Ever since music was introduced to feature films, it has been used to enhance the emotions the audience should feel. Music is used to lighten a mood or show the dramatic irony in a scene. Every composer scoring a film takes each scene and wraps the music around the tone. Most notable is Hans Zimmer’s recent work in The Dark Knight trilogy and Inception. The composers’ music and who they work with sets each apart from the other.
“The movie soundtrack that comes to mind is The Social Network due to its techno-like sound,” senior Jesse Hernandez said.
Since the late 1920s, music has been used in feature films and other works that have chosen to put music in their projects. The first film to feature music was The Jazz Singer in 1927. This was a technological advancement that kept the movie business soaring. After The Jazz Singer, movies were not complete without the sound of music accompanying them. Though the movie did not win any awards, it was the stepping stone for soundtracks to appear in films. The first awards given for Best Original Score in a film were given in 1934.
Most recently, Life of Pi won Best Original Score at the 85th Academy Awards this past February.
“Life of Pi’s soundtrack was more like a lullaby than anything else,” senior Hannah Schiffman said.
Composers like James Newton Howard try to fit the movie and the music in a way that allows each to be sold separately and still hold its own. After his work in Signs and other M. Night Shyamalan films, he has become a regular choice for Shyamalan’s film projects. This style of scoring brings the challenge of whether the scene achieves the same suspense and emotion without the music or whether the scoring adds to the effect. However, in the majority of movies, each piece is composed around the scene to fit the mood.
“I think that the two best soundtracks were for Les Miserables and Django Unchained,” senior Josh Rosenthal said. “Django had some of the best original songs, paying homage to the mid-20th century spaghetti westerns. Les Miserables was brilliant in the fact that the music was sung as the movie was being filmed, instead of in voiceovers, which is a first.”
