Classical Hollywood Film Music

From Unawiki

Classical Hollywood Film Music was mostly composed by European emigrants of whom many worked in musical theatres across Europe and emigrated in the 1910s. The musical style reaches from romanticism to operetta and Broadway jazz. The development of diegetic music, which means that the music is directly made of people who are in the movie like a piano player in a restaurant, to non-diegetic music, where the music comes out of the background to support or create an atmosphere lead to the innovation of a leitmotif, which is a motif that belongs to a special character in a movie is only played when he comes into the picture. This appears for example in King Kong who had his leitmotif composed by Max Steiner and has been used since then like in ‘Jaws’ for the great white or for Darth Vader with his Imperial March. Important composers are Franz Waxman and Alfred Newman.