The Reconstruction of Ancient Music
Film music, also called score or soundtrack, is music composed specifically to accompany a film. It plays a crucial role in setting the mood of a film and can drive the plot (Bullerjahn 2001; Stromen 2005). Already in the silent film era, soundless film was accompanied by music and sometimes by sounds. Both had to be produced live in the beginning. In addition, the rattling of the film projector could be drowned out in this way. Since there was no special film music at first, one fell back on already existing music from operas and the like. In the process, almost standards were established, such as the Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy for wedding scenes. Only rarely was the music written individually for a film. The orchestra also soon grew in size. In the beginning, there was often only one pianist playing, then came cinema organs with additional sound effects and even before the First World War, large cinemas used extensive orchestras. With the introduction of sound film, the music was prefabricated along with the film. Composers of film music basically have three composition techniques at their disposal (Pauli 1993):
The leitmotif, known from operas and used especially by Richard Wagner. The leitmotif conveys meaning and has the task of musically representing characters or the plot. The leitmotif can be incorporated into the overall composition or varied.
The underscoring attempts to convey the atmosphere of the events on the screen acoustically and to intensify the visual impressions. Individual cuts of the film are musically doubled in effect. This technique is also called Mickey-Mousing because it is particularly common in cartoons. Because it only works well in comics, underscoring is otherwise rather rare.
The mood technique also conveys a certain atmosphere and underpins the film with music that conveys a certain mood. The same film scene with different music can arouse completely different expectations in the audience. The music really colours the film. The music can also be used as a counterpoint and then blatantly contradicts the image content. This can create an alienation effect.
Depending on the style of music, a certain historical era is also alluded to. This is exactly where the problems begin with monumental films, which are usually set in a distant past. We have (almost) no musical scores from antiquity: The first sheet music in the modern sense was only introduced in the early Middle Ages from the 9th century onwards to write down church music. Admittedly, there had already been initial attempts in antiquity to record notes in the form of letters for pitch and symbols for tone duration. These very early notations are largely lost to us, as mostly only fragments have survived. The same applies to early film music, whose musical scores were often thrown away after the film was completed and today have to be reconstructed at great expense.
The Seikilos epitaph on a tombstone near Ephesus from the 2nd century AD exceptionally transmits a composition to us in its entirety. The stele is now kept in the Danish National Museum. In 1883, however, the first editor did not even understand that these were notes and remarked that the small signs above the text were incomprehensible. In the meantime, it has been possible to reconstruct this ancient melody together with the text in Greek. The soundtrack is published on Wikipedia.
When composing music for monumental films, composers also have to meet the needs of mainstream audiences and their expectations. Just as the costumes and hairstyles reveal which decade the film is from, the style of the film music quickly reve
