Throughout the twentieth century, advances in technology and new forms of media have led to significant shifts in the way musicians work. In particular, the advent of cinema in the first half of the twentieth century opened up major new possibilities in music, and even led to the emergence of an entirely unprecedented type of musician – the film composer. Here’s how the role of the film composer first emerged, and how it has continued to evolve and develop throughout the years.

In the early decades of cinema, film studios spared no expense when it came to scoring their films. Before composing software and other music technologies drastically reduced the number of musicians required for the task, composing for cinema would usually involve hundreds of performers and technicians.

The scale of the task meant that there was a great deal of cross-pollination between the worlds of cinema and more traditional classical music. Composers including Shostakovitch, Prokofiev and Benjamin Britten all wrote music for films, while one of the medium’s first major composers, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, began his career in Europe, where he was hailed as a prodigious new talent by Mahler and Richard Strauss.

As cinema established itself as one of the modern age’s most popular forms of entertainment and artistic expression, the role of the film composer was simultaneously established as its own distinct category. In fact, there’s a strong argument to be made that the most famous composers of this era, in terms of widespread name recognition and awareness of their music, are film composers – are any pieces of twentieth century classical music as instantly recognisable as John Williams’ score for Star Wars, or Bernard Herrmann’s music for Psycho?

Alongside this emerging generation of world-famous film composers, others continued to experiment and innovate – figures such as Vangelis pioneered the integration of electronics and synthesizers into film scores, while some directors abandoned original music entirely in favour of a ‘jukebox soundtrack’ of popular music. 

At first glance, the landscape of film music today can seem strangely similar to the early decades of film, dominated by a handful of household names – most notably the seemingly omnipresent Hans Zimmer, whose score for the 2017 film Dunkirk saw him receive his 11th Oscar nomination at this year’s awards ceremony.

However, these big names tend to obscure the enormous pool of talented musicians creating music for film. New technologies and programs for composing music have reduced the number of performers required to create a film score, opening up film composing for film and other media as one of the more viable routes into the world of professional music. It’s common nowadays to find aspiring young composers, armed with little more than a computer and the best notation software, working across film, TV and even video games – slowly curating a solid, demonstrable body of impressive work along the way.

I’ve written several times about the democratising effect that technology has had on music by providing more people than ever with the tools to compose. The world of film composing has followed much the same trajectory – from its early days dominated by a handful of major names, to the wealth of innovative talent on display today.