History of Music in Film: Analysis of How & Why Film Scores Enhance the Emotional Import of Films: Citizen Kane

The fact that the music of films often has powerful effects on its audience is undisputed. Careful examination of the reasons behind these effects, however, has been largely ignored. We tend to compare previously unassociated dramatic pieces we hear to film music – but what piece cannot be compared to film music nowadays? Every pre-composed piece or spontaneous melodic fragment is potential fodder for a cinematic soundtrack. The real questions lie in how and why people have been compelled to combine drama with music throughout history. This essay attempts to clarify some of music’s manifold roles in cinema and the reasons behind them by using as an example composer Bernard Herrmann’s Citizen Kane soundtrack.

In order to address these issues, a brief overview of the history of music in cinema is required. The root of music in film harks back to the Greek melodrams (the precursor in both literal language and event to the melodramas of today), a cross between a play and fledgling opera in which spoken word is accompanied by music.[1] As time passed, melodrams developed into opera, giving rise to types of performances known as number opera (those composed of a collection of closed pieces) and continuous opera (those including nonstop music), divisions that film soundtracks would later echo. Wagner’s full-fledged support of program music at this time, as opposed to the absolute music that had previously reigned supreme, resulted in his novel invention of leitmotifs (first used in his Ring cycle), or themes recurring throughout a work that were meant to evoke associations with an idea, character, or place. Wagner also put forth his idealistic notion of pairing all of the arts together in an opera - for example, music (the score), poetry (libretto), and painting (scenery) - without giving precedence to any of them. He called the finished product a total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk, which was seen as a revolutionary idea at the time, but did not become enormously popular.