Today, musical composition for films is more popular than ever. In
professional and academic spheres, media music study and practice are
growing; undergraduate and postgraduate programs in media scoring are
offered by dozens of major colleges and universities. And increasingly,
pop and contemporary classical composers are expanding their reach into
cinema and other forms of screen entertainment. Yet a search on Amazon
reveals at least 50 titles under the category of film music, and,
remarkably, only a meager few actually allow readers to see the music
itself, while none of them examine landmark scores like Vertigo, To Kill
a Mockingbird, Patton, The Untouchables, or The Matrix in the detail
provided by Scoring the Screen: The Secret Language of Film Music. This
is the first book since Roy M. Prendergast's 1977 benchmark, Film Music:
A Neglected Art, to treat music for motion pictures as a compositional
style worthy of serious study. Through extensive and unprecedented
analyses of the original concert scores, it is the first to offer both
aspiring composers and music educators with a view from the inside of
the actual process of scoring-to-picture. The core thesis of Scoring the
Screen is that music for motion pictures is indeed a language, developed
by the masters of the craft out of a dramatic and commercial necessity
to communicate ideas and emotions instantaneously to an audience. Like
all languages, it exists primarily to convey meaning. To quote renowned
orchestrator Conrad Pope (who has worked with John Williams, Howard
Shore, and Alexandre Desplat, among others): "If you have any interest
in what music 'means' in film, get this book. Andy Hill is among the
handful of penetrating minds and ears engaged in film music today."
