Film Soundtracks

False Notions and Modes of Listening

published in The Wire online, February, 2025, London

I wrote the series The Secret History of Film Music in the long gone epoch of the late 1990s for Wire (thanks to Tony Herrington and Chris Bohn). The simple idea was to cover modes of music which appeared in film scores except the type of Romantic post-Star Wars orchestral bellowing which is lionised, well, everywhere. (Search for podcasts on Film Music for proof.) Electronics, rock, funk, easy listening and orchestral atonality were all covered in the series. Those broad categories subsequently provided the basis for the radio series Psychosonic Cinema, ninety episodes of which I produced for Resonance FM from 2014 (thanks to Ed Baxter).

This is the first of a new series of essays on film music which Wire has asked me to write (thanks to Joseph Stannard) as a reboot of sorts of the original series. My title for that series was the somewhat bland Traces of Soundtracks. Wire went for a more Victorian slant, in acknowledgement of how little attention was being given at the time to alternative, counter and even underground approaches to making music for moving images. In writing this new series, I’m taking my lead from that title: there are many unspoken, uninformed and underdeveloped notions about film music—what it is, how it is made, who does it and why, how it relates to image and narrative, etc.—which persist today. So for this introductory essay, I’ll attempt to dismantle some of these notions, and hopefully provide a framework for the forthcoming series of scores and films I’ll be addressing.

Firstly, film music is part of a realm we know as ‘audiovision’. It’s something that is neither music nor film: a perplexing mutation that resembles both yet behaves like neither. When music ‘accompanies’ a scene in a film, it unleashes myriad modes of conveyance. Music can reveal something unseen. It can remind the viewer of something that has already occurred; or narrate a theme not overtly apparent in the scene. It can undercut all that seems obviously stated in a scene; or it can disrupt the holistic or centred nature of a scene. It can unintentionally state the obvious by flatly ‘musicalizing’ the scene’s drama; or it can amplify and intensify the scene by pushing an aspect of the drama to an implosive or explosive point. If you—as a viewer, a critic, or a composer—approach any scene in any movie with a subliminally ingrained model of how film music should operate, you will never be open to these possible modes wherein music can set up a specific and unique relation to a film’s scene. This part-frustrating/part-exhilarating situation is at the heart of the audiovisual experience. You can analyze it and deconstruct it, but by virtue of it being a compound event, it will always be inseparable. Ultimately, film music necessitates a new way of listening through seeing.

Secondly, in as much as sound and vision are distinct senses which fuse in the audiovisual experience, it needs to be more widely accepted that score composers and film directors are different beasts. Each has spent their lifetime sharpening one sense in order to enrich and deepen the art they produce in their respective media. But therein be liabilities: film directors often have woefully unsophisticated tastes in music, just as score composers—or musicians who succeed in being commissioned—have limited awareness of the breadth and scope of the sprawling historical mess of global film history. Directors who favour Bulgarian women’s choirs are on par with musicians who declare a love for Tarkovsky. Each lean into an implied or even affected sensitivity toward their counterpoint medium, but each lacks experience in being immersed in the history and multiplicity of the artform beyond their specialisation. (Similarly, when music reviewers tag a record as ‘cinematic’, the term is unsubstantiated through its re-enforcement of film music being ambient pastoral accompaniment.) This is not a condemnation: in the modernist, technological, industrial, collaborative, multi-sensory meld of art and entertainment that is cinema, no individual wears the mantle of author (despite cinema’s fantasy of such) or artist (despite music’s dream of such). Film music’s commissioning, development and production and resolution entails a radical formulation of the act of composing music, and how we define the purpose and effect of music.

Thirdly, the brute logistics of moviemaking (far too depressing a wormhole to venture details here) force unrealistic schedules, contractual barriers, poor planning, and internal politics to grind the mythical ‘creative process’ wafer thin. Throughout, the director and composer somehow manage to function and dialogue in order to keep a strong original idea on track through the minefields which line the gauntlet of post-production (music reference, cue selection, recording takes, edit changes and final mixing). Not even the most horrendous music recording session for a band comes near to the most typical materialization of a film score upon the movie soundtrack. Does this mean that movies with great and innovative music are magic? Please: let’s forego Spielbergian dreaming here. Is it ‘magic’ when a band gel and intuitively produce a memorable recording of a song? No: it’s the fruit of shared sensibility, deep communication, and openness to group dynamics and voicing. What we hear as ‘film music’ is the result of being shredded and ground through this industrial process in cinema. As viewers, auditors and critics in the wider word of music-making, this behoves us to at the least consider that the music we hear on the soundtrack is fatally compromised. Individual artistic control is a mirage in this context: film composers produce their work in a creative mode quite different from that enjoyed by recording artists. Film music asks us to be more flexible in assessing its outcomes, both on-screen on on-record.

Fourthly, film music is not even a thing: it is anything. Any genre, style, technique, performance, harmony, tonality, timbre, instrument, arrangement or production of music can become film music. The dumb beauty is that when anything is thrown into a film soundtrack, it will indisputably be that film’s musical score. So whatever ideologies of rock, folk, jazz, improv, classicism, noise, pop or club music you hold dear in the ‘outside world’ of recorded music will be modulated, transformed or decimated once that music is sounded in a film. Techno pulsations can terraform a psychological headspace. Folksy chimes can queasily create an emotional undertow in a scene. Electronic sounds (fetishistically retro or modishly digital) can transfigure a character. Jazz configurations can fractalize the narrative sense of a scene. None of these theoretical examples (there are thousands) operate along conservative channels of ‘accompanying’ the visuals, or (worse) giving ‘emotion’ to a moment on screen. Yes, conventional films adhere to the industrial truisms of humanist expression and commentary (sad music for sad scenes of sadness to make an audience feel sad). But for every cliched, soppy, patronizing Pavlovian statement made by a film score reductively portraying human emotions, character traits and behavioural types, there is a film score that widens the human spectrum to welcome the unfathomable complexity of human psychology. Such film music can create an aural stage for human interiority: the one thing that will always elude the camera’s capture.

These four modes of how film music operates might read as an unnecessarily dense treatise on what for many people is obvious and simple—that film music matches what we see on screen. The greatest secret in the history of film music is that such a view is false, ungrounded, and impossible. My series of articles here will aim to prove that key point by evidencing a fascinating range of film scores and soundtracks from the 21st century—some thoroughly mainstream, some ludicrously alternative, but all stretching normative definitions of ‘film music’ and in the process expanding listening sensibilities and audiovisual experimentation.

Text © Philip Brophy 2025. Image © humanity