During the 1920s, 
technological advances 
in synchronizing recorded 
speech and music to 
film revolutionized how directors 
made movies and how audiences 
experienced them. A torrent of 
movie musicals in the 1930s boasted 
song-infused scores by such figures 
as Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and 
George Gershwin, but instrumental 
accompaniments were also becoming 
de rigueur, a fact reflected by the 
Academy Awards inaugurating a 
category for Best Score in 1934. The 
“Golden Age of Hollywood” (let’s say 
1935-55) saw the rise of acclaimed 
music departments comprising 
composers, arrangers, orchestras, 
and other musical professionals within 
the major studios. The era’s great film 
composers included émigrés escaping 
the political turmoil of Europe, such as 
Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, 
Franz Waxman, Miklós Rózsa, and 
Dimitri Tiomkin.

The music in this concert is drawn 
from films of the 1950s and beyond. 
Leonard Bernstein’s musical West Side 
Story made history when it opened 
in New York in 1957 (“The radioactive 
fallout from West Side Story must 
still be descending on Broadway this 
morning,” wrote critic Walter Kerr 
in the next day’s Herald Tribune), 
but its release as a film in October 
1961 cemented its reputation as a 
touchstone of American culture.

Bernard Herrmann wrote more 
than fifty film scores, but he is most 
acclaimed for the seven that enrich 
movies by Alfred Hitchcock. (He 
completed an eighth, for Torn Curtain, 
but Hitchcock rejected it, which 
led to their abrupt breakup; and he 
also contributed an electronically 
manipulated soundscape for The 
Birds.) Each of his Hitchcock scores 
is a masterpiece, but his music for 
Psycho (1960) is the most likely to 
make listeners grip the armrests of 
their theater seats. Hitchcock famously 
advised him: “Only one thing I ask 
of you: please write nothing for the 
murder in the shower. That must be 
without music.” Herrmann disobeyed, 
and his music for screeching strings 
stayed in.

One of the most memorable TV 
themes from the ’60s was written by 
Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin for 
the Cold War drama series Mission: 
Impossible (1966-73). About its title 
track in 5/4 meter, he joked, “things 
are in 2/4 or 4/4 because people 
dance with two legs; I did it for people 
from outer space who have five legs.” 
In fact, its rhythm—dah-dah dit-dit—is 
the Morse Code spelling of “M.I.”—as 
in Mission Impossible. The ’60s also 
launched the James Bond franchise, 
beginning with Dr. No (1962) and 
From Russia with Love (1963). The 
scores for the early Bond installments 
were by the British composer John 
Barry, although contentious court 
proceedings found in favor of Marty 
Norman, the film’s orchestrator, as the 
author of the signature “James Bond 
Theme.” The Star Trek era began with 
a television series launched in 1966. 
It was the first salvo in what is now a 
13-movie franchise, beginning with 
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released 
in 1979. That initial film’s score was 
the work of Jerry Goldsmith, who 
would go on to compose four of the 
sequels, with other installments falling 
to James Horner, Leonard Roseman, 
Cliff Eidelman, Dennis McCarthy, and, 
most recently, Michael Giacchino. 
Arranger Calvin Custer’s suite played 
here includes material by Goldsmith 
and McCarthy. Setting the tone for 
the sweeping sound of the series’ 
scores, Goldsmith observed: “When 
you stop and think about it, space is 
a very romantic thought. It is, to me, 
like the Old West, [but] we’re up in the 
universe.”

Not all successful film scores 
were custom-composed for the 
movies they serve. Some repurpose 
existing music, which can add a 
layer of reference for listeners. In 
1973, the con-man caper The Sting
boasted a score made up of piano 
rags composed by Scott Joplin in 
the decades surrounding the turn 
of the 20th century. His music had 
largely faded from memory until a 
revival began in the late 1960s. The 
soundtrack, using Joplin rags arranged 
by Marvin Hamlisch, did much to help 
spur a widespread ragtime revival, 
and a decade later Joplin’s portrait 
appeared on a postage stamp in 
the U.S. Post Office’s Black Heritage 
commemorative series. Another 
film that made powerful use of 
existing classics was 2001: A Space 
Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick’s 
phantasmagorical science fiction film 
in which, for example, Johann Strauss 
II’s beloved waltz On the Beautiful 
Blue Danube accompanies a scene in 
which a spaceship docks with a space 
station, against a stunning backdrop of 
Earth and stars.

And of course John Williams. 
The preeminent film composer of our 
time, he has penned more than 120 
film scores and is now working on his 
30th for director Steven Spielberg, 
who quipped, “Without John Williams, 
bikes don’t really fly.” His breakthrough 
was Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). On first 
hearing Williams’ two-note shark 
theme, Spielberg assumed it was 
a prank; but he soon came around, 
and the motif became embraced in 
popular culture. Two years later they 
collaborated on Close Encounters 
of the Third Kind, in which UFOs 
communicate to humans using a 
five-note musical motif. Williams 
produced similarly dazzling 
soundtracks for other directors, 
including for nine films of the Star 
Wars franchise. When director 
George Lucas began thinking about 
the original Star Wars, in 1977, he 
told colleague Spielberg that he 
envisioned a score with a classical 
flavor, perhaps Korngold-style. 
Spielberg responded, “The guy you 
gotta talk to is John Williams. He made
Jaws, I love him, he is the greatest
composer who ever lived."