John Barry’s first score as a composer came in 1960 with the British coming-of-age romp Beat Girl starring teen idol Adam Faith. Performed by the composer’s own band, The John Barry Seven and Orchestra, Beat Girl’s soundtrack, incidentally the first British score to be released on vinyl LPs, boasts a fanfare horn section and a distinctive lead guitar amongst other typical orchestral elements. At this point in cinematic history, what role music served was still in flux. The earliest silent pictures—showcased as the pioneering Lumiere Brothers’—were in exhibition spaces, came accompanied by live musicians, photo-play music taken from repertory scores and improvised to suit the mood of each screening. The oft-told, but apparently apocryphal origins of film compositions—that they were merely implemented to cover up the sound of the projector—survives to this day.
Over the coming decades, musical innovations from the likes of Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman, and Ennio Morricone reoriented the emotional capabilities of film scores as well as the genre influences they might contain, to say nothing of the instruments used. Radio, Broadway, traditional theater, and the cinema all transformed in tandem, with composers moving between and being inspired by these different worlds. Alex North’s in 1951 incorporated jazz as well as classically inflected orchestra, a dash of the modern mixed in with the traditional. Leonard Bernstein’s score forthree years later elaborated upon the influence of jazz, playing with rhythm and harmony in seemingly improvisational bursts. Still, the reigning perception of the music of cinema is that of a conductor leading an ensemble of strings and winds toward some beautiful, swelling crescendo, the symphonic grandeur ofto the pastoral epic of.
