Movie Music

　　Accustomed though we are to speaking of the films made before 1927 as

　　"silent", the film has never been, in the full sense of the word,

　　silent. From the very beginning, music was regarded as an indispensable

　　accompaniment; when the Lumiere films were shown at the first public film

　　exhibition in the United States in February 1896, they were accompanied by

　　piano improvisations on popular tunes. At first, the music played bore no

　　special relationship to the films; an accompaniment of any kind was

　　sufficient. Within a very short time, however, the incongruity of playing

　　lively music to a solemn film became apparent, and film pianists began to

　　take some care in matching their pieces to the mood of the film.

　　As movie theaters grew in number and importance, a violinist, and perhaps a

　　cellist, would be added to the pianist in certain cases, and in the

　　larger movie theaters small orchestras were formed. For a number of years

　　the selection of music for each film program rested entirely in the hands

　　of the conductor or leader of the orchestra, and very often the principal

　　qualification for holding such a position was not skill or taste so much

　　as the ownership of a large personal library of musical pieces. Since

　　the conductor seldom saw the films until the night before they were to be

　　shown (if indeed, the conductor was lucky enough to see them then), the

　　musical arrangement was normally improvised in the greatest hurry.

　　To help meet this difficulty, film distributing companies started the

　　practice of publishing suggestions for musical accompaniments. In 1909,

　　for example, the Edison Company began issuing with their films such

　　indications of mood as "pleasant", "sad", "lively". The suggestions became

　　more explicit, and so emerged the musical cue sheet containing indications

　　of mood, the titles of suitable pieces of music, and precise directions to

　　show where one piece led into the next.

　　Certain films had music especially composed for them. The most famous of

　　these early special scores was that composed and arranged for D. W.

　　Griffith's film Birth of a Nation, which was released in 1915.