英语四级考试

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2016年英语四级背诵经典短文二十三(含译文)

来源 :中华考试网 2016-09-27

  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.

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