Journal of Film Music 5.

1-2 (2012) 207-215

doi:10.1558/jfm.v5i1-2.207

ISSN (print) 1087-7142

ISSN (online) 1758-860X

ARTICLE

Knowledge Organization in Film Music and its

Theatrical Origins: Recapitulation and Coda
WILLIAM H. ROSAR
University of California, San Diego
rosar@ifms-jfm.org
Abstract: The knowledge organization of film scores composed today reflects the history of repertoire practice
systematized by the Kinothek (Cinema Library) of the silent era, which was based upon the melos of theatrical stage
melodrama in the nineteenth century. Musicology can only benefit from understanding that system of knowledge
organization and applying it to studying the practice of film scoring, past and present.
Keywords: Musicological film studies; film music; melodrama; Kinothek; photoplay music; The Twilight Zone

Not even music history can escape the current

intellectual fashion of having history take a back seat
to sociology.
Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History (1983)

You unlock this door with the key of imagination.

Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound,
a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. Youre
moving into a land of both shadow and substance,
of things and ideas; youve just crossed over into The
Twilight Zone. The famous montage accompanying
those words spoken by writer Rod Serling who created
the series for CBS is now familiar to three generations
of TV viewers, with its odd assortment of stage props
floating through a starry sky.1 It could be said to
1 The Twilight Zone montage was conceived by Herbert Hirschman, producer
on the fourth season of the series (1963): I did, for good or bad, create
the main title. You know, the clock ticking and the mannequin. I wanted
to find some things that were interesting. I created that and I directed it.
I supervised the making of the props and I came up with the notion of the
things floating through the void. Rod wrote the narration and that sparked
in me the symbols that I wanted to use. Marc Scott Zicree, The Twilight
Zone Companion, 2nd ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 299. The opening
montages for the earlier seasons grew out of narration and visual ideas by
Rod Serling himself; see Martin Grams, Jr., The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the
Door to a Television Classic (Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing Co., 2008), 7780, 124-25.

embody the ideals of Surrealism, such as that which its

exponents called la rencontrethe encounter.2 Artistpoet Max Ernst said it was the mechanism of collage,
which he succinctly defined as being the systematic
exploitation of the coincidental or artificially provoked
encounter of two of more unrelated realities on an
apparently inappropriate plane and the spark of poetry
created by the proximity of these realities.3
In speaking of a dimension of sound, sight, and
mind, and of a land of shadow and substance, of
things and ideas, Serling could have been talking
about the world of the cinema, and the theater, if
most especially, le thtre du merveilleuxthe theater
of marvels.4 That bizarre rencontre of evocative words,
2 Considering the work of Max Ernst and that of composer-poet-collagist
E. L. T. Mesens, it was the opinion of Surrealist writer-director Jacques
Brunius that la rencontre was the most apt term for collage qua artwork, the
spirit of the thing, rather than as it is ordinarily defined as a medium which
uses paper, scissors, and glue; see J. H. Matthews, The Imagery of Surrealism
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1977), 68-69.
3 Max Ernst as quoted in Ji Kol, Poetry of Vision, Poetry of Silence
(Vancouver: The Gallery, 1984), 43.
4 Cf. Marian Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels (New York: Benjamin
Blom, 1964). Winter, a noted American theater and dance historian who
championed music for the avant garde cinema, wrote the first scholarly
historical survey of film music to be published in an American music journal,
The Function of Music in Sound Film, Musical Quarterly 27 (1941): 146-64.

Copyright the International Film Music Society, published by Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF.

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THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC

Figure 1: A still version of Herbert Hirschmans surrealistic skyscape montage for The
Twilight Zone that was used by CBS Television for promotional purposes
imagery, sound effects, and music in The Twilight Zone
main title montage could serve symbolically as a poetic
emblem or device for the musicological symposium
From Nineteenth-Century Stage Melodrama to
Twenty-First Century Film Scoring: Musicodramatic
Practice and Knowledge Organization, whose
heuristic mandate was to explore what today still
remains a largely untrodden and uncharted no mans
land within the disciplines of musicology and theater
arts, and that is the history of theater music practice, a
tradition spanning more than two centuries, and one
which lives on in the art of film scoring as practiced
today.5 Once part of living memory, known particularly
to working theater musicians, the history of that
practice obscured by the mists of time remains on the
periphery of historical musicology, at the same time
remote and strangely familiar, like dj vu, because its
echoes are heard every day by millions the world over,
whether in movie theaters, watching TV, YouTube,
video games, or iPhones, yet few know anything about
its theatrical origins.

The notion of dpaysementdisorientation

and to render the familiar unfamiliar through
decontextualization, was advocated by the founder
of Surrealism, Andr Breton, in that he and his circle
of poet-artists systematically sought to conjure the
uncanny experience of jamais vu by poetic and artistic
means. As he put it: La surralit sera fonction de
notre volont de dpaysement de tout (Surreality
depends on our wish for a complete disorientation of
everything).6 Yet disorientation may also occur as a
matter of course just with the passage of the present
into the past. Carl Dahlhaus wrote in his Foundations of
Music History that often distance in time causes a sense
of alienation, comparable to the Verfremdungseffekt
(alienation effect) of Bertolt Brecht, whose
epic theater consciously sought to disorient the
theatergoing audience partly by its de-familiarizing
of stage conventions.7 Dahlhaus maintained that
historical understanding (Verstehen) follows from
a detached approach, in which the past appears
progressively more enigmatic and alien the better it

5 From Nineteenth-Century Stage Melodrama to Twenty-First-Century

Film Scoring: Musicodramatic Practice and Knowledge Organization.
A symposium co-sponsored by the Society for American Music and the
California State University, Long Beach, College of the Arts, 12-14 April
2012.

6 Breton as quoted in Marcel Jean, ed., The Autobiography of Surrealism (New

York: Viking Press), 208.
7 Brecht wrote: An alienating image is one which makes a circumstance
recognizable and at the same time makes it strange The theatre must
astonish its audience, and it does so by means of a technique which alienates
what is accepted. A Little Organum for the Theatre, trans. Beatrice
Gottlieb, Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature 11 (1951): 26-27.

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KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION IN FILM MUSIC AND ITS THEATRICAL ORIGINS

is understoodor in which, to put it paradoxically,

distance increases with proximity.8 Pursuing and
attaining the characteristic estrangement of historical
consciousness no doubt is partly responsible for the
view of the past in the philosophy of history known
as historicism or historical relativism.9 Summarizing
historicism and tradition, Dahlhaus writes that
historicism is sentimental, as he puts it, the remote
is perceived as such but experienced as near; the
foreign is recognized as alien yet felt to be familiar. The
ultimate message of historicism is a twisted aesthetic
paradox.10
It should be observed by way of contrast that the
musicological study of film today consists typically of
interpretive readings, whether of individual films,
of film genres, or of some narrative aspect of film,
thereby following largely the lead of contemporary
film theory (and/or critical theory) more than
(historical) musicology and the study of theater
music tradition. Because of that methodological
orientation, proportionately less attention is devoted
to examining musical practice in film as a form of
dramatic musical art. There is a need now for historical
analysis and synthesis, such that individual studies
can be related to a more comprehensive historically
informed perspective in which music of the cinema
is understood in the broader historical context of the
theater music practice from which it grew.11
The art of film scoring as currently taught in the
professional curricula of academic institutions now the
world over is known to have its roots in the musical
practices of popular stage melodrama, which were
then adapted for early silent-film accompaniment in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.12
Original composition for individual productions was
8 Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), 2.
9 The vigorously debated pros and cons of historical consciousness as
applied to authentic performance practice have been usefully reviewed by
Anthony Ruff, Sacred Music and Liturgical Reform: Treasures and Transformations
(Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2007); see chapter 9, The Early Music and
Authentic Performance Movements.
10 Dahlhaus, ibid., 73.
11 See my Film Studies in Musicology: Disciplinarity vs. Interdiscplinarity,
The Journal of Film Music 2 (2010): 99-125.
12 See Roger Manvell and John Huntley, The Technique of Film Music (London:
Focal Press, 1957) and their discussion Music and the Drama (11-15)
in which they outline parallels between theater music practice and film
scoring, drawing largely upon an informative overview by English composer,
Norman ONeill, Music to Stage Plays, Proceedings for the Royal Musical
Association 37 (1910): 85-102. Cf. David Mayer and Matthew Scott, eds., Four
bars of Agit: Incidental Music for Victorian and Edwardian Melodrama (London:
Samuel French, 1983); Katherine Preston, The Music of Toga Drama, in
David Mayer, Playing Out the Empire: Ben-Hur and Other Toga Plays and Films,
1883-1908 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) and Anne Dhu McLucas, Later
Melodrama in America: Monte Cristo (ca. 1883) (New York: Garland Publishing
Inc., 1994). For a useful historical overview outlining the continuity of
practice between nineteenth-century stage melodrama and silent film, see
Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University, 2004),
chapter 3, The Music Scene.

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the exception rather than the rule in nineteenthcentury stage melodrama just as it was in silent-film
accompaniment or illustration as it was also called.
Much generic stock music was written for both, and
the agitato, misterioso, and appassionato virtually defined
the musical idiom of both traditions. These pieces were
called melos in stage melodrama, and a representative
selection of titles from the 1860s shows a veritable
lexicon of titles and types which carried over into
early cinema practice in English-speaking countries:
Mysterious music, Dreamy music, Thieves
pizzicato, Creeping murderers music, Triumphant
virtue music, Hunting music, Lively dreamy
music, Hurries, Dying music, Wild music, and
even Angel and demon music.13 Such a repertoire,
as indeed it was, may very well comprise the first
collections and libraries of mood music, whose
corollary in the silent-film era came to be known
generically as photoplay music, Kinothek in German
(a contraction of Kinobibliothekcinema library).
The short pieces composed (or adapted) and published
for silent-film accompaniment thus included the first
music written specifically for the cinema.
These pieces were called cues, equivalent to
the melos of stage melodrama.14 By 1920 the silentfilm illustrator had an expansive repertoire from
which to choose selections, and considerable effort
was devoted to the systematic classification of the
published pieces which stocked movie theater music
libraries and were used by organists and played by
pit orchestras. The two most ambitious works of this
nature were the Encyclopedia of Picture Music by Erno
Rapee (1925) and the Allgemeines Handbuch der FilmMusik (Comprehensive Handbook of Film Music) by
Hans Erdmann, Giuseppe Becce, and Ludwig Brav
(1927), the latter containing an analytical chart
organizing pieces according to mood, tempo, and form/
genre (see Appendix).15 This resulted in a system of
musicodramatic knowledge organization that was reflected
13 The requirements of the English melodrama necessitate very frequently
the presence of the musician in the orchestra during the progress of the
play. The entrance and exit of the virtuous yet suffering country maiden, of
the grim traitor, of the burly English squire, must be marked by what the
managers pleasingly style on the bills characteristic music. It used to be
formerly a matter of no little pride for a leader to be the fortunate possessor
of a large collection of such small pieces, numbered and labeledand all to
be used at the fitting occasion. London Theatre Orchestras, The Musical
World (7 September 1867), 621.
14 There is some indication that in the United States the theatrical term
cues came to be used in stage melodrama, which may explain its adoption
instead of melos as a term in early American silent cinema. For example,
see H. Wannemacher, Jr., Collection of Melo-Dramatic Music (New York: A. M.
Schacht & Co., 1878). I am indebted to Tobias Plebuch for making me aware
of this source.
15 Erno Rapee, Erno Rapees Encyclopedia of Picture Music (New York: Belwin,
1925) and Hans Erdmann, Giuseppe Becce, and Ludwig Brav, Allgemeines
Handbuch der Film-Musik (Comprehensive Handbook of Film Music) (Berlin:
Schlesingersche Buch- und Musikhandlung Lienau: 1927).

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in the classification schemes which, in turn, channeled

newly composed pieces into the existing categories of
agitato, misterioso, and appassionato, et al. By the end
of the silent era this system was understood and used,
sometimes with regional variations, wherever there
were movies and musicians performing to them. Kurt
London wrote of the Kinothek in his 1936 survey:
Here we have, for the first time in the history of
modern music, a systematic tabulation of music
according to its uses. Without the slightest regard
for sentiment, the illustrator had a catalogued library
made for him, collected from a host of small pieces
of music which could be played through in not more
than a few minutes each. The library grew with the
momentum of an avalanche as the films won their
emancipation. It contained, if we follow the romantic
conception of programme music, all the moods of men
and the elements, every kind of reaction to human
destiny, musical drawings of nature and animals, of
peoples and countries: in short, every sphere of life,
well and clearly arranged under headings. Within
this cinematographic library there were of course also
arrangements of characteristic pieces by well-known
composers of every rank. 16

Sometimes for major film releases in New York

and other metropolitan centers throughout the world
the photoplay music composers were commissioned
to write scores, which tended to be very similar to
the compiled scores. This was the case notably with
William Axt (New York) and Giuseppe Becce (Berlin).
When sound came to American films in 1928, some
of the photoplay music composers were brought to Los
Angeles, for example, William Axt, who was placed
under contract by M-G-M Studios.
At first the studios continued the practice of
scoring films with published photoplay music that
had been used for silent films. For a time in the early
sound era the same cue-titling practice continued.
This was gradually replaced by cue titles uniquely
associated with a given film, featuring the names of
characters or descriptions of film action or locations
in a film. But the traditional silent-film classification
schemes were still employed to classify the cues of
newly composed scores: each was assigned an existing
generic classification type (or mood) by studio music
librarians for potential reuse in other films. During
the 1930s through the 1950s the original score still
remained the exception, as many B films and
16 Kurt London, Film Music: A Summary of the Characteristic Features of its
History, Aesthetics, Technique; and Possible Developments, trans. Eric S. Bensinger
(London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 54-55. In his chapter Illustration; Compiled
Music (Kinothek) London provides a useful overview and analysis of
illustration as a practice and the music libraries and cataloging system that
supplied the music for it.

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serials, for example, were scored with existing cues.

Starting in the 1950s, television music also relied
heavily on stock music and has ever since.
The system of classification that was used allowed
movie studio music libraries to maintain a high level
of bibliographic control over their holdings. It also
provides a conceptual framework for musicologists
to use in studying and teaching film music. The
system furthermore illuminates a tradition too often
defined only pejoratively in terms of conventions,
formulas, and clichs. In addition to music manuscript
material, the classification schemes, card catalogs, and
associated instruments of bibliographic access (such
as cue sheets) now form an integral part of primary
source materials as preserved in the film music
holdings bequeathed to various academic repositories
by movie theaters, the studios, and composers
themselves.
The Symposium focused on exploring this system
of musicodramatic knowledge organization and on
understanding both its origins in stage melodrama
and how the practice continues as a living tradition in
film scoring today. To a greater or lesser extent current
practice can be seen as new wine in old bottles,
because while musical styles have changed, the same
underlying musicodramatic schema has remained
relatively unchanged, just as the venerable institution
of the stock music library endures.
That schema is exemplified by the title music for
The Twilight Zone, composed by Romanian-born avant
gardist Marius Constant (1925-2004), whose career
was spent in Paris. Constant recounted that, at the
request of CBS Television music director Lud Gluskin,
he wrote three or four pieces that might be used as a
theme for The Twilight Zone.17 But there are indications
that the stock music Constant had composed already
in the CBS Television Music Library was what was
actually used. The main title music, entitled trange
#3 (Strange #3), was selected from among other
tranges Constant had composed. For the end title,
the beginning measures were reprised and joined to
another piece of his entitled Milieu #2. Yet what
everyone seems to remember most is the distinctive
trange #3, though, no doubt partly because of the
arresting visual montage and words of Rod Serling
which the music accompanies.18
17 Marius Constant, Revisiting The Twilight Zone, High Fidelity (April
1986): 64. Constants cues, which are most closely associated with The
Twilight Zone, replaced the title music composed for the series by Bernard
Herrmann used in the first season. Constant claimed that Gluskin solicited
a theme from him in 1960, which would have been during or after the first
season.
18 See Reba Wissner, A Dimension of Sound: Music in The Twilight Zone
(Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2013), 10-13. Wissner devotes the first

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211

Figure 2: The first page of Constants autograph for trange #3 used for the main
title of The Twilight Zone (reproduction courtesy of William Stromberg)
Flutter-tongue winds reel out over an ostinato
of two electric guitars playing major seconds finally
culminating in a pyramid of fourths for its noisy
quartal chordal climax, all 30 seconds being a
veritable cocktail of Schoenbergian clichs, though
sounding very cool performed by a typical jazz
combo of the day on saxes, trombones, piccolo, and
bongo. But in spite of those modern trappings, the
structure of trange #3 recalls the formulas of
nineteenth-century theatrical melos with their often
simple utilitarian construction of repeated patterns.
In illuminating the musicodramatic schema
evidenced in a piece like Constants theme for The
Twilight Zone, musicologists are faced with a lost
country like the one poetically described by Marcel
Proust in his Rembrance of Things Past ( la recherche
du temps perdu). The historical challenge for historical
musicology is to reconnect a living tradition with its
largely forgotten past. That old territory must now
chapter of her book to describing the CBS Television Music Library and the
common practice of using stock music from it to score TV show episodes.

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be surveyed anew by musicologists, aided by old

charts and documents that have come down to us,
some of them publishedsuch as the table in the
1927 Handbuch der Film-Musik, which is ostensibly a
musicodramatic map of the terrain we call film music,
and a well-trodden terrain that rests on a bedrock
foundation of theatrical practice. It should be
labeled Exhibit A for that reason, as it is the first
and only schematic diagram bearing witness to the
dramaturgical interrelationship of motion picture
moods.
****
Composer-poet-painter Andrea de Chirico, who
adopted the nom de plume Albert Savinio, was the
brother of proto-Surrealist painter-poet Giorgio de
Chirico. Savinios revolutionizing theory of music was
published in the avant garde arts and letters magazine
Les Soires de Paris prior to his first concert which was
given in its editorial offices in 1914, and written about

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by Guillaume Apollinaire, who had coined the term

surrealist already in 1904:
[It was Savinios] wish to reunify drama and music;
his desire to reveal what modern metaphysics
contains of the dramatic; the terrifying, the unknown,
and the impassioned, his effort to create music
that would no longer be harmonic or harmonized,
but disharmonized, with a new form of collage
(melodies that recall well known songs, rhythms
that repeat familiar rhythms to the point of obsession,
peasant themes, burlesque music, the Garibaldi
anthem, drums rolls, etc.)19

These excerpts from Savinios manifesto read rather

like the now shopworn slogans of postmodernism in
musicor more to the point, the polystylism of film
scoring, being as it is by tradition an eclectic art of
pastiche.20

19 Maurizio Fagiolo dellArco, De Chirico in Paris, 1911-1915, in De Chirico:

Essays, ed. William Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 17.
20 For example, quoted in The New York Times, Soviet composer Alfred
Schnittke spoke of his Second Violin Concerto (1968) as being his first
polystylistic work: I was influenced by three things The first was the
music of Mahler and Ives. The second was Henri Pousseurs total serialism
the serial arrangement not only of pitches, but dynamics, durations and other
elements too. And the third was my work in the cinema. In writing for films,
I was often writing music that suggested other eras. So I adopted that for my
other works. (Allan Kozinn, An Eclectic Mix, Through a Contemporary
Prism, The New York Times, 22 May 1988, 76 and 96).

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213

Appendix Exhibit A
Musikgruppen nach Stimmung, Bewegung und Form (Music groups according
to mood, movement and form) from Erdmann, Becce, and Brav (1927)

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215

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