LA LA LAND: Where, When, and Why Music Entered Cinema

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Where did music in cinema come from, when, and why? What do we know about its role and purpose, and why do we try to immediately «Shazam» (use the Shazam app to recognize any melody or song instantly) the tracks we like right in the cinema? Can a soundtrack be a full-fledged character in a film, or is it meant only to illustrate and set the mood? Let’s try to reflect on all of this here.

Of course, it’s impossible to cover such a vast topic, list all the critical film composers, or mention iconic soundtracks in just one article. Instead, we’ll attempt to show the whole through a fragment, to glimpse the universe in a drop of water.

HISTORY

usic entered cinema at the end of the 19th century when the film was just beginning to take shape and had not yet become a significant art form. Initially, silent cinema gave rise to the institution of tapers — musicians, usually pianists, who performed in salons where films were shown. They played to enhance the attraction of early screenings and to drown out the loud crackling of the first projection devices.

At that time, music served purely an illustrative function and had not yet evolved into a dramatic tool. Although many skilled musicians performed, most were tapers — artisans lacking talent and imagination.

Today, it’s hard to imagine cinema without a soundtrack, but the leap from mere illustration to truly original film music isn’t always made, even now. It may seem surprising, but music and songs were heard on screen before spoken dialogue. In fact, music ushered in the sound era of cinema.

This shift occurred in 1927 with the release of The Jazz Singer, a black-and-white silent melodrama about the son of a Manhattan cantor who falls in love with jazz and, defying family tradition, runs away to devote himself to this new music. Coating his face with boot polish to resemble Black jazz idols and abandoning his Jewish surname, Rabinowitz, he transforms into the jazzman Jake Robin.

This was the first film to feature numerous musical scenes and even some spoken lines. However, as in classic silent films, most dialogue was still conveyed through intertitles. The music was central, and for the first time, actors sang on screen.

The Jazz Singer marked a genuine «sound» revolution in global cinema. It was the first film to feature a synchronized recorded musical score, along with synchronized singing and some spoken lines. This established the commercial dominance of sound movies and signaled the decline of the silent era.

Two years later, the magazine «Photoplay» popularized the term «soundtrack» in public consciousness. By the late 1940s, the first soundtrack albums featuring film music — later dubbed «original motion picture soundtracks» — began to appear.

HOW MUSIC WORKS IN CINEMA

Try focusing solely on the music while sitting in a movie theater (as if you were at a concert) — what remains of the film in that case? It’s hardly surprising that film music is created specifically for the film.

Contrary to popular belief, film music does not have another conventional meaning apart from being emotional. It also sets the mood. Directors use music (whether specially composed for the film or preexisting) to convey the emotional state of the on-screen characters: their determination, love, drug-induced trips, or traumatic memories from the past.

However, music in cinema goes far beyond the role of an emotional accessory. Its potential is much broader. For instance, it can direct the viewer’s gaze, influence pupil dilation, and alter the perception of time while watching a film. Film music is generally divided into two types — illustrative and complementary. The former tends to summarize what’s happening on screen.

English director Guy Ritchie, for example, prefers to use such music in his films. In his comedy Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), when the character Greek appears, we hear the melody of «Sirtaki». In Snatch (2000), when the robbers disguised as Hasidic Jews enter, «Hava Nagila» plays in the background.

The soundtrack works closely with the visual fabric. It «complements» what the image conveys.

For instance, Gato Barbieri breathes a beautiful despair from his Latin saxophone for Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris (1972), while the great Bernard Herrmann, composer of the scores for Citizen Kane and eight Hitchcock films, expresses the inner turmoil of Robert De Niro’s worn-out character in Martin Scorsese’s cult film Taxi Driver (1976) with his anxiety-filled music.

Sometimes, music even takes the lead over the entire visual sequence. This is the case in David Lynch’s films, where the themes of his regular composer, Angelo Badalamenti, literally set the tone of the narrative — sometimes soothing, other times unsettling, hypnotizing, or even scaring the viewer.

This music guides us through empty hallways behind red velvet curtains, leading us from nowhere to nowhere, hinting at the illusory nature of the world we inhabit. It speaks of how «the owls are not what they seem», reveals the fragility and duality of our surrounding reality, and creates a certain discomfort, prompting viewers to reflect on themselves and the world around them.

Yorgos Lanthimos achieves a similar effect through music. He is the most avant-garde of mainstream filmmakers and the most mainstream of avant-garde directors, whose films, unlike Lynch’s, often lack an original soundtrack. They usually feature classical music or unsettling ambient tracks.

Even in Poor Things (2023), for which Jerskin Fendrix was specifically invited as the composer, the music is far from what is typically heard in grand costume dramas. These are eerie, somewhat painful, and cold melodies, devoid of warmth, with fairy-tale motifs played on detuned instruments.

In mainstream cinema, music generally aims to make the viewer feel comfortable while watching. Lanthimos, however, reinterprets mainstream genres — from melodrama to horror — using music to emphasize the absurdity of the world we live in. He literally breaks societal conventions. The director’s fictional worlds, upon closer inspection, turn out to be exaggerated versions of contemporary society.

Music in cinema can also play from a first-person perspective, reflecting a subjective viewpoint. In The Godfather (1972), Francis Ford Coppola uses music to allow us inside Michael Corleone’s mind — to sense what he feels just before committing his first murder (even if it is justified revenge for his father) and immediately after. Finding a hidden gun in the restaurant bathroom, Michael decisively returns to the table to shoot his father’s attackers, with whom he is dining.

In the background, we hear the terrifying roar of a passing train that is not seen on screen. Coppola uses this to convey the immense mental strain of his character. The young Al Pacino, playing Michael, remains very restrained, barely showing any sign of nervousness.

This «thermos effect» is hot on the inside yet perfectly composed on the outside. When the fatal shots are fired, Nino Rota’s powerful music bursts forth like suppressed emotions breaking free. There is no turning back. From that moment, Michael and the entire Corleone family are doomed.

The central musical theme by John Williams in Jaws (1975) mimics a jagged rhythm, moving up and down like serrated teeth tearing human flesh, representing the monstrous shark that controls the waters around the idyllic town of Amity. It is the music that makes the audience’s heart tremble in anticipation of the inevitable horror — and catharsis.

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Steven Spielberg has repeatedly admitted that the key to the film and its pulse wasn’t the famous mechanical shark (known as Bruce in Hollywood) but rather John Williams’ music — which became the composer’s signature before the triumph of Star Wars.

Another example of a soundtrack that, like the novel Ulysses, delves deep into the psyche of a single character is the music for Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995). After the wounded Johnny Depp, who kills someone in self-defense, embarks on his journey into the unknown, he is guided by Neil Young’s rough, gritty, sand-like, bleak, and desolate chords.

Young’s music conveys movement toward the horizon, a dissolution into eternity experienced by the protagonist. Slow melancholy, minimalist by nature but with maximum emotional impact, the music symbolizes the protagonist’s fading consciousness and reflects on the soul’s journey.

Neil Young composed the soundtrack in about the same amount of time as the film’s duration. He locked himself in an empty hangar with a few guitars, turned on the projector, and recorded whatever came to him naturally. «I was playing solo», the composer later said, «and the film was my rhythm section».

The music for Dead Man is played as if on the edge of a great void — guitar solos breaking into individual notes and disappearing into darkness like sparks from a campfire. It is these fractured notes of Young that give Jim Jarmusch’s film its essential depth.

ANOTHER’S MUSIC AS ONE’S OWN

The first music explicitly composed for the film was created by the great French composer and organist Camille Saint-Saëns. His Carnival of the Animals would later become the central theme of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) and be used as the musical intro for the Cannes Film Festival. This happened in 1908.

The soundtrack was intended for the film The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (L’assassinat du duc de Guise). Before that, cinema mainly relied on classical music, which is still frequently used in film soundtracks today. Around the 1950s, popular music started to appear in films alongside classical compositions. In 1964, A Hard Day’s Night was released — a musical film featuring the complete track list of the eponymous album by the wildly popular band, The Beatles, with the musicians playing themselves on screen.

Since then, soundtracks have often included numerous popular hits that complement the instrumental themes written for the film, or they may even consist entirely of pop music. An example of this is Martin Scorsese’s grand, Jesuitical epic Casino (1995). As Sam «Ace» Rothstein scales up the gambling business, falls for the prostitute Ginger, and eventually loses everything, the background features a series of nervous hits ranging from The Rolling Stones to Roxy Music.

Robert De Niro’s House of Cards collapses to the sound of House of the Rising Sun. Here, Martin Scorsese uses music — an integral character in the film in its own right — to tell the story of his generation of «New Hollywood», which experienced the demise of the absolute freedom ideal parallel to the main crime plot.

Another director who assembles original soundtracks from existing songs is Quentin Tarantino. Music is fundamental to his films, often serving as the starting point of his work on a movie. Typically, Tarantino selects a few favorite tracks and uses them to establish the tone of the film.

According to the director, one of the primary tasks is to choose a song for the opening credits (e.g., Little Green Bag (1970) by George Baker Selection in Reservoir Dogs or Dick Dale’s Miserlou in Pulp Fiction) and then build the rest of the film around it.

«For me, the opening credits are significant, as they are the best moment to set the tone of the film. A great sequence of credits and the music playing before it — or even a single note, whatever you envision — establishes the essential tone of the film for you. That’s why I always try to find the right opening or closing theme at an early stage when I am just getting acquainted with the story».

Only once, in The Hateful Eight, did Tarantino enlist the help of a specially invited composer — the legendary Ennio Morricone (who won his second Oscar for this in 2016), and even then, Morricone only composed the central theme.

The rest of The Hateful Eight’s soundtrack still features «borrowed» music, in this case, tracks from John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). This is a hallmark of Tarantino’s signature style, built on compilation.

A compilation of images and music. The director already knows, at the scriptwriting stage, which music or song should play in each scene. If a song hasn’t been chosen yet, he describes what kind of song it should be.

The on-screen characters in Tarantino’s films mostly talk, eat, and… listen to music. Only after that do they kill or… die. They talk about music (consider the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs, where the characters discuss the song Like a Virgin before the robbery) and dance.

This type of soundtrack, by the way, has a specific name — «diegetic». It’s when music is integrated into the plot, and the characters interact with it. What does this achieve? Quite simply, it places the viewer directly in the same time and space as the character.

Like his idols Sergio Leone and Stanley Kubrick, Tarantino often combines light romantic music with gritty crime plots, turning brutality and violence into a setup for dark humor. This is known as the contrapuntal technique, where one layer of meaning contrasts sharply with another.

Consider the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs, where an upbeat dance hit plays against the viewer’s expectations. Initially, the audience gets drawn in, tapping along to the rhythm, only to find themselves almost complicit in the on-screen violence.

Film and its music indeed pull us into this fictional but compelling world. That’s why we love it — a world where the quirky images born from directors’ imaginations are inseparable from the music playing in the background. Nino Rota, John Williams, Hans Zimmer, Alexandre Desplat, Ennio Morricone, and Ryuichi Sakamoto have created not just great soundtracks but their own form of cinema.

A cinematic universe is born not so much from a beam of light in a dark hall as from a note, a sound that breaks the silence of the theater and generates its own image, without which the visuals feel incomplete.

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