Scoring the Screen: The Secret Language of Film Music

by Andy Hill

Today, musical composition for films is more popular than ever. In professional and academic spheres, media music study and practice are growing; undergraduate and postgraduate programs in media scoring are offered by dozens of major colleges and universities. And increasingly, pop and contemporary classical composers are expanding their reach into cinema and other forms of screen entertainment. Yet a search on Amazon reveals at least 50 titles under the category of film music, and, remarkably, only a meager few actually allow readers to see the music itself, while none of them examine landmark scores like Vertigo, To Kill a Mockingbird, Patton, The Untouchables, or The Matrix in the detail provided by Scoring the The Secret Language of Film Music.This is the first book since Roy M. Prendergast's 1977 benchmark, Film A Neglected Art, to treat music for motion pictures as a compositional style worthy of serious study. Through extensive and unprecedented analyses of the original concert scores, it is the first to offer both aspiring composers and music educators with a view from the inside of the actual process of scoring-to-picture.The core thesis of Scoring the Screen is that music for motion pictures is indeed a language, developed by the masters of the craft out of a dramatic and commercial necessity to communicate ideas and emotions instantaneously to an audience. Like all languages, it exists primarily to convey meaning. To quote renowned orchestrator Conrad Pope (who has worked with John Williams, Howard Shore, and Alexandre Desplat, among others): “If you have any interest in what music 'means' in film, get this book. Andy Hill is among the handful of penetrating minds and ears engaged in film music today.”

Genres: Music

425 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 1, 2017

Reviews

[Teo Weldon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one of the best things I've found in recent years. I feel like I could study this thing for years and still be making new connections.

What Andy Hill is showing is that film music is now operating as a mature language, and that movie audiences have huge vocabularies and expectations because of the wealth of film that has now been amassed. Andy hits on such obvious points and makes those points super clear through reductions of great score examples.

There are certain books that I keep reading over and over because I want them to be part of my deeper consciousness, and this is one of those books.

In my opinion, if you have any interest in film music or in scoring films, this is the best thing you could possibly read if you really want to understand what's going on with its language.

I would give it 6 stars if I could.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

So my second book on writing music for film in less than a year. This one was more accessible from my point of view and fascinating. But once again I give fair warning this is still way beyond my knowledge and is really targeted at university level students and budding film composers. However I still enjoyed it and some fascinating choices of film scores, not the usual with the chapters on Perfume and The War Of The Roses being standouts.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. I was skeptical because I’m already well versed in the subject of film scoring (it’s literally my degree), but I picked up some interesting insights, discovered new scores I hadn’t previously heard (particularly Perfume) and thoroughly enjoyed the book.

[Christopher Heckman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book started off promising, explicitly describing the "secret" language (such as the Hermann Chord, nonfunctional harmony, and Avro Part's compositional techniques), but then in the middle, the author started analyzing the scores without mentioning any major breakthroughs.

I'm not a movie person, so a good deal of the movies mentioned were lost on me, and for most of the rest, I will need to do another listen-through. That's not a bad way to spend time, though.

[Lord · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.7