Melody in Movies

Clapperboard

Melody is one of the memorable things about movies. Sometimes just a few strands of a movie melody can bring our entire experience with the film flooding back. How many of the following do you recognize?

Movie makers use melodies to enhance the emotional depth of the audience’s experience. A memorable use of melody was in 2001: A Space Odyssey. We heard the graceful strains of “The Blue Danube Waltz” while spaceships docked.

Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta makes Stanley Kubrik’s creepy visual imagery almost unbearably creepier.

Speaking of creepy, Alfred Hitchcock’s original Psycho featured an amazing and disturbing musical score by Bernard Hermann, including the famous shrieking violins (at 5:50).

Everyone is familiar, it seems, with John Williams’s “Imperial March” from the Star Wars saga (music begins after 1 minute). Villains rank their own music in many of today’s movies.

And so do heroes. Princess “Leia’s theme” is justly famous for its grace and beauty.

The so-called “Marlboro Man” theme originated in the 1960 movie The Magnificent Seven.

Howard Shore’s musical score to The Lord of the Rings movies—he called it his opera—helps us know how to feel about places and people in the vast saga. Edoras, the capital of Rohan, is noble, tragic, foreboding, and yet somehow hopeful, feelings Shore managed to capture in the music.

I hope this brief essay can help you better appreciate the musical scores that accompany the visual imagery of film.

You may also want to look at—and listen to—my blog posts on “Melody on TV” and “Melody.”