Aaron Copland - Film Composer

Film Composer

By the 1930s, Hollywood began to beckon "serious" composers with promises of better films and higher pay. The reality, however, was that few found good projects. Copland sought to enter that arena, as both a challenge for his abilities as a composer and an opportunity to expand his reputation and audience for his more serious works. Unlike the total attention he would hope to get from a concert-goer, Copland wrote that film music had to achieve a balance. It should be "secondary in importance to the story being told on the screen" while notably adding to the dramatic and emotional content of the film—but without diverting the viewer's attention from the action.

Upon arriving in Hollywood in 1937, he had high hopes: "It is just a matter of finding a feature film that needs my kind of music." What he found, however, was the ongoing tendency of studios to edit and cut movie scores, which often subverted a composer's intentions. No projects seemed suitable at first. But his patience paid off two years later when Copland found a kindred spirit in director Lewis Milestone, who allowed Copland to supervise his own orchestration and who refrained from interfering with his work. Copland composed three of his five film scores for Milestone.

This collaboration resulted in the notable film Of Mice and Men (1939), from the novel by John Steinbeck, that earned Copland his first nomination for an Academy Award ( he actually received two nominations, one for "best score" and another for "original score"). He considered himself lucky with his first film score: "Here was an American theme, by a great American writer, demanding appropriate music." Having accepted small sums for other projects in the past, especially to help out cash-strapped productions involving friends, this time Copland would capitalize on his efforts: "I thought if I was to sell myself to the movies, I ought to sell myself good." From then on, he became one of Hollywood's highest paid film composers, earning as much as $15,000 per film.

In a departure from other film scores of the time, Copland's work largely reflected his own style, instead of the usual borrowing from the late-Romantic period. Many silent and early talking films used classical music themes directly, both in the credit sequences and during the action. But with Copland, the film score's purpose was more comprehensive and subtle, setting the atmosphere of time and place, illustrating the thoughts of the actors, providing continuity and filler, and shaping the emotion and drama. He often avoided the full orchestra, and he rejected the common practice of using a leitmotiv to identify characters with their own personal themes. He instead matched a theme to the action, while avoiding the underlining of every action with exaggerated emphasis.

Another technique Copland employed was to keep silent during intimate screen moments and only begin the music as a confirming motive toward the end of a scene. Virgil Thompson wrote that the score for "Of Mice and Men" established "the most distinguished populist musical style yet created in America." Many composers who scored for western movies, particularly between 1940 and 1960, were influenced by Copland's style, though some also followed the "Max Steiner" approach, which was more bombastic and obvious. As a commentator on film scores, Copland singled out Bernard Herrmann, Miklós Rózsa, Alex North and Erich Wolfgang Korngold as innovative leaders in the field.

Copland's score for The North Star (1943) was nominated for an Academy Award, and his score for William Wyler's 1949 film, The Heiress won the award. Several themes from his scores are incorporated in the suite Music for Movies. His score for the film adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel The Red Pony was arranged by commission of the Houston Symphony Orchestra as a suite for their performance in October 1948 and became widely popular. His score for the 1961 independent film Something Wild was released in 1964 as Music For a Great City. Copland also composed scores for two documentary films, The City (1939) and The Cummington Story (1945).

When commenting on the effectiveness of film scores, Copland said: "I'd love to be able to have audiences see a film with the music, then see it a second time with the music turned off, and then see it a third time with the music turned on. Then, I think they'd get a much more specific idea of what the music does for a film.".