Classifying Stylistic Trends In Film Music

[Dixon Hill 4,229]

From a musicological perspective, how would you group/name the most prevalent strands of style in Hollywood film music? Is anyone aware of any scholarly attempt at this?

Some categories that come to mind for me are Old Hollywood Romantic, New Hollywood Romantic, Hollywood Avant-Garde, Hollywood Minimalism/Electronic, and Blockbuster.

I was just thinking about this today, wondering if anyone else finds it remotely interesting.

[Ludwig 1,000]

Film music is often so variegated that it becomes difficult to discuss style as we understand it in the classical world. One can find relatively pure examples of one style or another, for example the modernist style of Goldsmith's Planet of the Apes. But especially from the 1950s on, there are so many scores that defy this kind of categorization that we are forced to consider style in film music in a broader way.

My own belief is that it is best to tease out the various styles contained within a score then assess its overall approach, which I would call a "type" of score. So "styles" here would be the same as in classical music, but widened to include others such as classical Hollywood (which might more succinctly be called the "symphonic" style), various popular styles (pop, rock, jazz, folk), and indigenous (suggesting a particular people). If any of these styles predominates a film, we would just call the score's type the same thing. So Planet of the Apes would of course be a modernist type of score because it employs that style for the entire film.

But when there is more than one style in a score, we can distinguish between those scores that juxtapose different styles (i.e., they are heard at different times) and those that fuse them together (at the same time) - I would call the former "eclectic" scores and the latter "blended" scores. I would make this distinction because I think there is a significant difference in approach between, say, Star Wars and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, even though both make use of classical Hollywood practices (symphonic style).

Then we could add to the list "adapted" scores composed of pre-existing material.

All in all, then, we could have seven main score types to cover most bases:

- Symphonic

- Popular

- Modern

- Indigenous

- Eclectic

- Blended

- Adapted

I haven't seen other breakdowns of style in books, so I came up with this to try to explain film music styles.

[Dixon Hill 4,229]

As you touched on, my thinking was that, after acknowledging that there is a good deal of eclecticism in nearly every score, one could still fit the overall aesthetic of one into a single category. POA, as you said, is very eclectic, but the overarching spirit is still what I would call Williams' version of New Hollywood Romantic. Star Wars I think is closer to the Old Hollywood Romantic style, with touches of the Hollywood Avant-Garde.

I should say I don't mean for the labels I gave to correspond exactly with their current musicological usage, nor do I mean for them to necessarily describe the language used itself, but rather, as I said, the overarching spirit of the way the score is written. Something like Apollo 13 has a different musical vocabulary than Gladiator, but I would call both examples of the New Hollywood Romanticism. The Shawshank Redemption and Angels & Demons, again, different vocabularies and sound-worlds, but both fit into the Hollywood Minimalism/Electronic category in my mind.

[Ludwig 1,000]

I think we're on the same page, it's just a matter of how specific one wants to get in assigning categories. Myself, I like systems that lie at a midpoint between simple and complex - simple enough to be easy to remember but complex enough to allow for nuance and differentiation where it seems significant.

When I call Star Wars a blended score, I refer to precisely the two styles you mention - symphonic (or classical Hollywood - what you call Old Hollywood Romantic) and modern (in the sense of modernist - or what you call avant-garde). Of course the symphonic is the stronger style in the score, so you could call it "blended symphonic", for example.

Something like Gladiator combines elements of new age, electronica, and the traditional symphonic sound (and like Star Wars, has direct references to Holst's Mars), so again I'd call it a blended score. But it's the component styles that differentiate it from Star Wars. To me, categorizing scores by their overall approach first, then their component styles, is the most productive way to understand them because scores tend to be so varied. If we categorized by component styles, we'd end up with so many categories that the whole practice would be too complex.

Your solution is certainly simple enough to be useful, but I prefer something that allows for somewhat more complexity, so that we can differentiate between scores in the same large category by pointing to the component styles. Or maybe that's something you would do as well, but in describing the score in prose rather than through a label or some sort.