Thanks Schiffy. So, like Korngold, far more than a “dabbler”… that’s some substantial film music output! How do they in any way qualify for a “lowest output” film composer discussion?
Not the lowest output, but John Williams' quotation was quite interesting. And since William Walton's work influenced John Williams' music, he certainly had a big impact.
Regarding Aaron Copland, since Virgil Thomson influenced him, even if it's through documentaries, he better matches to the question.
On the other hand, 15 or so film scores is still a small output, compared to what film composers usually compose.
And some people forget that Korngold, Prokofiev or Copland had no impact in countries like France. At least regarding the leading composers. Arthur Honegger even composed film music in the early 30s which was closer to what Hollywood would do a decade later.
I would say that Burt Bacharach had a significant influence on film music in the 1960s and early '70s (and not just American film music), but he only composed around a dozen feature film scores from 1962 to 2014 (two of which were Italian films that he was hired to rescore for American release), plus a few films like "The April Fools" (1969) where he wrote a theme or song. However, his influence - enormous as it was for a while - doesn't really stretch into the 1980s and beyond, so his impact is pretty contained in a specific era.
I would say that Aaron Copland is the prime contender here. Composers today will still aim for the kind of pastoral Americana he was known for. In fact, in recent years one of Danny Elfman's scores, "White Noise," even drew Copland comparisons (though I don't recall detecting them myself).
Classical composers who dabbled in film seem to have a lock on this, at least for me.
Krzysztof Penderecki wrote a handful of scores for Polish documentaries and shorts, but his work was hugely influential on a ton of film composers.
Same with John Corigliano, who was mentioned earlier, and who wrote only four scores that I'm aware of but has been very influential not only in his output but in the other composers that have been his students (like Elliot Goldenthal) who then went on to be influential in their own right.
I get the feeling his impact comes from his concert works, which I think pre-date his film work.
Incorrect. While he certainly has a lot of concert works that pre-date his film work, they are not the ones that were particularly influential on film. I assume what you most have in mind are his stage works, in fact, and the earliest of those to really make an impact on "the American sound" was the ballet Billy the Kid (1938). Less than a year after that Copland had composed his first two film scores, The City and Of Mice and Men (1939). The latter I already made the case for above, in terms of its influence in Hollywood (nominated for TWO music Oscars, written for a Best Picture nominee). Then a year after Of Mice and Men he did Our Town (1940).
Fanfare for the Common Man, Lincoln Portrait, and Rodeo, and Danzon Cubano didn't come until 1942. Appalachian Spring didn't come until 1944, his Third Symphony finished a couple years after that.
A very interesting article about Virgil Thomson, originally published in the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 4th Edition 2000, by Philip Kemp :
Virgil Thomson’s reputation as a composer of film music is out of all proportion to his output. He wrote scores for only eight movies, six of them documentaries. Yet these scores - and two of them in particular - exerted a lasting influence on the development of 20th-century American music, not only for films but in the concert hall as well.
Born in Missouri, Thomson studied during the 1920s with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, revelling in the musical and artistic ferment of the era. Invited in 1936 to provide a score for Pare Lorentz's documentary, THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS, he responded with music that treated indigenous American folk themes with a wit, litheness and affectionate irony learnt from Satie and the composers of Les Six, creating an engaging blend of naivety and sophistication.
Lorentz's film, commissioned by the US Department of Agriculture, dealt with the Dustbowl disaster of the American Midwest, when thousands were driven off the land by economic and ecological breakdown. Working closely with Lorentz - and virtually for nothing, since the director had long since overspent his minuscule budget - Thomson wove further strands of association around the film's evocative images. For the arrival of cattle on the high plains, banjo and guitar pick out the plangent melancholy of cowboy songs like “Streets of Laredo,” while scenes of rampant financial speculation are treated to a raunchy, sardonic blues, vibrant with saxophones, that recalls the Weill of DREIGROSCHENOPER.
Thomson's score for THE PLOW reached wider audiences through the orchestral suite he drew from it, and so did the music for his second collaboration with Lorentz. Backed, like its predecessor, by Roosevelt's New Deal Administration, THE RIVER sketched a brooding, elegiac account of the Mississippi valley, culminating in a celebration of Roosevelt's pet scheme, the Tennessee Valley Authority. Once again Thomson's score set off the images - and Lorentz's incantatory script - with a piquant mix of original material and indigenous melodies: hymn-tunes, spirituals and popular songs, including (for scenes of booming industrial expansion) an uproarious handling of “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”
To Aaron Copland, Thomson's score for THE RIVER provided “a lesson in how to treat Americana.” Its influence can be heard in Copland's own ballet scores - Rodeo, Billy the Kid, Appalachian Spring - as well as in the work of associated composers such as Roy Harris and Walter Piston. But in the specific field of film music Thomson's two scores for Lorentz established an alternative mode to the lush Germanic romanticism then prevalent in Hollywood movies. Not only through Copland's own film scores (and via Copland, those of his followers such as Bernard Herrmann and Alex North) but for American film music in general Thomson set out options of concision and spareness, of a clean, sharply-etched idiom rather than an overall impressionistic haze.
“The movie,” Thomson once wrote, “is a true musical form, as truly a musical form as the opera, though without the opera's inseparable marriage of music to words.” Nowhere was his theory better demonstrated than in his score for Flaherty's LOUISIANA STORY. The film, financed by Standard Oil, showed the coming of oil prospectors to the swamp wilderness of the bayous, seen through the eyes of a native Cajun boy. Drawing this time on an anthology of Cajun folk song, Thomson clothed the haunting melodic lines in a rich variety of instrumental texture, combining them as before with original passages of his own. Though employing complex formal devices—a twelve-tone chorale, a passacaglia, a chromatic double fugue - the music never seems academic, nor loses the simplicity and rhythmic freedom appropriate to its basic material and to Flaherty's lyrical images.
Thomson's score for LOUISIANA STORY won him a Pulitzer Prize, the first Pulitzer award ever granted to a film score. Once again he adapted the music for concert use, deriving from it two separate orchestral suites and a ballet, The Bayou.
The only feature film Thomson scored was THE GODDESS, the rise to fame of a Monroesque Hollywood star directed by John Cromwell from a script by Paddy Chayefsky. Less distinctive than his documentary work, the music suggests that Thomson felt hampered by composing for fiction film, with its limited scope for elongated lines and symphonic development. Even so, THE GODDESS allowed him to exercise his talent for spot-on pastiche. At various points in the film (which covers the years 1928–58) a radio is turned on and jazz emerges, each time perfectly in period in its style and instrumentation. Yet all of it is Thomson's original work - further evidence of his exact and appreciative ear for indigenous American music of every kind.
Yes, Thomson is a very good candidate for this discussion as well. While he technically composed more film scores than Copland did, I think in terms of minutes he composed less film music than Copland did.
I think that Copland had more of a direct impact on Hollywood, and therefore had a bigger direct impact in general, on the larger world of film music. Most Hollywood composers weren't taking their cues (so to speak) from U.S. government documentary short film scores... but Aaron Copland himself was certainly paying attention to his colleague Thomson's work, including The Plough That Broke the Plains. And while I think Copland codified and popularized the "Americana sound" we recognize today much more than Thomson (in both his ballet and film scores), Thomson absolutely got there first and was the one to influence Copland (who in turn influenced others). So in terms of ripple effect, without Thomson's Plough That Broke the Plains we probably at least wouldn't have gotten quite the same Of Mice and Men score by Copland.
Of course in terms of ripple effect, we can keep going back all the way to 1908 and the very first original film score, from a composer who only wrote one single film score of less than 20 minutes in length (though it was pretty much wall-to-wall scoring):
Pretty cool to see it getting performed live to picture again over a century after it was composed!
I found no mention of this Harmonia Mundi release from the end of 2023 - François-Xavier Roth and his period-instrument ensemble 'Les Siècles' recorded Saint-Saëns's score in a 2CD set much lauded by the press:
I found no mention of this Harmonia Mundi release from the end of 2023 - François-Xavier Roth and his period-instrument ensemble 'Les Siècles' recorded Saint-Saëns's score in a 2CD set much lauded by the press:
