The Musical Score: A Fundamental Part of Cinema "Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable," said Leonard Bernstein, television hall of fame member and composer of West Side Story (Leonard). The intent of music is displayed in such a way that lets us experience a range of emotions and feelings that cannot be put into words; hence, many artists around the world have employed music time and time again to add a that extra flavor they require for their creations to be perfect. Filmmakers are no exception: they employ composers to design melodic sounds that entwine harmoniously with the script in pursuance of embellishing their stories. Under those circumstances, music and film act as a marriage, where both parties ought to commit to each other and perform their duties to produce a happy outcome. For this reason, music is an imperative element in the film industry. …show more content…
First of all, what is music? According to Gordon Epperson, contributor for Encyclopædia Britannica, “music is an art concerned with combining vocal or instrumental sounds for beauty of form or emotional expression, usually according to cultural standards of rhythm, melody, and, in most Western music, harmony” (Epperson). In other words, we can say that music is an art form that combines sounds to express emotions, and, as such, it’s been associated with other forms of art including theater and film. Secondly, to define a film, we recur to Encyclopædia Britannica’s contributor, Robert Sklar; he says a motion picture, also called film or movie, is a “series of still photographs on film, projected in rapid succession onto a screen by means of light” (Sklar). Unsurprisingly, at some point in time, music, one of the oldest ways for man to express artistry, intermingled with the world’s newest artistic style, motion pictures, to give birth to what we now know as the film