The First Steps of Film Music
By Charlotte Stace
The First Steps of Film Music is a talk that rewinds cinema history to the moment filmmakers realised something crucial: images hit harder when music is guiding your emotions. Long before “soundtracks” became concert-hall favourites, silent films were already using live accompaniment to heighten drama. This talk traces how that instinct evolved into a whole new musical art form.
Led by film historian and journalist Albert Beorlegui, the talk focuses on the early 1930s, when a wave of mostly European-born composers helped define what we now think of as classic film music. These are the pioneers who gave Hollywood its emotional language: Max Steiner (Gone with the Wind), Erich Wolfgang Korngold (The Adventures of Robin Hood), Alfred Newman (Wuthering Heights), Dimitri Tiomkin (Lost Horizon) and Franz Waxman (Rebecca).
If you love film scores, or just want to understand why a single chord can make a scene unforgettable, this is a deep dive into the “origin story” of film music.