Music from the Films

Extract

Nearly all our famous composers have now seen their names blazoned across the ‘credit titles’ of what America calls ‘motionpictures.’ The plot may be moronic, the dialogue the most basic English, but the music may now scale the Olympian heights of classical austerity, or plumb the mazy depths of atonality and every other form of modern anti-romanticism. Gone are the days when studios shunned doctors of music like straphangers dodge the passenger sneezing in a tube. Counterpoint is no longer contraband, nor fugue verboten, a man may make a canon without being fired.