This chapter examines ways of working as a composer for screen, explaining every step of the process – from reading through a script or treatment to the final recordings and edits – and offers advice on how to approach collaboration and networking in the film industry.

On the Waterfront (1954) offers a particularly interesting case study of both film and music in the 1950s. Elia Kazan’s iconic depiction of waterfront corruption in Hoboken, New Jersey is revered for its neorealist cinematic techniques, masterclass in method acting, and concern for the collective plight of blue-collar longshoremen, but is perhaps best remembered as a classic story of one man’s tragic fall and ultimate redemption through the love of a woman. Concerned that the film lacked sufficient ‘star power’ for success at the box office, independent film producer Sam Spiegel eventually convinced Leonard Bernstein to compose what would be his first and only film score. This chapter argues that Bernstein’s music interacts with the film’s narrative in a way that is not only remarkable for one’s first score, but also represents an important contribution to 1950s cinema, employing textures and influencing composers who are still with us today.

Since its first moments of relatively wide visibility in the 1990s, black metal music has been one of the most controversial and artistically fecund subgenres of metal. In particular, a rash of serious crimes perpetrated by Norwegian black metallers boosted its visibility, and the salacious details of this period were well-covered by journalists, cultural critics and academics. Following this period, however, black metal musicians around the world took a wide range of approaches to the genre. However, one persistent aspect of black metal’s musical practice is the foregrounding of geographic location and local cultures within both the music and visual artwork. This chapter explores on black metal in the United States’s Mountain West, where the musical and ideological tropes of Norwegian black metal are recontextualised into forms that honour this new location while still retaining key points of Norwegian black metal’s worldview. The focus is particularly on the Colorado band Wayfarer’s interrogations of settler colonialism and the cowboy mythos of Hollywood westerns, but the chapter also touches on broader currents of environmentalism and indigenous activism in North American black metal.

Britten’s early love for the cinema - when he was spellbound in particular by the work of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers - and his later apprenticeship as a composer for documentary films in the 1930s are both charted in this chapter, which analyses his comments on the medium in his youthful letters and diaries and goes on to consider the impact film music had on his later stylistic development as a composer of works for the stage. High points of his own work in film include his scores for the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit, including two celebrated collaborations with the poet W. H. Auden (Coal Face, 1935; Night Mail, 1936), his score for the feature film Love from a Stranger (1937), and his virtuosic orchestral music for Muir Mathieson’s educational film Instruments of the Orchestra (1946). The chapter concludes with an account of Britten’s close involvement with his own local cinema in Aldeburgh during the late 1960s.

For most British composers active in the twentieth century, the actual writing of music was only one of many skills they were obliged to develop. Many composers were also actively engaged in the fields of teaching, performance, and administration, and could supplement their income with a variety of other jobs, ranging from adjudication and private tutoring to broadcasting and music criticism. Additionally, the growth in popularity of radio, television, and film opened up new opportunities for composers in lighter genres that had hitherto not been available, either to supplement their contributions to more traditional concert hall repertory, or as dedicated positions in their own right. This chapter will examine these various career paths and responsibilities, looking at how British composers’ training, abilities, interests, and sociocultural status shaped and directed their vocational trajectories.

This article argues that Brecht’s unique musicality as a poet led to a rich and rarely paralleled collaboration with musical composers. While the young Brecht sketched out his own music for his early poetry and songs, he soon turned to professional composers as partners. The article focuses on Brecht’s three major musical collaborators, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. In addition to the innovative works that Brecht created with these composers, they also stimulated important theoretical writings that led to new forms of opera, as in Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera, or a revolutionary aesthetics of film music, as in Eisler/Adorno’s Composing for the Films, which is strongly influenced by Brecht.