Film-Music, Where it All Began...

Hi everyone and welcome to this month's blog post!  Today we are going to go right back to the beginning of film history to see how film-music got started.

'The Horse In Motion'

​The birth of film began around 1873 with Eadweard Muybridge developing a photographic technique called 'chronophotgraphy', the scientific study of locomotion.  After experimenting for about four years, Muybridge set up a series of still cameras next to a race-track and photographed a horse galloping past (Sallie Gardner).

In 1887, Muybridge photographed a different horse (Annie G), which comes from plate 626 called 'Animal Locomotion'.  This has since been created into an animated gif from the frames.

The oldest surviving films

Some of the oldest surviving films, which are only very short as film-making had not yet been developed as an art or form of entertainment, include The Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) and Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (1895).  

The screening of films has always been accompanied by music, often piano, sometimes a small orchestra or organ.  It was usually anything that was available at the time rather than specific to the film.

​The first films in the 1900s were short as well as silent but directors started creating works of fiction, such as The Cook in Trouble in 1904, A Funny Shave in 1906 and The Dancing Pig in 1907.  

In 1925, Edmund Meisel specifically wrote the score for Battleship Potemkin.  However, it was composers such as Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Alfred Newman that started to develop the archetypal classic ‘Hollywood score’, from the late 1930s onwards.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  If you want to know more, hit me up at the email address listed under 'contact'.  Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next month.  Bye for now!