The traditional historical narrative of film music places the end of the transition to sound in 1933 with Steiner’s score for King Kong, which is typically considered to be the first classical Hollywood film score and responsible for beginning an era of relatively standardized approach to composing for films. This narrative is, of course, an oversimplification.
Slowik argues that Steiner’s practice in the early 1930s was less an innovation than an extension and codification of methods that had developed in the silent film and had continued as a minority practice through the transitional period.
Writing on Steiner’s scores for Symphony of Six Million and The Most Dangerous Game (both 1932), Slowik states ‘Steiner’s primary contribution was to reintroduce the theme-driven score in a dramatic context, an approach that had fallen out of favor with the advent of the 100 percent talkie’ (2014, 204). Nathan Platte’s work on Steiner’s early scores during this period likewise makes it clear that many innovations that have been assigned to Kong in standard film-music histories had predecessors in earlier scores by Steiner and others (Platte 2014). Nevertheless, the music for Kong seems much more consistent with the practices that would dominate Hollywood film music during the classic era than do the sound-film scores that came before it – with the possible exception of Symphony of Six Million (ibid., 321, 328; Long 2008, 88) – and indeed many that come after it. Steiner’s innovations would seem to belong to the manner in which he evoked but also broke with silent-film practice in a way that enabled him to forge an underscore predicated on sound film. But this practice did not emerge immediately in Steiner’s music, and, as
Slowik and Platte both note, Kong still retained strong affinities to transitional accompaniment practices quite continuous with those of the silent film.
Like The Jazz Singer, Kong was perhaps primed to become a signal event, and to serve as the moment of origin for the classic Hollywood film score, because its soundtrack thematized its problem and so could be allegorized into a general solution. Slowik notes structural affinities between Kong and the earlier Symphony of Six Million with respect to music: both films initially develop an opposition of space articulated with music (island, ghetto) and without music (city, uptown). Six Million begins in the ghetto and returns to it, and throughout music remains bound to the ghetto, which is rendered exotic and pathetic in virtue of its musicality. Kong inverts this arrangement, beginning with the city devoid of music, devoid of life; the exotic island is then suffused with music, and Kong’s forced appearance in the city has the effect of releasing music into it (Buhler et al. 2010, 331). According to Slowik, ‘What marked King Kong as unusual was not a musical decision to tie music to fantasy but rather a narrative decision to depict urban reality and exotic fantasy in the same film and to blend them together in the final act’ (2014, 234). And Slowik rightly notes that Steiner’s score for the film is fully consistent with film-music practice that had developed at the end of the transitional period. Yet this revisionist claim, although broadly correct, is akin to the one that would minimize the influence of The Jazz Singer in the transition to sound; neither claim accounts for the fact that these stories began circulating almost immediately. They may well form crucial pieces in the mythology of sound film, but the myth was already forming at the moment of origin. If Steiner could quickly represent Kong as having opened a new path for music in film (1937, 220), it is likely that he seized on this film and not his previous or later work for a reason, even if he had a strong self-interest in promoting his own work.
While films like The Jazz Singer and Kong have become iconic in the history of film sound and film music for their innovations framing the transition period, the myths surrounding these films obscure a much richer history: one of codification and experimentation, of unexpected continuity and major disruption and of negotiation and confrontation. The shift occurred in markedly different ways in Hollywood and in Europe, and the technology’s dissemination to the rest of the world reveals further dimensions and complexities to the story of the transition. Emily Thompson, for instance, in her study of the installation of sound technology around the world, writes that sound film ‘provided a powerful new means by which to articulate national agenda, and the end result was not a single, standardized and unified modern voice but a cacophony of competing signals and messages’ (2004, 192).
Within this period, the role of music and sound in cinema shifted in many dramatic ways, but emerging out of the transition period the major principles motivating their use remained. The maintaining of these principles was by no means inevitable, as producers, directors and composers around the world negotiated the role of music and sound in the soundtrack; moreover, experiments with the soundtrack did not cease after the transition period. Many of the most innovative uses of sound in later films came from directors and composers who bucked the trends of established practices. Yet the manner in which film music and sound practices were standardized by the mid-1930s reveals certain constants from the silent to the ‘classical’ era of filmmaking:
sound film, organized under the principle of vococentrism, ultimately had the effect of tightening the already powerful grip of narrative on cinema.