The Sound of the 10s - 30s English • Filmhuis Denhaag Filmhuis Denhaag

The Sound of the '10s, '20 & '30s

Film and music belong to each other

The earliest films didn’t have any sound, but that didn’t mean that it was silent in the cinema: live musical accompaniment was provided by a pianist or orchestra. As a result, kisses became passionate, chases thrilling and clumsiness funny. 

In the 1910s and ’20s, cinema organs and gramophones were also installed in cinemas. These provided suitable music and sound effects. More and more, composers were also writing music specifically for a film. This music wasn’t recorded onto a record to be played in the cinema – it was performed live. 

With the arrival of films with sound in 1927, everything changed. From this point on, music and film became closely linked. A few years later, it led to the presentation of the first Oscar for best original song. With the sheet music and records of these songs, you could recreate a little bit of Ginger Rodgers or Fred Astaire in your own home. These were the tentative beginnings of the soundtrack. 


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The rise of Nazism in Europe in the 1930s resulted in many leaving for the United States. Some were composers who went to work for the film industry 

in Hollywood. They wrote the music that they were familiar with from the European concert halls and as a result, romantic orchestral music became the norm. At the same time, American composers were writing scores in which the vast, American landscape resounded. Leading characters were also given their own theme tune, a leitmotif. The first to have one of these leitmotifs was the giant ape King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack 1933). 

The economic crisis and looming war meant that there was a desire for light-hearted musicals, historical sagas and animated films. The hopeful tunes from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (William Cottrell, David Hand, Wilfred Jackson 1937) and The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming 1939) became classics.


Listen to the classics from the beginning of cinema

Hear how European composers left their mark on Hollywood, a giant monkey is musically introduced & Judy Garland dreams of a better place beyond the rainbow.

Facts of Filmmusic

The Singing Fool (1928)

The 1927 film The Jazz Singer was for a long time best known for being the first film with sound. Owing to its enormous success, it was quickly followed by The Singing Fool. Today these films mainly stand out for the blacked-up face of actor and singer Al Jolson. Blackface had its origins in theatre shows that had been popular in New York since the 19th century. In these, white men portrayed African Americans as lazy, hypersexual, superstitious and stupid. For Al Jolson, playing a black man was central to his public persona. According to his biographers, he performed in blackface because he felt freer and more spontaneous wearing a painted mask. Jolson’s role is nonetheless a sad reminder of the discrimination and stigmatisation of African Americans.

King Kong (1993)

The Jewish composer Max Steiner was one of the many Germans to emigrate to America during the rising Nazi threat of the 1930s. He quickly found work in Hollywood, where he wrote the score for the film King Kong (1933). In this, he introduced the use of a leitmotif: a couple of notes or a melody associated with a particular character. For the enormous ape Kong, Steiner wrote three descending notes that give weight to this awe-inspiring creature. Even when Kong isn’t yet in the frame, his leitmotif adds to the tension. The composer John Williams later applied this musical device with huge success in Jaws (1975). In this film too, the shark has a menacing presence, even when you can’t yet see it.

Modern Times (1936)

From the early days of cinema, Charlie Chaplin was world-famous as an actor and director of his own films, such as The Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925). Much less widely known is that Chaplin also wrote the music for a number of his films. One such example is the film Modern Times (1936) and the song Smile. Nat King Cole’s interpretation of the song in 1954 made it world-famous, after which many other artists began to sing it.

Wizard of Oz (1937)

The song Over the Rainbow is taken from the film The Wizard of Oz. It won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1939 and made Judy Garland a worldwide star. Garland sang of her yearning for a beautiful, new world – somewhere over the rainbow. That longing was familiar to many people: during the Second World War, the song became immensely popular among the American soldiers in Europe. For them, Over the Rainbow became a symbol of their return to America, where life would be just as wonderful as over the song’s rainbow. After the Second World War, Judy Garland became a gay icon and the rainbow became the symbol of the LGBTQ+ community. All thanks to Over the Rainbow.

Of Mice and Men (1939)

During the 1930s there was considerable social unrest in the United States, the result of an economic crisis, unemployment, extreme drought and dust storms. Composers such as Aaron Copland identified with the workers and their distressing and often hopeless situation; they saw it as their duty to write music that wouldn’t alienate workers from their roots. Rather than complex film scores that were difficult to listen to, they composed music inspired by American folk music and jazz. American composers developed a sound that was recognisable to all Americans. The music was straightforward, warm and emotional. And typically American.
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