More movie music is starting to cross over to the concert hall

Truly great music is always upstaged.

Artfully arranged scenery obscures its beauty. Car chases drown out its excitement. Dashing actors distract from its emotional power.

But behind the scenes, the thrills and the drama of a film are enhanced by the score.

This holiday season, many film fans will head to theaters to take in Hollywood’s Oscar-season offerings. Few will leave extolling the virtues of the musical scores that accompanied them through at least 90 minutes of a movie.

“In some ways, composing for film is really a thankless job because if you do your job really well, nobody should notice your music,” said Brett Mitchell, assistant conductor of the Houston Symphony and one-time film composer.

Increasingly, film scores are peeking out from behind the curtain and gaining notice on concert stages. Concert programs feature music from films such as “Star Trek,” “The Lord of the Rings” or “Star Wars” performed by notable orchestras across the country.

Howard Shore’s score to “The Lord of the Rings” was recently performed live at Radio City Music Hall as an accompaniment to the film.

As film music moves into the concert hall, composers such as John Corigliano and Philip Glass are taking their talent to Hollywood with compositions that win awards.

“They are very different worlds,” said Paul Chihara, a composer with a career in concert halls, film and television. “Oddly enough, recently some of the same characters are in same worlds.”

Historians of movie music are fond of saying that the art of the film score began in its golden age.

The age was prompted by an exodus of classically trained composers to Hollywood from Eastern Europe. They forged a movie music sound that reflected their concert hall roots, said Chihara, who is also a music professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.

But even in the beginning of film music, movie house and concert hall crossover existed.

In addition to adding musical swashbuckle to the 1930s movies of Errol Flynn, Erich Wolfgang Korngold wrote concert music including a beloved violin concerto played by virtuosos today.

American composer Aaron Copland wrote the music for the 1938 film “Of Mice and Men.” His music for “The Red Pony” was turned into a suite that had a concert-hall premiere.

Corigliano has continued the tradition by turning music from his soundtrack to the film “The Red Violin” into a concerto for classical audiences.

Yet crossover was rarely acknowledged or accepted. That has changed, said Chihara, who remembers the days when conductors turned up their noses at movie composers.

“I think we have to confront the fact that the younger generation does not feel a stigma of listening to or liking film music,” said Chihara, who wrote music for the television show “China Beach.”

Acceptance has come with the realization that, in the 21st century, music and image almost always mix, said Ronald Sadoff, director of the scoring for film and multimedia program in the Steinhardt School at New York University.

“We live in a society in which music exists in tandem with moving images,” Sadoff said.

The Houston Symphony’s Mitchell, now 30, was raised on “Star Wars” and “Superman” films, scored by John Williams. As a child he had little exposure to the classical repertoire that he now conducts. His experience with large orchestras came from Williams recordings.

“I realized the power film music could have even outside of the film,” said Mitchell.

This summer he conducted the Houston Symphony in a live performance of music adapted from the Discovery show “The Blue Planet.”

Writing scores for films has its own challenges, said Jeff Walton, a Houston-based composer of film and television music.

A film composer often gets to work on music at the end of the process, after the film has been shot and edited. Walton has often had no more than three or four weeks to create the sounds that will move an audience.

That has meant many nights of little sleep and lots of deadline stress, said Walton, who is 46.

“There was the adrenaline thing,” he said. “It was a lot of fun.”

As Walton sees it, the film composer’s job is to support the drama.

“You are sort of acting as an invisible actor in the film,” he said.

For film-score composers, the big moments to shine usually come when the credits are rolling, Mitchell said. And that is when the audience is busy leaving the theater and throwing out popcorn boxes.

Mitchell’s suggestion for this movie season is to sit awhile.

“It’s worth it,” he said. “You get to see all the people who worked on the film, and you get to hear what the composer thinks is his best effort.”

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