British Composers and Film Music

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 795, 15 October 1954, Page 20

British Composers and Film Music

[7's nearly 20 years since Sir Arthur Bliss, now Master of the Queen’s Musick, wrote his famous score for the H. G. Wells film The Shape of Things to Come. That is often regarded as the starting point,in the development of a new type of music for films, for it was probably the first occasion on which a composer worked side by side with the film makers from the scripting to the final editing. Wells himself said: "The music is @ part of the constructive scheme of the: film, and the composer was practically a collaborator in its production, This Bliss music is not intended to be tacked on: it is a part of the design." In the same year William Walton wrote his first film music, for Escape Me Never, which , ‘starred Elisabeth Bergner, and over the years since then nearly every contemporary British composer of note has written music for the cinema. Among the best known are Ralph Vaughan Williams, who began in 1940 with 49th Parallel, and whose score for Scott of ‘the Antarctic was a starting point for his Sinfonia Antartica; and Arnold Bax, who in 1942 wrote the music for Malta, G.C. These four composers will be discussed im four programmes on the British composer and film music, which are to be heard in Focus on Film from 2YA on Mondays, starting on October 18. :