The programmatic nature of the average film soundtrack has undergone a slew of changes in the past decade. Once upon a time, the album contained a composer's score for a film -- usually instrumental -- and served as a memento of... [more]

The programmatic nature of the average film soundtrack has undergone a slew of changes in the past decade. Once upon a time, the album contained a composer's score for a film -- usually instrumental -- and served as a memento of an evening in the cinema as much as a musical experience. In recent years, the album connected to a given film more than likely contains an anthology of pop, rock, or hip-hop tunes that may be only marginally connected with the music heard in the theater; in the 1990s, the soundtrack album has come into its own as a marketing tool, both for film companies to connect with a younger audience and for record labels to promote their artists. Songs drive the soundtrack album, despite the fact that they are often not originally recorded with the film in mind. It was not always so, and sometimes still isn't. The recording experiments conducted by beloved figures such as Italy's Ennio Morricone or Bernard Herrmann (who scored Alfred Hitchcock's films) were rendered in bold relief on soundtrack albums in the 1960s. As avant-garde musician (and sometime film composer) Brian Eno has pointed out, "music without a center" -- the center being the picture for which it was composed -- still exerts a singular fascination. From the classical pilferings of Max Steiner or Erich Korngold from Hollywood's Golden Age, up to the present day meditations of French cinema musician Gabriel Yared and the electronically enhanced eclecticism of Hans Zimmer, music that is not designed as a stand-alone entity still yields unexpected pleasure. [show less]