‘Never let it be mediocre’: film music in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Although from the earliest days film music in Europe benefited from the close involvement of established composers of concert music, who often brought to their commissions a level of imagination and originality scarcely to be expected in the highly pressurized conveyor-belt production of film scores in Hollywood, this should not be taken to suggest that the European situation was particularly wholesome. In the UK, for example, the stigma attached to commercial composition blighted critical perceptions of a number of composers who worked regularly in film; those who simultaneously attempted to forge careers for themselves as symphonists, such as William Alwyn, Malcolm Arnold and Benjamin Frankel, inevitably suffered from an establishment view that they were somehow prostituting their art when they entered the film studio, or (even worse) that their concert works were merely pretentious film music. Although both Alwyn and Frankel wrote many fine symphonies, their concert music was destined to remain far less familiar than their film scores, and it was only posthumously in the 1990s that their serious compositions were widely recorded. Before Benjamin Britten (whose early career in documentaries is examined in Chapter 7) quit film work and embarked wholeheartedly on his concert-music career, he wrote to his publisher in December 1937 about the inclusion of his music in a forthcoming radio series devoted to film scores to say ‘I have about ten volumes of film music to my credit (if it be credit!) … I think this is worth bothering about because it is quite good publicity, & I'm always being told that I should bother about that kind of thing!’ (Mitchell and Reed 1991, 535–6).