"Whatever Happened to Great Movie Music?": Cinéma Vérité and Hollywood Film Music of the Early 1970s

By Julie Hubbert

In the early 1970s two well-known and well-respected film composers, Elmer Bernstein and David Raksin, wrote articles similar not only in their nearly identical titles, but in their assessment of a dramatic change that was taking over Hollywood film music. Bernstein's article, "Whatever Happened to Great Movie Music?," which appeared in a 1972 issue of High Fidelity, was the first to signal that all was not well in the film-music community. A profound change in film-music tastes and practices, he reported, was forcing many decorated and venerated Hollywood composers into an early and unwanted retirement. His services, and the services of colleagues like Alex North, Bernard Herrmann, Miklós Rósza, Alfred Newman, and Dimitri Tiomkin, were no longer being required because the long tradition of orchestral film music was fast being replaced by new musical forms and styles. That these new practices were decidedly inferior was an opinion Bernstein did little to hide.