Focus Features

Because movie music is not just about music but about relation to the moving image, a soundtrack album, and marketing, the history of movie music moves to different rhythms than the history of modern composition. Here is a timeline that notes some of the main developments, turning points, and innovations in the history of the film score.

1908: In one of the first instances of a serious composer writing music specifically for a film, France’s Film d’Art hired classical composer Charles-Camille Saint-Saens to

1912: Pianist Walter Cleveland Simon writes a series of scores for films by the production company Kalem. These are sold in the form of sheet music to exhibitors, who hire their own performers, for 25 cents a copy.

1915: D. W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation features an orchestral score by Joseph Carl Breil, played live at the premiere by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

1927: Composer Gottfried Huppertz created an original score for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis that could be played live by both an orchestra and, in smaller venues, a pianist.

1927: The Jazz Singer, a musical starring Al Jolson, was also the first “talkie,” with synchronized dialogue.

1929: Carl Stalling composes a score for the Disney cartoon The Skeleton Dance and goes on to develop an innovative collage style composed of rapidly changing musical fragments.

1931: With the soundtrack composer not yet an accepted job within the world of film production, Charlie Chaplin composed his own score for City Lights.

1938: Lush, larger-than-life movie music came into vogue in the 1930s, with Erich-Wolfgang Korngold’s score for Michael Curtiz’s The Adventures of Robin Hood being an high-water mark.

1943: Alfred Newman’s score for Henry King’s The Song of Bernadette was one of the first soundtracks to be successfully sold to the public as a long-playing record.

1951: Alex North composes the first major score using elements of jazz and blues for Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

1952: In a first, Dimitri Tiomkin’s theme song for High Noon was used to promote the film, and its lyrics to set up the storyline.

1960: For Alfred Hitchcock’s low-budget Psycho, soundtrack great Bernard Herrmann worked just with a string section and created violent, contrapuntal music that formed a large part of the film’s air of menace.

1960: Nino Rota’s playful Euro-jazz-tinged score for Fellini’s La Dolce Vita drapes an affectionate irony over the film’s characters.

1964: Distinctive themes, unusual instrumentation, and incorporation of sound affects into the compositions distinguished the sweeping movie music of Ennio Morricone. His long collaboration with Sergio Leone started with the “spaghetti Western,” A Fistful of Dollars.

1967: Simon & Garfunkel’s songs for Mike Nichols’ The Graduate had the effect of articulating the movie’s tale of generation anxiety.

1968: In one of the earliest cases of a director becoming wedded to the “temp music” he uses during editing, Stanley Kubrick tosses out Alex North’s score for 2001: A Space Odyssey, using instead classical music by Johann Strauss and Gyorgi Ligeti, among others.

1971: For A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick used one of the first synthesizer-based scores: a series of Beethoven compositions performed by electronic music pioneer Walter (now Wendy) Carlos.

1973: Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets is considered the first film to replace a film score with pop songs, in this case songs by groups such as the Ronettes, the Shirelles and the Rolling Stones.

1973: Bob Dylan’s songs for Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid were the first use of songs composed by a major recording star specifically for a movie.

1977: John Williams’ score for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind is based on a five-note theme that is not just movie music but also the communicative language used in the film to talk to the aliens.

1977: Disco songs by the Bee Gees were composed and performed specifically for John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever, marking the first instance of original popular music by established artists being used to both score and promote the movie.

1988: Minimalist composer Philip Glass’s score for Errol Morris’s documentary, The Thin Blue Line, boldly created a trance-like mood for the director’s investigation of justice denied.

1991: Pro Tools, a computer-based audio and music editor that will revolutionize film soundtrack editing, debuts.

1995: The Danish Dogme ’95 movement bans the use of non-diegetic film scores.

1999: Thomas Newman’s quirkily orchestrated score for Sam Mendes’s American Beauty influences an entire generation of composers.

2004: Soundtrack albums collapse; no soundtrack this year topped 1 million in sales.

2005: Four-Eyed Monsters scores its web series by finding bands on social network sites and then offering them free promotion

2006: Awesome, I Fuckin’ Shot That! Adam Yauch’s Beastie Boy film moves the concert doc to the social networking age by outsourcing production to 50 fans armed with Hi-8 cameras.

2008: Paramount gives up on soundtrack physical media, selling Michael Brooks’ score for Into the Wild as a digital download only.

2008: Joss Whedon reinvents the musical for a new generation with his downloadable superhero comedy, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog.

2009: Royalty free music sites spring up promoting composers and allowing amateur filmmakers to legally score their YouTube films.