The art of keeping score

Music for film is a peculiarly modern art form, and when done right it becomes inextricable from the narrative. Writer ALAN GLYNNpicks his favourites and explains what it was like when 'Limitless' gave his own work a soundtrack

AND THEN TWO come along at once. In this case two Alberto Iglesias scores, one for Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I Live Inand the other for Tomas Alfredson's new screen version of John Le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Audacious and traditional at the same time, both of these excellent scores accompany visually imaginative, stylistically rich movies.

What’s not to like? But as with most things these days – the book trade, for instance – you can look at the situation in one of two ways.

Either it’s all falling apart, or things have actually never been better. With film music, I take the optimistic view. Sure, there’s a proliferation out there of anonymous, pounding electronic scores, as well as cynically compiled “various artists” soundtracks, but equally there are lots of composers working today – with many now coming from different musical disciplines – who are writing original and exciting full orchestral scores.

It's a peculiarly modern art form – the composition of music for film. Ever since the days of the nickelodeon, stories told with moving pictures have had music accompanying them. They don't necessarily need it, of course, as shown very effectively by Hitchcock in The Birds,and more recently by Michael Haneke in Hiddenand The White Ribbon. But there's a certain austerity here that, let's face it, we mightn't want to see replicated everywhere. Because a good movie score provides colour and emotional commentary. And what a truly great score does is become an integral part of the movie itself, working its way into the very fabric and texture of it. Such a score makes the movie it accompanies incomplete – unimaginable – without it.

Try to imagine Vertigowithout Bernard Herrmann's mesmerising score. This music doesn't just tell us what to think, it is an objective correlative of what we think – of what we feel and experience at a visceral level when we watch the movie.

Its tones and moods are inextricable from the movie’s layers of emotion, from its colour and depth, from its narrative complexity.

In the same way, try to imagine Chinatownwithout Jerry Goldsmith's score; To Kill a Mockingbirdwithout Elmer Berstein's score; The Godfatherand Amarcordwithout Nino Rota; James Bond without John Barry. Conspiracy thrillers from the 1970s without David Shire and Michael Small. Make your own list.

Sometimes a score can give a fairly ordinary film a bit of a lift. I watched State of Grace, Phil Joanou's 1990 westies gangster flick, late one night recently. It's pretty good and has a great cast, but Ennio Morricone's achingly beautiful score raises the bar considerably and infuses the movie's themes of regret and lost youth with a poignancy that they might not otherwise have achieved.

An alternative to the original score is the mixtape approach, where a movie co-opts existing music, usually classical, and redefines it with new imagery (and occasionally threatens to spoil it, through overkill, as is the case with the adagiettofrom Mahler's 5th used in Visconti's Death in Venice). The master of this form was surely Stanley Kubrick, who had an uncanny ability to pair existing music with whatever personal vision he was committing to screen at the time. In this regard, my own favourite of his is Barry Lyndon,a film in which music and imagery, lighting and colour, are held in such perfect balance that you are literally transported to a previous century. Okay, not literally. But if feels that way.

A more recent and very successful example of this type of soundtrack was Shutter Island, for which Robbie Robertson made an impeccable selection of modern classical music that perfectly matched Scorsese's astonishing visuals. It almost seemed as if Max Richter's On the Nature of Daylight(from The Blue Notebooks) was just floating around in the ether, waiting for Scorsese to come along and appropriate it.

But on balance, I think there is something more artistically satisfying about an original film score – music composed for and inspired by a specific story and sequence of images, the composer playing an essential part in the collaborative process.

There have been plenty of great composers for film. From Hollywood’s Golden Age, think of Eric Wolfgang Korngold, Dimitri Tiomkin, Max Steiner, Miklos Rozsa and Franz Waxman. Most of these guys were classically trained and wrote music that was heavily influenced by the composers of the Late Romantic period. But with the arrival of Bernard Herrmann a new complexity entered the equation.

There was a new depth of engagement with the material, as the music began insinuating its way more and more into the DNA of the story, and it was from this revolution that the likes of John Barry and Ennio Morricone emerged. Here were young composers creating a sound that was uniquely their own but which also managed to capture the heart and essence of whatever film they were scoring.

Of the established composers of today (no list will be complete, of course, but here are a few: Thomas Newman, Howard Shore, John Williams, James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman, John Powell, Alberto Iglesias, Alexandre Desplat) I imagine that many of them started writing music because of what they experienced in movie theaters when they were kids – the sheer visceral shock of first hearing, say, the theme from Goldfinger or from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and I imagine that many of them today feel they owe a huge debt of gratitude to John Barry and Ennio Morricone.

From the above list, Alexandre Desplat (for my money) is one of the most interesting. Like a lot of his contemporaries (and Barry and Morricone), Desplat tends to overproduce and some of his scores can seem indistinguishable from others, but his back catalogue is littered with some fairly powerful work. Check out his scores for Birth, Syriana, Lust, Caution and L'ennemi intime. Desplat's recent score for Terence Malick's The Tree of Lifeis very beautiful as well, but it somehow got lost in the film, possibly because of Malick's insistence on using a parallel mixtape approach, which I feel was possibly misguided. (There, I said it).

But there are new developments in film music, too. These come in the shape of some really interesting blow-ins from other musical disciplines. In the past we've had Ry Cooder ( Paris, Texas), Philip Glass (the Qatsitrilogy), and more recently people such as Jonny Greenwood ( There Will be Blood), Jon Hopkins ( Monsters), Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross ( The Social Network) and the Chemical Brothers ( Hanna). All of these are fabulous, exciting scores that broaden the parameters of what film music can do and give us a sense of where we might be going from here.

And coming soon? Personally, I'm looking out for Desplat's The Ides of March,Reznor and Ross's The Girl with the Dragon Tattooand Zimmer's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

The Limitless score

EARLIER THIS YEAR I had some direct contact with the world of film music when I first heard the score for Limitless, the movie adaptation of my 2002 novel, The Dark Fields.

I was also seeing the entire film for the first time, so it was a pretty intense experience – made more so by the fact that it was in a theatre in New York and both Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro were sitting a few rows behind me. It’s a tribute then to Paul Leonard-Morgan that in these concentration-sapping circumstances his score made such a strong impression on me. I even remember humming the main theme as I walked out of the theatre.

Back in January director Neil Burger hired Scottish composer Leonard-Morgan to write the music for the film, and at fairly short notice. Working under pressure, Leonard-Morgan – best known for his work on the BBC series Spooks – came up with a thrilling electronic score that perfectly reflects the kinetic visual style of the film, which itself is a fairly accurate representation of the sort of chemical fever-dream I was aiming for in the book.

Electronica isn’t exactly my favourite musical genre, and it doesn’t have a great track record where movie scores are concerned, but this is changing, and Limitless is a really good example of what can be done when style and content are made to work in unison.

Alan Glynn's new crime novel Bloodlandis published by Faber and Faber