Scoring the Movies: A History of Film Music

Even before films had synchronized sound, they were never truly silent—live music accompanied the images, setting mood and enhancing emotion. 

In this engaging lecture, Professor Allen Cohen traces the evolution of music written for film, illustrating its journey with audio and video examples. We’ll explore how film scores developed from the late 19th century into the Golden Age of Hollywood, and how they have continued to adapt through jazz, pop, electronic, and digital innovations. Along the way, Professor Cohen will discuss the aesthetics of film music, its many functions in storytelling, the variety of styles composers have embraced, and the technological changes that have shaped the art form. 

From the earliest picture palaces to today’s blockbusters, discover how music has always been essential to the magic of the movies.

Dr. Allen Cohen is Professor of Music at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His compositions have been played in Carnegie Hall and across the United States and Europe. He has also written dance arrangements for Broadway musicals, scores for off-Broadway musicals and plays, and music for several films and many radio and television commercials, and he has conducted three musicals on Broadway and many elsewhere. He is the author of Howard Hanson in Theory and Practice (Praeger/Greenwood) and the popular children’s book That’s So Funny I Forgot to Laugh! (Scholastic), and co-author of Writing Musical Theater (Palgrave Macmillan). He has served as a judge for the American Prize in music for many years, and he has presented papers about music and musical theater at conferences in New York City, Hawaii, Greece, and Germany.

This program is made possible with the support of The Friends of the Livingston Public Library.