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How Music Works: Film Composers, Labour, and the Screen Composers Association …
for SCA members “covering registering procedures in the film, radio and
20
television performance fields”. SCA membership fees depended on the
amount of annual income from motion picture work: in 1945, the mini-
mum fee was USD 20 for earnings below USD 5,000, while the highest fee
was USD 180 for earnings above USD 40,000/year. 21
Despite this legal and revenue-oriented focus, the SCA also acted as a
social collective, supporting members during difficult periods of their lives
whenever necessary. When the German-American composer Werner Rich-
ard Heymann was hospitalised following a suicide attempt, the SCA col-
lected donations from their members to help Heymann cover his bills, as
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he was financially destitute. Composer societies such as the SCA often
formed not only for specific purposes, but also because of crucial needs that
required collective energy and resources. The following section examines
how the SCA’s four goals manifested in film composers’ working practices,
and thus serves as a means to better understand ‘how music worked’ in the
middle of the twentieth century.

Film Music Composition: Labour or Creative Work?
Legally, film composers in the Hollywood of the 1940s were hired as em-
ployees at a film studio, receiving a lump-sum payment, comparable to oth-
er professions in the film industry. Being hired as an employee meant that
film composers signed over the rights to their compositions to the film stu-
dio or production company. Generally, film composers were not entitled to
any royalty payments when their music was reused in other films produced
by the same company – a common practice in Hollywood, and one publicly
addressed by the SCA legal counsel Leonard Zissu. Correspondence pre-
23
served in the SCA collection indicates that, despite several lawsuits brought
by SCA members such as David Raksin in the 1940s, a clause requiring com-
posers to sign over all copyrights and performance rights to the film studio
– thus making the company the recipient of ASCAP royalties – continued

20 SCA Press Statement, 17 June 1954 [MHL, SCA Collection, Folder 62. Press Releases
and Publicity].
21 See: SCA Notice regarding Dues [US-Wc, Erich Wolfgang Korngold Collection, Box
88, Folder 56].
22 Letter from Adolph Deutsch to Scott Bradley, 9 April 1950 [MHL, SCA Collection,
Folder 32. Correspondences].
23 See: Leonard Zissu, “The Copyright Dilemma of the Screen Composer,” Hollywood
Quarterly 1, no. 3 (April 1946): 317, https://doi.org/10.2307/1209289.

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