Page 125 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2026 Skladateljska društva nekoč in danes.../Composers’ Societies Past and Present...

How Music Works: Film Composers, Labour, and the Screen Composers Association …
this task, the SCA asked film composers such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold
to submit their contracts to the society in order to review the current situa-
tion in the industry, a task that apparently remained necessary, as indicated
27
by the Friedhofer letter quoted above. Notably, there was no common un-
derstanding in Hollywood regarding the conventional terms of composers’
engagement, and standardised practices seemed to have been largely absent
from the industry.
In the early stages of reviewing the legal standing of music in film,
a desire emerged for the various societies to coordinate their efforts un-
der the auspices of the AFM, and thus film composers were to be includ-
ed in the powerful musician’s union. This intention was strongly and pub-
licly opposed by the composer Virgil Thomson in his 1939 book The State
of Music, an attempt to describe “the island of home”of musical professions

28
in the United States. Thomson, who composed primarily for documenta-
ry films, also addresses a general legal problem with music, which contin-
ued to be a topic of concern for the SCA: namely, whether music in gen-
eral should be considered labour or creative work – a division that proved
particularly problematic for film music. Thomson distinguishes between
musicians as time workers and composers as creators of intellectual prop-
erty. Musicians and composers, despite potentially working in the same in-
dustry, should be represented by separate professional bodies. In doing so,
Thomson proposes differentiation based on the nature of work rather than
the industry, thus not fully addressing the unique position of film compos-
ers situated between labour and creative work. Furthermore, he acknowl-
edges in his monograph the complex legal framework of music composi-
tion in the twentieth century:

Music still gets written, performed, and consumed, lots of it, in all cat-
egories. And neither the profession of writing nor the trade of perform-
ing it is quite yet immobilized by friction with the businessmen who or-
ganize the dissemination of it. 29
An interesting consequence of this “friction with the businessmen” was
that, due to the involvement of the AFM, musicians often benefited financial-
ly more from the re-recording of a score for another film than the compos-
ers themselves. This practice of using library music was common at minor

27 See: Letter from Leonard Zissu to Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Oct 11, 1943 [US-Wc,
Erich Wolfgang Korngold Collection, Box 88, Folder 56].
28 Virgil Thomson, The State of Music (New York: William Morrow, 1939), 3.
29 Ibid., 250.

125