Page 126 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2026 Skladateljska društva nekoč in danes.../Composers’ Societies Past and Present...

Skladateljska društva nekoč in danes | Composers’ Societies Past and Present
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studios as a cost-saving measure. In simple terms, labour in the film in-
dustry was financially rewarded, whereas creative work received compar-
atively little compensation. According to the violinist Julius Toldi, the film
composer consequently was “the only one exposed to arbitrary exploitation”
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in the film industry, echoing also Deutsch’s statement quoted earlier.
One prerequisite for improving the position of the film composer was
providing them with proper credit for their work. Although this principle
may seem obvious, standard contracts often omitted such a clause. Excep-
tions included distinguished composers, such as Erich Wolfgang Korn gold,
Max Steiner, Aaron Copland, or Dimitri Tiomkin. Their names and repu-
tations on the music scene helped the film company in promoting the film,
as a prominent composer was often considered a marketing asset rather
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than a cost for the film studio. For lesser-known composers, the situation
was, of course, different. It should be emphasised that the attribution of
screen credits to the composer did not grant them ownership of their crea-
tive work. Ben Winters has recently refuted the persistent myth that Korn-
gold supposedly held the rights to his film music compositions. In fact, Ko-
rngold operated under essentially the same contractual conditions as other
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Hollywood film composers, except that he was probably more publicly
visible through press coverage – a visibility shared by other major figures
in the industry which the SCA intended to use for its advantage.
The SCA aimed to have the profession of film music composition ac-
knowledged not as labour but as a creative work, subject to both copy-
right and performing rights. The problem of crediting film composers
for their creative contributions was discussed not only in internal SCA
meetings, but also publicly by the legal consultant Leonard Zissu, who

30 See: Minutes of the SCA Free Lance Composers Meeting, April 5, 1948 [MHL, SCA
Collection, Folder 40. Freelance Composers].
31 Letter from Julius Toldi to J.K. Wallace [President of Musicians Mutual Protection
Organisation], 10 March 1949. [MHL, SCA Collection, Folder 32. Correspondenc-
es]. Toldi, a musician in the Twentieth-Century Fox Orchestra, belonged to Arnold
Schoenberg’s private circle in Los Angeles, and promoted Schoenberg’s music in the
US (see: Kenneth H. Marcus, Schoenberg and Hollywood Modernism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 154–5).
32 See: Notes on the meeting of the SCA Contract Committee with the Screen Writ-
ers Guild and the Radio Writers Guild, 4 Dec 1945 and for an assessment of the con-
tracts of Korngold see: Ben Winters, Korngold in America: Music, Myth, and Holly-
wood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025), 53–82.
33 See: Winters, Korngold in America, 82.

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