Page 135 - 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 …
second, the usual existence of a single musical composition across different
media, each of which carried its own aesthetic conventions and profession-
al practices; third, the centrality of the publication of music as a written text
in American copyright law, which marginalised forms of music that existed
primarily as sound; and finally, the internationalisation of the film and mu-
sic industries after WWII, which introduced new legal and economic chal-
lenges for music professionals in different national contexts.
The SCA’s foundational years – during which the society consolidated
its purpose, aims, work plans, and organisational structures – produced a
significant body of archival material. These sources are invaluable not only
because they document the immediate concerns of composers at the time,
but also because they preserve a contemporary perspective that avoids ret-
rospective distortion. Placing this contemporary assessment in a broader
historical and aesthetic framework helps to illuminate how the medial po-
sition of film music – hovering between written text and ‘ephemeral’ sound
– fundamentally shaped its reception.
Indeed, the long-standing exclusion of film music from Western music
historiography can be traced to two factors. First, the prevailing modernist
attitudes in music composition that predominated for a long time in music
62
scholarship. And secondly, film music’s ambiguous position within legal
and medial categories, which is a constant topic in the SCA records. In this
sense, film music as a new compositional practice of the twentieth centu-
ry exposes crucial tensions among sound, text, labour, and authorship, es-
pecially when studied through the professional realities of composer-per-
formers and their networks. Collaboration was central to the production
of Hollywood film music, which depended on networks of composers, ar-
rangers, orchestrators, performers, and studio executives. Yet collective
63
agency, as embodied in professional organisations such as the SCA, has re-
ceived little scholarly attention. This neglect may reflect a broader histori-
ographical bias that foregrounds the individual composer, the single ac-
tor over the collective and the institutional structures that shaped musical
practice. Film composers themselves, including figures such as Franz Wax-
man, often reinforced this individualistic narrative as part of their strate-
64
gies of professional identity formation. Nevertheless, if we are to under-
stand ‘how music works’ in this context, it is essential to engage with the
62 For this assessment see also: Winters, Korngold in America, 2.
63 See: Nathan Platte, Making Music in Selznick’s Hollywood (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2017), 11–3.
64 See: Zechner, Franz Waxman, 234–5.

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