Part I

• In early movies there was no music. Then, the music that was played had to be recorded in unison with the video track.

• At first, it was unimaginable that the music would come from a source which couldn't be seen simultaneously on screen.

• Time was next to nonexistent for composing film-scorers

• Today the composer usually has a between a few weeks and a couple months to write the music, while five days was not uncommon in the 30s

• Golden age of film – 30s-50s. Movie-goer numbers were higher in percentage than ever. Much of the music then was influenced by the Romanticism from the 19^th century. New ideas and freedom for creativity were not generally accepted until some tolerance of experimentation in the 40s.

• Beginning in the 60s and 70s, dissonance in film scoring was much more customary, and also jazz and rock music became a regular part of film scores.

• Music is the very last part of a very long and complex process of realizing a film. It is fundamentally a part of post production, being one of the finishing touches on a film. However everything must be carefully planned with music in mind; if the film will be synced with music then the film's time-line must be carefully laid out.

Part III

• You often don’t have time to wait for inspiration to reveal itself, but instead have to rely on craft, intent and knowledge to complete a score in time. 

• It is important to develop a broad array of musical ineptitude, for example being adept at playing and composing in the style of classical, jazz, sound-scaping, pop, etc.

• Even if a musical style doesn’t spark your interest immediately, it is important to develop versatility, and so that style should be studied as an academic exercise (Alf Clausen firmly believed in this, he told students to thoroughly examine music).

• Prior to scoring a scene you should always know what you want to express, by examining the scene’s mood, flow, and tempo.

• For TKAM Elmer Bernstein spent six weeks just watching the movie until it spoke to him, and he discovered the role that music played. However, a film scorer usually won’t have this luxury, needing to start producing a score in a matter of days or a couple weeks, so knowing your direction can be crucial in this sense.

• Said Dick Grove, the reason we write music is to learn things about ourselves. We need to ask questions about ourselves, and answer based on what we have already learned through the creative process.

• Some composers think about the movie intellectually at first, and then attack it from a musically intellectual perspective.

• Other composers start with the emotion that they can glean from a movie, and build the music off of that emotion.

• There are two methods of composing for film, on pen and paper, for live recording, or using synthesizers. Pen and paper requires experience with notation and the ability to hear in your head what a group of notes will sound like ahead of time. Synthesizers on the other hand, allow for quicker writing, and “happy mistakes”, although it may be less clear what you want a musician to play than if you had written the score with expertise by hand.

• You have to take into consideration the content of the film. You have to write based on dialogue, i.e. who is talking, and what they are both feeling and saying. You also have to write based on tempo of action and/or dialogue as well as progression of drama.

• Music is a valuable tool in the smoothing of transitions in films, or for keeping a continuous flow throughout the course of the movie.

• The main title and the end credits are two places where a musician can “stretch” their music. In other words, they can develop an A and B theme, and complete their musical idea, which is often not possible during a shorter scene in a movie.