ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on perceptions of originality within contemporary screen music, revealing specific recurrent anxieties. It aims to provide perceptual frameworks that characterize the creation of 'something from nothing' as inherently more valuable and original than the rearrangement of existing parts. These two poles are what Robert Macfarlane has labeled creation and invention. The chapter considers the ways in which the thorny concept of originality is perceived within screen music, and reflects on the implications of this problematization for wider cultural production. It describes a critique of ideas about musical originality within screen music, particularly as elaborated in the Academy Awards. Interviews with numerous composers and filmmakers attest to the importance of the score, which they have considered a primary example of exemplary originality. Scholarship primarily focusing on Hollywood's Golden Age suggests the beginnings of an 'originality turn' in screen-music studies, which opens up new and more subtle perspectives.
