Introduction

The introduction discusses the aesthetic and production blueprint of the classical film score and different theoretical approaches to music in audiovisual culture. Alongside other broad models of sound and image relations, such as silent cinema and modern “musical sound design,” the classical film score is both a model and a conceptualization of the relationship between sound and image. These models and their musical structures are determined by film form, not by musical form. So, the models are conceptual as well as aesthetic. Furthermore, they are also technological affordances (broadly conceived), rather than comprising simply “aesthetic choices,” which has dominated and limited thinking about both film and music as artistic endeavours.