Imagine your favorite movie without its music. Without their accompanying scores, would the Harry Potter or Star Wars franchises be as iconic as they are? Would you cry at the beginning of Up without its heartbreaking piano to guide you through?

Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine a movie without music. In the 1920s, the Age of the Silver Screen, or the era of silent film, dominated the film industry. There was no recorded sound accompanying movies, and especially no spoken dialogue. Despite the idea of combining moving pictures with recorded sound having been around for almost as long as the idea for the film itself, filmmakers were unable to do so because of the technical challenges involved with the process.

Even when the only movies coming out were silent, however, music always stuck to its side. Many showings of silent films almost always featured live music. It was essential in building the film’s atmosphere and giving the audience vital emotional cues.

In the modern day, films are never without their musical companion. Every movie playing at a theater or from a streaming service has its own distinctive score. As films evolve, the score still plays a crucial role in communication that is only implied. An effective score adds depth and emotion to a scene that dialogue cannot.

Think about your favorite movie. Have you ever listened to the music in the background? Would the tone and atmosphere be the same if you changed it?

An original score is vital to the story-making process, and by changing it or adding it to another movie, mainly within the same franchise, an ineffective score can take away from what the scene was trying to create. When you take the score from another movie within the same franchise, it can re-contextualize what the original movie had established.

Take the Star Wars franchise for example. Within the nine movies making up the prequels, originals and sequels, John Williams has carefully composed the greatest franchise score of his career, only to be disregarded with The Rise of Skywalker. Before the movie came out, John William’s idea for the film’s original score was leaked. When The Rise of Skywalker was released, however, many fans were perplexed when they heard the same music from the original trilogy. Transporting the same version to the sequel put it in a new context where it no longer held the same meaning and emotion that it held previously.

The music within The Rise of Skywalker felt out of order with the film’s plot and, most importantly, the use of the scores from the originals felt like the filmmakers were trying to rely on the nostalgia fans might have felt for the originals. It came to light, however, that John Williams had written three hours of music for the film and only 76 minutes of it appeared in the film. The almost two hours of unused score would potentially never see the light of day that it very much deserved.

That discovery raises the question of whether the movie would have been different with John Williams’s new score. What was his vision for the film? These questions will likely never be answered.

It may not seem that important, but composers put a considerable amount of thought into the already complicated art that is film scoring, and for the most part, it goes unappreciated and overshadowed by a film’s other components. Even at the Academy Awards, film scores go unappreciated. The film score award was not even presented live at the 2022 Oscars. This omission was a slap in the face to the hundreds of composers, musicians, orchestra members, along with other professionals, who put their heart and soul into each film’s score. Their work provides today’s cinematic storytelling with its emotional foundation.

There is so much that goes into making a movie, from the screenplay to the cinematography, the editing to the casting, and, of course, the acting. But perhaps the most unappreciated and vital part of cinema today is a movie’s score.