Music: Pop Records

"Movie music," said Sir Thomas Beecham, "is noise. It's even more painful than my sciatica." For years, audiences approached screen music with what the industry regards as a more eupeptic attitude: they ignored it. Although isolated scores such as Max Steiner's music for Gone With the Wind caught the public fancy, Hollywood's rule-of-baton used-to be that a good score is one the audience does not hear.* Now film scores have become big sellers on the pop market. The change was foreshadowed by The Third Man theme and by Dimitri Tiomkin's High Noon; both...