This genre describes the style of orchestral compositions generally associated with soundtracks to modern high-budget films, games, and other non-live media. It has its roots in Western Classical Music, particularly late Romanticism, taking inspiration from the dramatism, large orchestra, use of leitmotif, and emotiveness of the genre. There is also a notable influence from Modern Classical, with its common focus on atmosphere and texture over melody.
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This genre describes the style of orchestral compositions generally associated with soundtracks to modern high-budget films, games, and other non-live media. It has its roots in Western Classical Music, particularly late Romanticism, taking inspiration from the dramatism, large orchestra, use of leitmotif, and emotiveness of the genre. There is also a notable influence from Modern Classical, with its common focus on atmosphere and texture over melody. Additionally, non-classical sources such as Traditional Folk Music, Jazz and modern popular music are often incorporated into the orchestral setting, generally to set the location, themes or time period of the accompanying media. The style is played with a large symphonic orchestra, with additional modern and non-Western instruments included if required by the composer. Whilst this form of music is associated strongly with soundtracks, not every example of it is a soundtrack, and not every orchestral soundtrack fits this style.
The development of synchronised sound allowed full symphony orchestras to accompany films, not bound by the size of a cinema. Most films of the period of the 1930s and 1940s were scored with a combination of Easy Listening and operatic romanticism, particularly influenced by Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. Some early examples exist of scores beginning to fuse romantic and modern classical for dramatic effect however, such as Wolfgang Zeller's score to the 1932 horror film Vampyr.
The 1950s was the decade where mainstream soundtracks begun to move away from pure romanticism, into the more modern and eclectic approach described by this grouping. In this period, composers such as Miklós Rózsa begun using musicological research to inform their works to create soundtracks that would fit better with a film's setting. Composers who studied with or were influenced by avant-garde modern classical composers also began to emerge. They used new techniques like atonality, unresolved dissonance and even Serialism in their works, though not to the extent that the soundtrack would be inaccessible to the general public. Particularly influential from this time were Bernard Herrmann's works for filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, including Vertigo and Psycho.
This approach to orchestral music became the standard. For example, Ennio Morricone's soundtrack to Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) fuses melodic symphonic orchestral sections with tense, dissonant modernism and non-classical sources that indicate location such as Mexican Folk Music and Western music, creating the widely known sound of Spaghetti Western. John Williams fused the sweeping late period romanticism of 'Golden Age' Hollywood scores with melodic symphonic bombast, sections of 20th century atonality and dissonant cluster chords. The incorporation of some Electronic elements into the orchestral setting became common as synthesizers and digital technology became more widely accessible, for example Wendy Carlos's soundtrack to TRON. Minimalism was another important later influence on the style, with Hans Zimmer's soundtrack to Inception very clearly showing the incorporation of the genre in its repetitive nature under the Epic Music style. Note, however, that not all modern orchestral soundtracks fit this style, such as the score to The Shining which is more purely derived from avant-garde modern classical, and the score to The Age of Innocence which returns to classical romanticism to fit its setting.
Whilst mostly associated with films, the style can be found in other media. In television, the style is used mostly in cinematic, fictional series, with examples including Star Trek, Game of Thrones and Lost. Video games were initially bound by their technical limitations, though attempts were made to recreate the style in certain adventure games such as I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Later, pre-recorded soundtracks were made possible, which allowed for orchestral soundtracks, with examples of this style being found in games such as Halo 3 and Shadow of the Colossus.
