LibGuides: Music: Film Music

Film Music

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Film Music Collections

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature
A comprehensive guide to publications on traditional, popular, and classical music from all over the world. Publications are in multiple languages and cover from 1967 to the present.
International Inventory of Musical Sources (RISM)
Music manuscripts are listed in the online database of the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales. Currently, this data gets enriched, edited, and updated regularly
Academy Film Archive
The Academy Film Archive is home to one of the most extensive and diverse motion pictures collections in the world. The hundreds of collections housed at the Archive include Academy Award® nominated films, the annual Oscar® telecasts, documentaries, silent movies, experimental films, film industry-related interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, home movies, and a wide range of international cinema.
Naxos : Music in Movies
Although many feature films have music scores tailor-made for them by distinguished composers in the medium, many blockbusters have also called on pieces from the classical repertoire to provide the supporting ambience.
IMDb
IMDb is an online database of information related to films, television series, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, plot summaries, trivia, ratings, and fan and critical reviews.
Alexander Street : Film Music
Today, Alexander Street publishes more than 80 collections totalling many millions of pages, audio tracks, videos, images, and playlists. They are concentrating on building the best collections they can.
The Film Music Institute
The Film Music Institute, one of the industry’s most established and long-running professional education providers for the film and television music industry, was founded in 1996 and enjoys a long history of providing powerful, usable courses designed to deliver the highest quality professional education for film/television/game composers, songwriters, lyricists, orchestrators and arrangers.
Film Score Monthly
The record label Film Score Monthly was founded in 1998 and has released over 200 CDs of historically important original soundtracks from the 1940s through the 1980s. These film scores—typically unavailable anywhere else—are licensed from the Hollywood studios and lovingly preserved and restored for commercial presentation.
FSM (Film Score Monthly) Online
Well, for those who have been subscribers to the print version of Film Score Monthly, it's important that you know that FSM Online is the same Film Score Monthly you know and love, only better! And to those new subscribers, welcome to the industry's premiere film music resource.
FilmSound.org
Many users of FilmSound.org share with me a common goal which is the love for film sound in all it's forms. The works displayed here are representations of what all of us - practitioners of sound design, students, academics, as well as film sound buffs - love and enjoy.
Film Score Rundowns
A collection of written film music analysis. The contents of this website are ©Bill Wrobel
You are welcome to copy, archive, or quote these analyses for non-profit purposes, but please retain the source and copyright. http://www.filmscorerundowns.net/
Filmtracks : Modern Soundtrack Review
Officially launched in October 1996, serving the movie soundtrack industry with its first library of original online reviews. Almost two decades and hundreds of millions of page views later, Filmtracks remains the most visible elder statesman of the soundtrack genre on the web.
Soundtrack
Soundtrack.Net is the authoritative source for news and information about composers, movies and television soundtracks, albums, original scores, and songs in movies.
Film Music Society
The FMS promotes the preservation of film and television music in all of its manifestations, including published and unpublished scores, orchestrations, recordings and all related materials. It is the leading organization for film and television music preservation in the world, with members in eighteen countries.
American Music Preservation
The longest-running awards for film music recordings. List of Awards (1988-2018). The Sammy Film Music Awards (SFMA) are named in honor of songwriter, Sammy Cahn (1913-1993).
Alexander Street : Filmmakers Library online
The titles in theFilmakers Library Online: Second Edition collection cross nearly all academic disciplines and educate students and researchers on critical and thought-provoking issues, figures, and cultures.
Roger Ebert.com
Welcome to the newly refreshed RogerEbert.com, the world’s preeminent destination for movie criticism, commentary and community. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
Guide to Film Scoring (Book)
This book is for anyone interested in film scoring for movies or television. It takes the reader through the art of film scoring, the history of the field and writing the musical score.

Journals

Film & Music Journals

Journal of Film Music
The Journal of Film Music is a forum for the musicological study of film from the standpoint of dramatic musical art. The analytical tools and methodologies of historical, systematic, cognitive, and ethnomusicology all are relevant and essential to this study, which seeks to both document and illuminate film practice through source studies, analysis, theory, and criticism.
Music and the Moving Image
Provides information on the relationship between music and moving images, including film, television, music videos, computer games, performance art, and web-based media.
Journal of Film and Video
The Journal of Film and Video, an internationally respected forum, focuses on scholarship in the fields of film and video production, history, theory, criticism, and aesthetics.
The Soundtrack (Journal)
The Soundtrack is a multi-disciplinary, double-blind peer-reviewed journal that brings together research in the area of music and sound in relation to film and other moving image media, including television, games and installations.
CinemaScore (Journal)
CinemaScore® is the industry leader in measuring movie appeal among theatre audiences. Since 1978, CinemaScore has been polling moviegoers at major movie releases on opening night to collect demographic information and calculate a distinctive CinemaScore grade.
Current musicology
Current Musicology is a leading journal for scholarly research on music. We publish articles and book reviews in the fields of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, and philosophy of music.
The Music Quarterly
The journal focuses on the merging areas in scholarship where much of the challenging new work in the study of music is being produced.
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television is an international and interdisciplinary journal concerned with the history of the audio-visual mass media from c.1900 to the present.
Studies in Australasian Cinema
Studies in Australasian Cinema is a scholarly journal devoted to the screen cultures of, and film scholarship from, the Australian, New Zealand, and Pacific regions.
Senses of Cinema
Senses of Cinema is an online journal devoted to the serious and eclectic discussion of cinema. We believe cinema is an art that can take many forms, from the industrially-produced blockbuster to the hand-crafted experimental work; we also aim to encourage awareness of the histories of such diverse forms.

Social Media

Accounts

Facebook Instagram Blogs

FilmScore Monthly @scoremovie The Soundtrack Archives

Film Music Society o nlygoodsoundtracks Musique Fantastique

Youtube Twitter

Best Movie Soundtracks - Part 1 Film Music Reporter

FilmScoreRundowns S enses of Cinema

Spotify Podcasts

Best Movie Soundtracks Film Score Podcasts

T he Complete Movie Soundtrack Collection The Movie Score Podcast

Creative Commons

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Related Subject Guides

Other Sources:

M FCO - Film & Media

Film Music Search Terms

To Sir with Love

Audio Visual

Audio Visual

Digital Theatre Plus
Provides access to high quality films of leading British theatre productions as well as behind-the-scenes documentaries and interviews.
eTV
Provides real-time resources through recorded TV programmes, live streams and on demand videos. First-time users must register.
Kanopy
A streaming service that provides access to video content sourced from leading suppliers.
Alexander Street
Alexander Street are curated, primary-source collections, websites, and streaming media for learning and research.

Music Scores

Image by Marco Massimo from Pixabay

Online Scores

Digital Score & Libretti
Loeb Music Library's digital collection of scores and libretti, selected for their rare or unique natures and their popularity as objects of research and teaching.
Boosey & Hawkes
Welcome to Boosey & Hawkes Online Scores where you can view works from the B&H catalogue in digital format.
Sikorski
The Sikorski Music Publishing Group reveals the rare attribute of being equally committed to works from the entertainment-music branch and to those from the serious music sector as well.
MUSOPEN
This page hosts our collection of over 100,000 classical sheet music pdf files, all for free and in the public domain. Browse sheet music by composer, instrument, form, or time period.
eScholarship : (UCLA) Music Scores
The Contemporary Music Score Collection is published by the UCLA Music Library. The collection includes the digital, open-access scores from the library.
SoundWorks Collection
The SoundWorks Collection is an online destination that takes you behind the scenes and straight to the dub stage for a look into audio post-production for feature films, video game sound design, and original soundtrack composition.

Complete Guide To Film Scoring
The Art and Business of Writing Music for Movies & TV. Richard Davies

Sound Collections

Sound

National Juke Box (Library of Congress)
The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center and other contributing libraries and archives.
The Great 78 Project
The Great 78 Project is a community project for the preservation, research and discovery of 78rpm records. From about 1898 to the 1950s.
British Library Sounds
Listen to a selection from the British Library’s extensive collections of unique sound recordings, which come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound: music, drama and literature.

Music Sources at the Hocken
The Hocken archives include musical recordings in various formats and related documents. From the records of musical groups to the musical output of local (and locally-based) composers.