21 Mar The French Orchestral Cinematic Sound of the Thirties
The French cinema of the 1930s and 1940s is mostly accompanied by orchestral music mainly composed by neoclassical composers such as Jacques Ibert, Maurice Jaubert, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric or Roland-Manuel. Through their scores and their theoretical writings on the subject, we will try to define their conception of film orchestra sound in order to identify the distinctive features of a neo-classical symphonic writing for cinema recording. We will study the number of musicians and the orchestral parts, the diversity of orchestral devices, the recurrent instruments, orchestral doubling and the use of new instruments… This paper will allow us to distinguish “French film music” from the Hollywood orchestral sound of the same period (Steiner, Waxman, Korngold).