It goes something like this. Around 1911, Europe's music, which was built and grew from the time of the Greeks, had said just about everything that it could.

The only future was to break with the clumsy, overwrought, and by now hopelessly repetitive tonal system and write music in which each of the 12 tones within the octave was of equal value. This would open new vistas of expression for future generations.

New criteria for musical excellence quickly developed within the intellectual community: repetition was bad. Melody was bad, except when used ironically. Tonal harmony was bad -- all because this was the dead language of the ancients. It was not modern. It was simplistic. It was cheap and vulgar. It was not serious. It was popular.

Although the public did not clamor for this new music, select societies in Europe and America played it and many books and articles were written about it. A fringe movement became the darling of an intellectual community that equated newness with goodness. This musical fringe would have remained on the periphery had not World War II devastated the emotional life of Europe, making it seem inappropriate, if not impossible, to write new romances among the unspeakable ruins.

This was not the case in America, whose cities and countrysides were left untouched by the war's physical devastation and whose cultural life had, if anything, been improved by the war. Cut to Hollywood Babylon, entering the ring in the gold satin shorts.

Hollywood, fueled with the talents of European émigrés as well as a young generation of native-born composers, continued to believe in the efficacy of tonal music, seeing infinite possibilities of expansion. They used jazz, ethnic instruments, and even atonal influences within its framework.

By contrast, the brilliant evangelists of atonality took the theory of 12-tone pitch control and expanded it into a veritable cosmology, with an awesome new jargon to describe total organization of pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and timbre. Many became convinced that the expressive performance practices of tonal music were no longer appropriate or in good taste. The battle for the hearts and minds of the musical world ended in a split decision:

Boulez and Stockhausen got the minds and Hollywood won the hearts. Thus, many new classical compositions never found an audience, being relegated to the World Premiere or New Music Festival category. Meanwhile, movie music became a term of derogation for any new tonal music -- whether or not actually written for the cinema.

Anyone who remembers the world premiere of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra knows that movie music was the most lethal term in the critics' arsenal.

What exactly is movie music and what is so bad, or shall we say, threatening, about it?

First of all, movie music is simply music written for the movies. It comes in a variety of styles, shapes, and qualities. Like opera music or ballet music, the greatest scores exist with or without the theater. And, like orchestral tone poems and programmatic symphonies, the greatest movie music survives quite nicely whether or not you know the story. (While we are on the subject, would we enjoy The Rite of Spring as much as if it were called Etude for Orchestra? and conversely, what if Schoenberg's Opus 43b were called The Flaming Fireduck? Just a thought.) Today, few would call Stravinsky's Rite "ballet music" the way one calls Giselle ballet music, but a hundred years ago this phrase was used quite successfully as invective against Tchaikovsky's symphonies.

Most film music is written in small sections, called cues, but in many of the best scores of Steiner, Korngold, Rozsa, and Waxman, the music can continue seamlessly for up to halfan hour, because the composer has thought through his musical logic into larger forms.(Max Steiner's score to Gone With the Wind lasts about three and a half hours, longerthan five Beethoven symphonies played successively.) The style of most filmunderscoring (as opposed to songs) is a continuance of European orchestral music known to all concertgoers. If one thinks of movie music as representing a style of composition, then movie music existed well before movies were invented in the late nineteenth century.

When movies were silent there was always music -- music to cover the sound of the projector, but mostly music to glue the scenes together and expand the visual imagery with sonic ambiguity and magic. Whether music was played on a piano, a theater organ, or by a full symphony orchestra, silent pictures were never silent. The leading European composers of the time wrote for the new medium: Saint-Säens, Mascagni, Prokofiev, to name just three. Richard Strauss had his musical themes categorized according to emotions for use by organists accompanying the silent screen.

When sound was first affixed to the voiceless picture, music disappeared. Only movie musicals contained music. But after the Hollywood studios had fired all but one of their musicians, that one remaining composer, Max Steiner, proposed an experiment. This Steiner, who had been a violin prodigy in Vienna, and grew up in a wealthy family and knew all the world's great musicians as a boy; who knew the German theater tradition of having an orchestra play original music during the performances of straight plays; who studied a bit with Gustav Mahler; whose grandpapa had convinced Johann Strauss to write operettas, and whose father had built Vienna's huge Ferris wheel in the amusement park called the Prater; this was the Steiner who proposed writing music to be played under a dialogue scene in a movie. The producer was skeptical. The audience would be confused: "They'll think there's an orchestra in the next room." But David O. Selznick allowed the experiment, and the rest is history. Seven years later Selznick and Steiner would produce Gone with the Wind, in which the music never stops. When Steiner was given credit for inventing underscoring he said, "Don't be ridiculous. Wagner invented underscoring." He was not kidding.

Movie music works on the premise of assigning thematic material to important dramatic or visual events, and then develops and recapitulates them -- just like Tristan, but also Ein Heldenleben or Mahler's Ninth Symphony or, for that matter, Don Giovanni. It was the musical language of Europe and when the architects of a modern Europe rejected it, it was embraced in America by the incredible new medium for dramatic art, the sound film.

Hollywood's new composers were all child prodigies. They studied and performed in the greatest conservatories of Europe: Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin, Paris. They fled the Holocaust, became American citizens, and composed the music that caressed Elizabeth's Taylor's cheek, energized Charlton Heston's anguish, escorted Bette Davis down the grand staircase, made an even better swordsman out of Erroll Flynn, and scared the popcorn out of us when we saw Boris Karloff in a rubber mask. They gave a voice to the world's dreams and they are the composers of what the world thinks of as American music.

Of course, it is American music. Or is it? After all, was Aaron Copland more American, growing up in Brooklyn with parents who were Polish and Lithuanian immigrants? And what about John Philip Sousa, whose parents were Portuguese and Bavarian? Victor Herbert was born in Dublin. And so maybe it is also Europe's music -- this music which Europe's elder statesmen still reject, and is only now being played by its orchestras.

In America, the dichotomy between popular and serious is marginally greater than in Europe. It has been difficult for writers to categorize tonal orchestral music written in this style. It has no name, no category, no country -- and yet it is the most-heard orchestral music in history. Perhaps it has by now become, quite simply, the world's music. If so, it is because of the cinema, the world's art form.

Those European-born composers who came to America endured another dismissal: being ignored or ridiculed was Europe's punishment for those who left, even though they would have perished had they stayed. To this day, one reads that Kurt Weill "sold out" to Broadway. The American works of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Hindemith are looked down upon in Europe. Good Schoenberg is the Vienna Schoenberg, and bad Schoenberg is all that stuff written in Hollywood. Yes, somehow the curse of the Hollywood film industry fell on those who simply lived in Southern California and never even wrote for pictures!

Part of the denigration of film music has to do with the impression of giving up one's artistic standards in order to make pots of money. For the record, Johann Sebastian Bach was paid for every cantata he composed, and he complained incessantly about money. Haydn and Wagner practically moved in with their local princes and did what His Majesty asked for in return for an orchestra, scenery, and supper. Verdi and Wagner rewrote their operas so that they would be produced in Paris. We are not talking about unknown juvenilia here. We are talking Otello and Tannhäuser. And they did rewrite in order to get performed and get paid. Was that compromise? Is that any different from Rozsa rewriting a waltz for Billy Wilder or Korngold composing music to a pre-existing image of a sword fight? Richard Strauss was a millionaire, but Erich Wolfgang Korngold was not. He was paid a salary by Warner Brothers. In return, he supported many families who had fled the Nazis and lived to see his fame in Europe as a serious composer turned into dust with a savagery that is breathtaking to recall. It literally killed him in 1957. Today, the young musicians of German orchestras have never heard of Korngold. He had astonished all Europe with his orchestral scores written before he was a teenager, and his first four operas were produced at the Vienna State Opera; he was lucky enough to be in Los Angeles when Hitler marched on Vienna in 1938. Today, the Vienna Philharmonic is still deciding if Korngold wrote real music. One is reminded of Vienna's attitude toward Mahler before Leonard Bernstein taught them to play and love their own musical heritage.

This fantasy of the Faustian deal -- Hollywood money in return for musical scruples -- was exacerbated by the presence of two eminent but angry composers who also lived in Southern California: Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. Both attempted to make deals with Hollywood and failed -- though to this day the Stravinsky estate is trying to get more money from Disney for Fantasia. The serious American press and the Europeans, especially the Germans and the English, were always happy to print the latest verbal attacks from Stravinsky and his assistant Robert Craft about the idiocies of Hollywood -- where they had decided to live.

Miklos Rozsa's reputation in the East Coast press was characterized in a brief obituary in The New York Times of July 28, 1995, which referred to his "classically tinged film scores." Is it an accident that Leonard Bernstein's sensational 1943 debut with the New York Philharmonic contained Rozsa's colorful and dramatic Theme, Variations and Finale which had been chosen and rehearsed by no less than Bruno Walter?

What happened to Rozsa after 1943? Well, for one thing, he won an Academy Award for Spellbound, and with each success as a film composer (he wrote over one hundred film scores) the world of serious music that had formerly embraced him fell away. In spite of this, he continued his "classical" output, including a violin concerto, cello concerto, viola concerto, and numerous other orchestral works. And who won this battle? The people?

The public which now applauds Mahler's emotionalism and overt romanticism in the concert hall is the same public which wept at Rozsa's Miracle and Finale to Ben-Hur and cheered at the finale of Korngold's Robin Hood in the movie theater. Perhaps it is time to revise our history of the twentieth century in order to explain the sudden ascendancy of Mahler's music in the 1960s, when the only serious new music was aggressively non-tonal. Surely it is no accident that the same generation that accepted Mahler in the concert hall was the same generation that had grown up with Steiner, Korngold, Waxman, and Rozsa in the cinema. ("Why do you think I conduct it?" Bernstein once said to me of his love for Mahler.)

It is time to embrace what we all secretly know to be true: that the great century of romantic excess is ours. We walked on the moon. We tried to kill each other. We sang more love songs than in any other millennium. And yes, we wrote very beautiful music.

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