If you watched all of the Academy Awards Sunday night, you might know that composer John Corigliano's score for "The Red Violin" won the Oscar for Best Original Score. Corigliano was one of several composers mentioned in a discussion about composers who cross over the line between writing music for film and concert composing.

Dr. Michael Schelle, a professor at Butler University, gave a lecture entitled, "The Gold Chain around the Hairy Chest of Hollywood," on Monday in the Little Theatre at Saint Mary's College.

One may wonder why anyone would attend a lecture with that title, or why, for that matter, anyone would use that as a title.

Schelle said, "Many directors feel that the musical score of the film is the gold chain around an otherwise hairy operation." He found the metaphor while researching his recent book "The Score."

Music in Hollywood films has changed a lot since the advent of sound in pictures. Early in the 1930s, Hollywood composers worked with existing compositions and fitted them for the films they were working on. The original "Dracula," starring Bela Lugosi, has a score that would sound very familiar to anyone who is part of the ballet world. "Dracula" and the ballet "Swan Lake" claim the same score.

In the middle years of Hollywood, the 1940s and 1950s, many composers kept one foot in the concert composition business while keeping the other foot in film composing.

Today, however, there is very little cross over remaining. Most composers focus either on film or concert music and only dabble in the other field occasionally. For example, Corigliano is a concert composer who has only written scores for three movies.

On the other side of composing, Thomas Newman, who has written the scores for "American Beauty," "The Green Mile" and "The Shawshank Redemption," recently wrote a piece for the world famous Cleveland Orchestra.

Schelle attributes the greater isolation partly to differences in the two versions of the industry: "Hollywood composers are used to having the best players and recording until they get the best sound. They're not used to a whole union orchestra who has complaints. But a concert composer would be floored by Hollywood musicians not complaining."

Following his brief introduction to music in the film industry, Schelle showed the audience just what he was talking about with several film clips that demonstrated the variety of uses and types of music that composers have used throughout the history of Hollywood film making.

The first film clip from "The Spiral Staircase" featured music by Roy Webb, a film composer who composed during the 1940s. Webb made use of a classical Chopin piece during the opening credits of the movie that dissolved into his original score, showing the transition from already existing music to new composition.

Bernard Herman was next in the line-up. Herman's name may be familiar from the credits of one of the many Alfred Hitchcock movies for which he composed scores. This particular movie for which Herman composed, "Hangover Square," was a lesser known piece about a mad composer. This piece shows dramatically the crossover between film and concert composition. Along with an original score to underwrite the action, Herman also had to compose a 12-minute piano concerto for the mad composer to play in the final minutes of the film. In this case, Herman's music "underscored the action and was the action," Schelle said.

The next film clip Schelle showed would have looked very familiar to any four year old if only the director had added a dancing candelabra. An original version of "Beauty and the Beast," with a score written by George Aurich, showed a European movie that made use of music. Europeans today are more likely to be composing both for the concert hall and for films.

Movie music experienced a new phenomenon that came directly from Japan. The score from the movie "Ran," a violent Japanese film about samurai, began a new trend called composing against the action. Film composers today still make frequent use of this style, when sound effects of a very violent or disturbing scene fade away and are replaced by a floating melody.

"Our emotional reaction to what is going on is really captured in the score," Schelle said. He showed "Revolution," a film that appeared onscreen in the 1980s, as an example of this kind of music.

Schelle then showed a clip of a film that had a score composed by Aaron Copeland. Copeland, who died recently, is still hailed as the Dean of American Music. His concert compositions are played by orchestras world wide. He also crossed over the line and explored the world of movie music.

In addition to famous movies, such as "Of Mice and Men," Copeland composed the score for a film called "Something Wild." In this film, the film watcher hears a side of Copeland's music that Americans seldom recognize.

"As [the main character] falls into her dream," Schelle said, "We get the dark side of Copeland that we don't know so much about in this country."

As a finale for his lecture, Schelle showed a piece of film that had a score composed by one of the premier concert composers in Japan, Akira Ifukube. Ifukube, whose compositions are known world wide, composed the score for the original "Godzilla." Schelle added an interesting piece of film trivia: Godzilla's growl was created by playing descending notes on the E chord of a double bass backwards.

So, "The Gold Chain around the Hairy Chest of Hollywood" proved to be a wonderful exploration into the world of movie music.

• Out of the garbage and into the history books
  
• Renowned composer gives lecture at SMC