Why Film Composers Are the New Beethovens

Ask someone to hum a piece of classical music and they’ll probably give you Beethoven’s Fifth, or maybe the Ode to Joy. Fair enough — those melodies have had two centuries to burrow into the collective consciousness.

Now ask them to hum something orchestral that was written in the last fifty years. What do you get?

The Star Wars theme. The Harry Potter theme. Schindler’s List. Inception. Interstellar. The Lord of the Rings.

Every single one of those is a film score. And every single one was written for a full symphony orchestra.

The Great Migration

Something extraordinary happened in the twentieth century that classical music institutions still haven’t fully reckoned with: the best orchestral composers stopped writing for the concert hall and started writing for the screen.

This wasn’t a decline. It was a migration. The talent didn’t disappear — it moved to where the audience was.

John Williams, Hans Zimmer, Ennio Morricone, Howard Shore, Alexandre Desplat — these are not lesser composers working in a lesser medium. They are symphonic composers of the highest order who happen to work in collaboration with visual storytelling. Their music stands on its own. It fills concert halls when performed live. It moves people to tears without a single frame of film attached.

And yet the classical establishment has spent decades treating film music as a guilty pleasure at best and a bastardization at worst.

The Snobbery Tax

There’s a price the classical world has paid for this attitude, and it’s steep.

By dismissing film music as “not serious,” the concert hall effectively ceded the most emotionally powerful orchestral music of our era to movie theaters and streaming platforms. It told audiences that the music they loved most — the music that made them cry, that gave them chills, that they remembered for decades — didn’t count.

And then it wondered why those audiences stopped showing up.

The irony is that the greatest classical composers would have recognized film scoring immediately for what it is: dramatic music written to heighten emotional experience. That’s exactly what opera was. It’s what ballet music was. It’s what Beethoven was doing when he wrote the Eroica — telling a story through sound, creating an emotional journey that an audience could follow without a single word of explanation.

Film composers aren’t betraying the classical tradition. They’re continuing it.

What Concert Music Lost

The divergence between concert music and film music in the twentieth century wasn’t just about venue. It was about values.

Starting in the mid-1900s, serious concert music moved aggressively toward the cerebral — atonality, serialism, aleatoric composition, extended techniques. Much of it was brilliant. Some of it was genuinely revolutionary. But almost all of it prioritized intellectual rigor over emotional accessibility.

The audience for new concert music shrank accordingly. Not because people were too unsophisticated to appreciate it, but because the music had explicitly stopped trying to communicate with them. Accessibility was treated as a weakness. Emotional directness was considered naive.

Film music went the opposite direction. It had to be immediately communicative — there’s no time for program notes when the audience is watching a story unfold in real time. It had to be emotionally precise. It had to make you feel something specific, right now, without explanation.

This isn’t a lesser skill. It’s arguably a harder one.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Consider this: the most-streamed orchestral recordings in the world are almost entirely film scores. The best-selling orchestral albums are film scores. The orchestral performances that sell out arenas — not concert halls, arenas — are film score concerts.

When the London Symphony Orchestra plays the Harry Potter suite to 20,000 people in a stadium, those 20,000 people are having a genuine orchestral experience. They’re hearing a hundred musicians perform a complex, sophisticated piece of music written for the full forces of the modern symphony orchestra. The fact that they first encountered it in a movie theater doesn’t make the experience less real.

If anything, it makes it more real. Because those audience members aren’t there out of obligation or cultural aspiration. They’re there because the music moved them. That’s supposed to be the whole point.

Bridging the Gap

The good news is that the wall between film music and concert music is starting to crack. Major orchestras now regularly program film score concerts, and they consistently sell out. Composers like Jonny Greenwood move fluidly between film scoring and concert commissions. A new generation of listeners who grew up on Zimmer and Williams is discovering that the same instruments and the same emotional language exist in Mahler and Rachmaninoff.

The path forward isn’t about choosing sides. It’s about recognizing that the concert hall and the cinema have always been drawing from the same well — the human capacity to be overwhelmed by organized sound.

The greatest orchestral music of the last fifty years was written for film. The question is whether the concert hall is willing to learn from that, or whether it will keep pretending it didn’t happen.

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Beethoven wrote for the audience in front of him. So did John Williams. The difference isn’t quality. It’s venue.