As far as I can remember I have always loved music in the movies. How it can suddenly suggest a context, a feeling or emotion has always been fascinating to me. That’s why I love scoring movies, it’s always a new story and a new challenge to get together with a director vision and find what’s right for it, regardless to any technical or aesthetic matter... “Emotions in cinema” by Bernard Herrmann « Cinema — and certainly the development of cinema — is without question the most important artistic development of the 20th century. And the fact that many people in the arts refused to welcome it during its infancy, just as they did with the phonograph, is striking. Today, a composer who writes for film reaches a global audience, and cinema is the only art form that uses music as an integral part of its artistic expression — I don’t think theatre uses it nearly as much. One could almost say that no film comes into existence without some kind of musical presence.  Film music must express what the actors cannot say — it must communicate and share their emotions.
This is especially true when a film is centered on the characters’ inner feelings. For another kind of film, such as a Hitchcock thriller, the approach is different: the film can be seen as a sequence of segments whose separation is created artificially through editing, ellipses, and various cinematic techniques. In this case, the music’s role is to bind these segments together into a unified whole, so that the spectator feels the progression from one moment to the next as something inevitable. One of the paradoxes of film music is that both good and bad music can, in their own way, work in a scene. This is why one of the most astonishing things about music for cinema or television is that no one truly knows why it is indispensable. After an entire lifetime, I still cannot explain why — only that a film never feels complete without it. Try watching a full movie without music, and you will find it unbearable…!! »