What Is Cinematic Music? Film Scores to Epic Music

What Is Cinematic Music?

Cinematic music is music written for films, or in the style of film scores, to tell a story and stir emotion. It is usually orchestral and mostly instrumental, often with a choir, big percussion and synthesizers or electronic sound design. It grew from the live music that accompanied silent films and from Hollywood's sound-era scores, and today it is heard in trailers, video games, concerts and streaming playlists.

A film score is original music written for one film, made of pieces called cues that start and stop at set moments to strengthen the drama of each scene. Cinematic music is the wider sound that grew from it. Trailer music, video game scores and the genre fans call "epic music" use the same orchestral, story-driven language without belonging to a single film. For many people, their first or most powerful encounter with orchestral music is through film.

What Does Cinematic Music Sound Like?

The core is a symphony orchestra: strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion, usually with a choir or vocal soloists. Most film scores are orchestral works rooted in Western classical music, but many also draw on jazz, rock, pop, ambient and world music. Since the 1950s a growing number of scores have used electronic sounds, and many written today are a hybrid of orchestral and electronic instruments. Some are made entirely by the composer on computers, synthesizers and samplers.

Three ideas give the music its shape:

• Themes for characters and places. Film scores often give important characters, places and ideas their own melodies, an idea taken from Wagner's leitmotif. John Williams's Star Wars music, with themes for Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, is the best-known example.
• Repeated figures that push the story. An ostinato, a short figure repeated over and over, drives scenes forward. Williams's two-note ostinato for Jaws (1975) has become shorthand for approaching danger.
• Builds to a climax. Trailer and epic pieces often start quietly and grow in a steady crescendo to a huge ending, the way Carl Orff's "O Fortuna" opens with drums and choir and builds to a powerful finish.

There is no fixed tempo. A cue follows the picture, so the click track that musicians hear while recording changes with the meter and tempo of the music, and slow, expressive cues are often played in free time because a steady metronome can make them sound stiff.

Cinematic music is mostly instrumental. When voices appear, they are often choirs singing in Latin, as in "O Fortuna", in other languages or in no language at all. John Williams's "Duel of the Fates" sets an old Welsh poem in Sanskrit, and Lisa Gerrard, the voice of Gladiator (2000), often sings in a language she invented. Some composers reach for unusual sounds when a story calls for them: Ennio Morricone used whistling, cracking whips and electric guitar in his westerns, and Bernard Herrmann scored Psycho (1960) for strings alone, wanting "a black-and-white sound" to match the black-and-white picture.

The Styles of Cinematic Music

Classic Orchestral Film Score

The symphonic Hollywood tradition: a full orchestra, often with choir, and themes for the leading characters. It runs from Max Steiner's King Kong (1933) and Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) to John Williams's Star Wars (1977).

Hybrid Orchestral

The orchestra combined with synthesizers, samples and electronic sound design. Hans Zimmer is its leading name: in the 1980s he and composer Stanley Myers worked on fusing the orchestral sound with electronic instruments, and his scores for Inception, Interstellar and Dune carried the style into the 2010s and 2020s.

Electronic and Synthesizer Scores

Scores built mainly on synthesizers, common in thriller and horror films of the 1970s and 1980s. Brad Fiedel recorded The Terminator (1984) on a Prophet synthesizer, and John Carpenter used synthesizers extensively.

Trailer Music

The music used in film previews. It is often not from the film itself, because a score is usually written after the film is finished, long after the trailers come out. Specialist libraries make it instead, in a sound-design driven, hybrid orchestral style with big choirs, drums and the low, brassy "BRAAAM" hits that became popular in action trailers in the 2010s.

Epic Music

Trailer-style music released for listeners in its own right: orchestral and choral, with modern sounds and song-like structures. It grew out of the trailer libraries of the 2000s, and Two Steps from Hell, founded in Los Angeles in 2006, became its best-known name.

Minimalist and Ambient Cinematic

Quieter scores built from repeated phrases and slowly shifting layers. Philip Glass's music for Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and The Truman Show (1998) and Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight", which opens and closes the film Arrival, are leading examples.

Video Game Scores

Music for games, from the limited sounds of early sound chips to full orchestral scores. Game music can change with the player's actions, and it is now sold on albums and played in concert halls around the world.

A Short History of Cinematic Music

So-called silent films were almost never silent. A pianist, a theatre organist or, in big cities, an orchestra played along, often from catalogues of mood music sorted into dark, sad, suspense, action and chase. The first full scores written for films came in 1908, by Camille Saint-Saëns for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise and Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov for Stenka Razin.

Sound changed everything. In 1927 De Wolfe Music set up the first production music library, and in 1933 Max Steiner's score for King Kong became a landmark in matching music to the action on screen: as the island chief strides closer, each footstep lands on a chord. Steiner used an eighty-piece orchestra and gave the leading characters their own themes. Often called "the father of film music", he went on to score Gone with the Wind (1939) and Casablanca (1942). The Academy began awarding film scores in 1935, and in 1938 Korngold's symphonic score for The Adventures of Robin Hood set the style that action films followed through Hollywood's golden age.

The music soon left the cinema. The first soundtrack album of an orchestral score, Miklós Rózsa's music for Jungle Book, appeared in 1942. In Italy, Ennio Morricone reinvented the western: his score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) is regarded as one of the most influential soundtracks in history, and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) sold as many as 10 million copies.

By the 1970s, grand orchestral scores had fallen out of fashion. Then George Lucas asked John Williams to model Star Wars on the golden-age scores of Steiner and Korngold. Recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra, the 1977 soundtrack won the Oscar, reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and became the best-selling symphonic album of all time. In 2005 the American Film Institute ranked it first among American film scores.

Synthesizers moved in during the same years, from horror and thriller scores to The Terminator. Hans Zimmer took the next step, fusing the orchestra with electronic instruments; he has scored more than 150 films and won Oscars for The Lion King (1994) and Dune (2021). From the late 1990s specialist libraries such as Immediate Music, X-Ray Dog, Audiomachine and Two Steps from Hell began making hybrid orchestral music for trailers, and when fans asked to buy it, they started releasing albums. Two Steps from Hell's first public albums came out in 2010 and 2011, and three of their releases later topped Billboard's Classical Crossover chart.

Games joined the story too. Koichi Sugiyama held the first game music concert in 1987 with music from Dragon Quest, Video Games Live opened at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005 before 11,000 people, and in 2023 the Grammys added a category for video game scores.

Where You Hear Cinematic Music

Cinematic music is a listening genre, not a dance. People hear it first in films and TV, then in trailers and video games, and at big sporting events: John Williams wrote theme music for the 1984 Summer Olympics, and Hans Zimmer's FIFA anthem opened the television coverage of the 2018 World Cup.

It fills concert halls as well. Because film music is the modern orchestral music the public knows best, major orchestras play it in concert, and the London Symphony Orchestra has performed it since 1935. Williams led the Boston Pops from 1980 to 1993, and Howard Shore has toured his Lord of the Rings Symphony since 2004.

More and more, people stream it. A 2020 study for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra reported that 46 percent of young people in the United Kingdom use services such as Spotify and YouTube to listen to orchestral tracks. An analysis of more than 1,200 Spotify work and study playlists found that film soundtracks made up one-fifth of the top 20 songs, because so many scores are mostly instrumental.

Cinematic Music in Spain

Spain has its own stars and its own prize. Spain's film academy has given the Goya Award for Best Original Score since the awards began in 1986, and the record belongs to Alberto Iglesias. Born in San Sebastián in 1955, he made his name with the films of Pedro Almodóvar and Julio Medem, earned four Oscar nominations, for The Constant Gardener, The Kite Runner, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Parallel Mothers, and in February 2025 won his twelfth Goya, for The Room Next Door.

Javier Navarrete, born in Teruel in 1956, was nominated for the Oscar for Pan's Labyrinth (2006), a score built entirely around a lullaby. Roque Baños, from Jumilla, won Goyas in 2008 and 2009 and scored the Hollywood horror film Evil Dead (2013). Madrid-born Lucas Vidal scored Fast & Furious 6 and won two Goyas in 2016. José Nieto has six Goyas and in 2000 became the first composer to receive Spain's National Cinematography Prize, and Fernando Velázquez won the Goya in 2017 for A Monster Calls. Since 2007, Santa Cruz de Tenerife has hosted Fimucité, an international film music festival.

How to Get Into Cinematic Music

Start with the themes everyone knows: Star Wars, Jaws, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Then listen to how the sound changed, from Steiner's King Kong and Herrmann's Psycho to Zimmer's Interstellar and Dune. For the trailer sound, try the epic music albums of Two Steps from Hell; for something calmer, Philip Glass and Max Richter. Film and game music concerts are the best way to hear an orchestra play it live.

At Vectra Sounds, cinematic music is the home of Plus Ultra, an album by Brian Galvan, the creator of Vectra Sounds, made with AI music tools. Its cinematic scores tell the story of Spain, from its downfall and rise to its global empire and its fall. Every track has its own page with a 45-second preview.