[Nicolai P. Zwar]

Musicians just continued doing for film what they had done for the theatre.

That’s really it… Musicians just kept doing for film what they had already been doing anyway (not just for theatre). And yep, that’s basically it, that’s the story.

The identity of film music comes from its function, not from its style of form, which can be any musical style. Which is why there is not “one prototype” of film music.

There is music, and there is, let’s say, the “the toolbox of musical techniques”. This toolbox has been developed and used and re-used and advanced and expanded for as long as there is music, particular Western (classical) music. And “underscoring” (figuratively), characterization, atmosphere, drama… composers had been doing that long before cameras existed. Vivaldi “scoring” dogs in The Four Seasons is one example I already mentioned. Take Beethoven’s Egmont or Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The latter functions basically like a modern film score.

None of this was really “proto‑film music” in the sense that it was just waiting for film to be invented… But it was simply music doing what music had always done. Film inherited those techniques wholesale. And of course, it especially used and used and (perhaps) overused some of these techniques. It didn’t need to invent them; it just applied them to a new medium.

That’s why I said there is not any one particular musical technique or characteristic that is in any way unique to film music per se, not one (just like there is not any one particular musical technique or characteristic that is unique to any other type of music), but there are techniques that film music particularly prominently and predominantly applies.