[Nick Zwar]

Film music has been an important part of the music that interests me for as long as I can think back, though I only started to seek out film music on album in my early teens. Not sure my “origin” story is particularly interesting… since I’ve always noticed the music, even in the TV shows when I was a kid. I remember actively starting to tape music of the TV as early as elementary school, and, well, yes, that was the only way to get that kind of music. I didn’t even know one could actually get film music on albums until I was in my early teens.

There was always music in our household, though my parents weren’t actual musicians. But we had a piano at home, and I heard a lot of classical music as a kid just naturally growing up. I also fondly remember an excellent music teacher I had when I was in second grade, who taught us well how and what to listen for in music, and inspired us elementary school kids to check out Bartók! How cool was that in retrospect.

As I said, I always notice music when it is playing. Even when I watch a movie, and there is dialog, sound, and music, my ears’ attention tends to focus on the music. It did that even before I started to listen to film music on its own. So there were movies (and TV shows) I had audio taped off the TV set (fortunately, I could connect my radio tape recorder with the TV with a cable, not via mic, so that I could get the TV sound without any “room noise”), stuff like HIGH NOON, THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY, WAR OF THE WORLDS, THE BIG COUNTRY, LAWMAN… I played those audio tapes and was fascinated by the music of these movies. I thought it would be great to really get this music apart form the dialog and sound effects…

First thing I told my dad when I had seen STAR WARS for the first time and he picked us up at the theater, asking how it was: “Wow, you’d have loved the music! The music was great!”. So I was a kid who just saw STAR WARS for the first time, and the first thing I could think about when I came out of the theater weren’t the special effects, the light-sabers, the story, but the music. (My father was a movie and (classical) music buff himself (his favorite film composer was Dimitri Tiomkin).)
When I see a movie, I often tend to follow the music more than the images or the dialogue. Sound trumps image for me.

One day, a friend lend me two soundtrack albums: John Williams STAR WARS and Jerry Goldsmith STAR TREK – THE MOTION PICTURE; I audio taped them and must have listened to them up and down. That was a pivotal time, no question, because from then on, I was hooked, and soon, I had some Williams, Goldsmith, Barry, and Morricone albums of my own. Never stopped to this day. In school, I had lots of friend with various interests in music, and we learned from each other. No one (in my friend circle) thought interest in film music, in classical music, in jazz, in rock/pop/prog-rock, etc. was “odd”, we really liked to exchange “our special interest music” with others.

I have always been a more “composer” oriented listener though, so once I am interested in a particular composer, I seek out more of his (or of course her) work. (Instead of buying film music based on movie or movie genre…)
That’s why in my CD shelf, film scores are grouped by composer, not by film title.

One side note of interest: looking back, I remember the first “John Williams” music I really loved was not STAR WARS, or SUPERMAN, it was much earlier, it was his theme for the movie THE COWBOYS, which I knew from an old short lived TV series (based on the movie) I watched when I was still in elementary school. Of course, back then I didn’t know or remember the name “John Williams”. Many years later, when Varèse Sarabande released John Williams’ music for the movie THE COWBOYS, it put a smile on my face to finally hear that great old “cowboy theme” again, because I have never seen any snippet from the TV show again… it’s pretty much forgotten.