Screen Time

Rock songs and movies have been tightly connected since Blackboard Jungle (1955) made Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" a hit and, by general consensus, marked the dawning of the rock 'n' roll era - but instrumental scores are a different beast entirely. It's not every pop musician who can make the transition to writing film scores; even so, many have.

Intentionally or unintentionally, early video game composers mirrored some of the composition practices of Baroque-era composers, for many of the same reasons.

Top composers in the 1940's flocked to Hollywood to write for movies, including Igor Stravinsky. He was approached about a film depicting a Norwegian uprising against Nazi occupation. Stravinsky agreed to compose but demanded that his music wouldn't be altered. He didn't get his way, and the movie went ahead without him. On Monday's Performance Today, we'll hear Stravinsky's rejected movie score, "Four Norwegian Moods", performed by the US Marine Band.

Every weekday morning at 10 a.m., the hosts at Classical MPR play a standout work based on the theme for the week. We call these works Morning Glories. This week, we're presenting five outstanding film scores in celebration of Classical MPR's Movie Month!

For hundreds of years, composers have written music for the stage. For about the last 80 years, great composers have written soundtracks for films. Now, there's yet another medium for composers. Video game music. Emily Reese joins us to show the connections between video game music and classical music, on Friday's Performance Today.

Popularity of Top Score inspires Classical MPR's on-air playlist this week.

Here are my picks for the best video game soundtracks of 2011.

Barbara Mraz joins Alison Young this week. She is a deacon at St. John the Evangelist in Saint Paul and a life-long movie fan. She brings faith, theology and movies together in a course she has created, so her playlist is filled with some of the best movie scores ever written.

Maybe all he really wanted to do was direct, like the old Hollywood joke goes. But the fact is that Josef Stalin, murderous Russian despot, did get involved in the movie biz. In today's show, the story of Alexander Nevsky, a 1938 propaganda film ordered up by Stalin, and a concert performance of the film score, written by Sergei Prokofiev.

In this week’s edition of Roll Credits, Lynne Warfel and Bill Morelock explore movie themes from romances of these years, and some more recent, too. Try your hand at a bit of trivia to see what you know, and failing all else, cue up the archived audio from this week’s show and bask in the […]