Throughout the eras, since the beginning of motion pictures, filmmakers have, for the most part, have always used some aspect of music to aid the story. While some filmmakers are not able to take advantage of this, there are some that absolutely excel in this field: Alfred Hitchcock, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese. These three filmmakers collaborated brilliantly with their Music Department heads to help the audience get a deeper, more emotional link with the characters and give us insight into characters.

In the case of Hitchcock, this can truly be appreciated in the famous shower scene of the movie Psycho. Here, he not only uses it effectively to capture the intensity and horror of the situation, he successfully connects the audience to the actor. The audience experiences the same fear that the actor is experiencing as soon as we see the shadow. I am sure this scene caused many people to check twice before entering the shower.

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I was intrigued today by the question proposed: "Can purely instrumental music tell a story [in regards to film] all by itself?"

There's no doubt that the musical score of a film conveys meaning in one form or another. Titanic wouldn't have been half as good without James Horner's musical genius, in my opinion. So in a sense, a score can achieve what actors, scenes, and even glorious cinematography can't: a tantalizing emotional context through which the scenes and actors may be evaluated. All the buck naked Roses and floating doors in the world would have been left adrift without that ethereal, heartbreaking music.

However, can a score alone tell a story? I don't think so. They can invoke emotional responses, even images in your mind, you may even picture a couple running towards each other in slo-mo through a field of flowers, but without some form of comparison or music saying "This is what the mood is", it's sort of like being on the edge of your seat.

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