1) The three basic original scores during the silent film era were, “adaptation of works from the classical repertoire”, “arrangements of well known patriotic, religious, popular tunes’, and “newly composed material”. The ‘Adaptive’ score was borrowed existing music, normally classical music, which was placed in a film. It was recognized during the 1930s. It was made up of many features such as “extensive use of music, exploitation of the full range of orchestral colors, and musical support of dramatic moods, setting, characters, and action, and etc” (pg.126). ‘Arrangement’, worked almost like ‘Adaptive’ but could only borrow melodies. The last original score during this era was “newly composed material, which basically implies that music was made specifically for the film. The film ‘The Birth of a Nation’ is a film that obtained all three original scores. An example of “adaptive” could be seen in ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ by Richard Wagner, which was used to represent some Ku Klux Klan scenes. ‘Arrangement’ could be seen when the movie took the melody of the popular Christmas song “O Christmas tree” and made it into “Maryland, My Maryland”. The “perfect song” was written by Carl Breil and made specifically to symbolize the innocence and playfulness of the character in the film ‘Elsie’.
2) The role of music in ‘Casablanca’, is huge, because it is used to describe the setting, for example the tunes ‘Marseillaise” and “Die Wacht am Rhein” were used to explain the conflict between Germany and France. Source music, predominantly popular American music was huge in this film and was used to describe ‘Ricks Café’ in America ,whilst Arabian music was used to set the mood for the change of setting in the ‘Blue Parrot Café’ which was in the Middle East. The most notable tune in this film is “As Time Goes By was not composed by Steiner.