'Breve Encounters' By combining the best of classical music with a powerful mode of entertainment, film can be a stimulating tool in the school music room. Robert Legg sets the scene In a darkened room, 60 eyes stare awestruck at the flickering black-and-white image of a 1940s drawing room. My Year Eights are meeting the absent but troubled gaze of a smartly dressed Celia Johnson who, sitting bolt upright in a floral armchair, is reliving Trevor Howard's departure from the Milford Junction refreshment room. We are watching the end of Brief Encounter. It must be my 20th time but as usual I'm gripped as the crashing chords of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto sweep into the final, telling exchange:

‘Laura,' calls the husband. ‘Yes, dear,' she replies, terrifyingly clipped.
‘Whatever your dream was, it wasn't a very happy one, was it?'
After a moment: ‘No.'
‘You've been a long way away,' he suggests.
Almost inaudibly, after another pause, she replies, ‘Yes.'

The tension is palpable and for a moment David Lean has us in the palm of his hand.
Given the apparent incompatibility between the subject matter and its present audience, this is perhaps surprising: as far as I'm aware, suppressed love amongst the middle classes isn't the hottest topic of conversation at the school disco. But this is, after all, film: a language of signs and symbols understood fluently by these media-savvy 12-year-olds.

‘Why the Rachmaninov?' I ask, expecting to have to tease out the answer. ‘That's obvious,' comes back a confident reply. ‘It's showing you the passion that they're too stuck up to talk about.' I blink, painfully aware that, in a nutshell, she has delivered my lesson plan for me. This is the beauty of studying film scores. By combining the best of classical music with an immensely powerful and popular mode of mass entertainment, it allows young people to access something challenging and complex through a medium they find comfortable and unthreatening. The angelic Julie Andrews had it right: ‘Just a spoonful of sugar…'

But this isn't just about finding sugary ways of swallowing the bitter ‘medicine' of classical music. As my pupil was quick to point out, film music is more than just pretty tunes accompanying all-important action: it's all about adding information. A sun-kissed Floridian beach scene, for example, is all very friendly until, in the basement of the bass section, that sickening minor second begins to oscillate. Then you know it's time to get out of the water. Without the score, the audience is as unprepared as the shark's next victim.

With pupils fluent in the language and practice of film analysis, composing original music for film is but a small step away. Providing extra-musical stimulus is pretty vital here: scripts, synopses and storyboards can all work well. In my experience, the best stimulus is a short section of dramatic film that can be closely studied with the sound turned off. Drawing pupils' attention to the dramatic and emotional content of the piece inspires them to conceive and create appropriate accompanying musical ideas.
Developed over a couple of lessons, these musical vignettes can be performed live alongside the film excerpt or, technology permitting, can be recorded, mixed and mastered into a professional finished product. ‘It's great,' observes a 12-year-old pupil, ‘because you get to make your very own film scene.'

For the most able, the temptation to subvert the surface meaning of the film is often too great to resist: tragic moments become slapstick or, in the manner of a melodrama, the everyday is imbued with high passion. For the less able, the constraints of the excerpt provide much-needed compositional structure and invite the harmonic, melodic and motivic development that is so often lacking in such pupils' work.For all pupils, the necessity for precise temporal organisation is rewarding: a chilling ‘Hitchcock' chord (C-E-G#-B, for example) timed to coincide with an arch look or a moment's pause adds a wonderfully satisfying Bette Davis feel to any performance.

Like most interdisciplinary work, studying film is becoming increasingly popular. The exam board Edexcel has furthered this trend by including sections of several important films in its current New Anthology of Music for A-Level. Extracts from Georges Auric's Passport to Pimlico and Jerry Goldsmith's Planet of the Apes (1970) feature alongside James Horner's score to Titanic and John Williams' celebrated ET. Although at Key Stages 4 and 5 the analysis probes deeper and compositions are more complex, the principles remain the same. A-Level students, in particular, connect with film in a way that is often alarmingly sophisticated. ‘Talking about film music is easier,' a sixth-former told me. ‘It's more relevant to my interests. I feel like I know what I'm talking about.'

Ridley Scott's epic Gladiator, richly scored by Hans Zimmer, is a popular case study amongst sixth-formers. The music is as opulent and monumental as the film's imagery. Moreover, the composer's ability, in his own words, to ‘take a humble theme and turn it into a thousand emotions' is especially useful for introducing the concepts of leitmotif and idée fixe: ideas that Zimmer uses to dramatic effect throughout the 150-minute marathon.
And for the keenest pupils, the score has rich analytical pickings. Best of all are the battle scenes; Zimmer chooses triple metres – reminiscent of Viennese waltzes – to add an air of Roman civilisation and sophistication to the brutally orchestrated image of the bloodiest kind of hand-to-hand warfare.