A picture paints a thousand words, as the saying goes. Music, however, provides the subtle shading and detail which gives depth to the picture.
When movies were silent, musicians provided music which helped convey the mood and enhance the action on-screen. Problem was, dialogue was flashed on the screen, which pulled your eyes from the action. When talkies began to show up, that became unnecessary, but directors still used music to help set the mood of the scene. To show the importance of sound, a number of actors lost their jobs when people heard their actual voices.
Jump to the 1930's. Though films had featured sound and dialogue for years, the technology was still in it's infancy, particularly when it came to recording on location. A series of four documentary films, Redes, The Plow that Broke the Plains, The River, and The City, were released that decade. Each was designed to address a specific subject, most famously, The Plow that Broke the Plains, which addressed uncontrolled agriculture and it's contribution to the Dust Bowl-and introduced Americans to The New Deal. Producers hired Virgil Thomson to compose the music, which now stands alone as a concert piece. Much of the footage was shot on location, which made audio recording nearly impossible with the technology of the day. The film was, instead, narrated by American actor and baritone Thomas Hardie Chalmers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQCwhjWNcH8
Virgil Thomson also wrote the soundtrack to The River, (addressing the importance of the Mississippi River), while Aaron Copland scored The City, which looked at the current state of urban living and touted the benefits of planned communities. It was produced in conjunction with the 1939 New York World's Fair and narrated by another American actor Morris Carnovsky. Some say it is one of Copland's finest compositions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nuvcpnysjU
The fourth film, Redes, was a "documentary-like dramatization of the daily grind of men struggling to make a living by fishing on the Gulf of Mexico (mostly played by real- life fishermen)," according to The Criterion Collection, which is a repository for both classic and contemporary film. That soundtrack came from Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas.
http://postclassical.com/redes/
All four have excellent soundtracks, but the recordings were made quite long ago.
Enter Naxos Records, which has just released Redes, the last of the four soundtracks, recorded by PostClassical Ensemble. Joe Horovitz looks at the series in his blog Unanswered Question.
I think you'll find the music intriguing and the film footage a glimpse into an America which once was - and some of the incredible effort it took to build this country. I only wish I could have had a conversation with some of those shown in these documentaries.