The Film Music Society

The Film Music Society, Inc. (formerly the Society for the Preservation of Film Music, Inc.) is a non-profit educational organization based in Los Angeles. It was founded in 1983 by film historian-musicologist, William H. Rosar, the year that the American Film Institute commenced its "Decade of Preservation."

Patterned after the National Geographic Society, and the Institute of the American Musical (Miles Kreuger, Founder and President) in Hollywood, The Film Music Society has sought broad public support for a mission of national scope: to preserve for posterity the mostly unpublished materials created in the composition, orchestration, and recording of American motion picture music or film music — Sheet Music (composers' manuscripts, orchestrations, orchestra parts), recordings (disc, tape, soundtracks), and documents (cue sheets, contracts, correspondence).

With the advent of sound films circa 1928 the safekeeping of specially composed film score materials was under the sole purview of the movie studios who owned them and the composers who were employed to write the music. Mostly these materials were stored and continue to be stored in studio music department libraries and in film vaults only accessible to studio personnel. In the heyday of the Hollywood studio system (c. 1920s-1950s), film composers often retained their manuscripts and recordings of their music given to them by the studios as a courtesy. When scoring independent films composers often retained all the score materials themselves, but not the actual music track or soundtrack, which was kept by the production company.

In 1937, producer and film industry visionary David O. Selznick proposed that copies of selected scores should be deposited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, though the plan did not materialize. Ten years later, British musicologist Frederick W. Sternfeld organized the College Committee on Film Music, composed of musicologists, teachers, and librarians, whose goal was to make films, scripts, and copies of film music materials available for study to scholars and students. Some of the material Sternfeld collected for this purpose is preserved in the Rauner Special Collections Library of Dartmouth College and in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University.

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