An argument that the greatest test of a film score is whether it works in silence.

The conventional wisdom about film scores is that the best ones are invisible — you don't notice them, they just enhance what you're watching. I want to complicate this.

The scores that I believe are genuinely great are ones that exist independently of the images and do something specific that cannot be described as enhancement. Morricone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo. John Williams' Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

These scores don't vanish into the films. They're in dialogue with the films. The tension between what you're seeing and what you're hearing is productive — it creates emotional overtones that neither the image nor the music creates alone.

When I listen to the Once Upon a Time in the West score as a stand-alone album, which I do regularly, it calls up the images I associate with it and creates an experience that isn't quite like the film and isn't quite separate from it. The score has become a lens for the film that persists outside the viewing experience.

That's a different and higher achievement than invisibility.