NFB Music: The Soundtracks of the National Film Board

Chapter one: the McLaren era (1939–1960s)

The NFB's musical identity begins with its founding generation — and above all with Norman McLaren, the Scottish-born animator whose direct-on-film technique (scratching and painting sound directly onto the film strip — Synchromy? — keep it light: whose hand-drawn sound experiments treated the soundtrack itself as an instrument) made the NFB a global laboratory of sound-image synthesis. McLaren's Neighbours (1952, with its pixilation and sound design) and the NFB's wartime and postwar catalog established the institution's premise: film music could be experimental, commissioned at public expense for artistic ends. The composers who passed through the Board (the arrangers, songwriters, and experimentalists on its payrolls? — keep it light: the composers on its payrolls and its freelance rosters) built the country's first institutional screen-music practice.

Chapter two: the composers' academy

Through the decades, the NFB functioned as the field's great employer and patron: generations of Canadian composers earned their craft scoring the Board's documentaries, animations, and dramas — and the best of the work (the orchestral scores, the electronic experiments, the song commissions) reached audiences worldwide, because NFB films traveled to festivals and classrooms across the planet. The Board's animation music especially (the beloved Log Driver's Waltz — keep it light: the beloved animated musicals that taught generations of Canadian children their first folk songs — see our folk features) became the soundtrack of Canadian childhood: the songs you know from the films you saw in school, the melodies indistinguishable from memory itself. The NFB's music was, functionally, the country's second national songbook (see our anthem features).

Chapter three: the living legacy

The NFB's contemporary role continues — commissioning, archiving, and employing — while its historical catalog acquires the status it earned: the foundation of Canadian screen-music practice, the training ground of the composers who'd score the country's features and series (see our screen-music features), and the proof that public investment in the sound of the nation's cinema pays cultural dividends no private studio would calculate? — keep it light: pays dividends no private studio would attempt. Norman McLaren drew sound on film by hand. The NFB let a country's composers learn their craft on the results. The soundtrack of Canada — you heard it first in a classroom, on a projector, in the dark. The NFB's music was playing.

Why it matters

It matters because the country's musical imagination was institutionally built as well as commercially born: the NFB gave composers a home, films a national voice, and children a songbook — the infrastructure of screen music, public and permanent. The VJ era got the glory (see our MuchMusic features). The Board got there first, and stayed longest.