The History of Production Music

The history of Production Music is a fascinating chapter in 20th-century popular culture. What we now call "Production Music" in the U.S. — for providing incidental music for dramatic plays, pageants, radio, TV and films — was originally known in Europe as "Cinema Music", "Atmospheric Music" and then the title for which it is still known in many places — "Mood Music."
In Europe it was also known as "Effects Music" and "Background Music." Here in the US, it has been also known as "Cue music" and "Library Music." But overall "Mood Music" is still the best-known term up until the 1960s when "Production Music" seemed to take its place as a term in the U.S.
Here is a rough outline of the principal events in its history...
The art of "film scoring" began with a few lists assembled by orchestra leaders, theater organists and pianists, of various typical classical pieces to accompany scenes in silent films. So we might say "scoring" was originally a live in-person process that involved some awkward segues or even improvised bridges, as musicians scrambled to turn the pages of their well-worn individual pieces of sheet music;
In Germany original music for silent films began to be composed in the decade following the turn of the century, composed by Guiseppe Becce and Hans May; and during the 1920's Hungarian-born Sandor Totis (known later in the U.S. under his professional name of Alexander Laszlo.) But Laszlo's early experimental film music was for multiple cameras projecting colored shapes on a screen. These were known as "Farblichtmusik" (Color-Light-Music) concerts.
An ever-increasing number of original incidental music composed especially for use with silent films began to appear — released in the U.S. by such publishers as Sam Fox Moving Picture Music. His first popular sets of motion picture music in 1913 contained various characteristic piano pieces composed by Cleveland-born John Stepan Zámečník, who was known as "J.S. Zámečník" (pronounced ZAM-ish-nick.) His family had emmigrated from Bohemia (which is now part of Czechoslovakia.) At the age of 20, he went back to "the old country" and studied at the Prague Conservatory under the famous composer Anton Dvorák. Back in the U.S. he played violin with the Pittsburgh Symphony under Victor Herbert, but returned to his home town to become music director of the Hippodrome Theater in Cleveland, where he wrote incidental music for the theatrical presentations and pageants as well as 6 light operettas.
In 1913 the first volume of music cues he wrote for Sam Fox to accompany the exploding field of "silent movie music" had only 25 piano pieces; He followed it up with several volumes for full orchestra, and during his lifetime was to compose over 1500 published compositions under various pseudonyms. In 1924 Zámečník moved to Hollywood, California to begin writing entire movie scores to be performed by live orchestras at larger theaters.
While European composers had been writing original works for films for two decades, and J.S. Zámečník was dominating the field in the U.S., many smaller theaters could only afford a pianist who struggled to keep up with the projected scenes using whatever classical or popular sources seemed appropriate — sometimes improvised from memory — and sometimes with piles of individual sheet music balanced on the piano.
One example of this collected "anthology" approach — perhaps in response to all the flimsy sheet music that must have fallen from pianos and music stands at times — is a large heavy bound book published in 1924 by the G. Schirmer company in New York with the title "Motion Picture Moods." This huge 675-page collection was assembled by a busy silent film pianist and organist who held several silent film accompanist jobs in New York by the name of Erno Rapée.
Young Mr. Rapée selected not only from what we might now call "the old warhorses" of classical music — familiar compositions from the pens of Grieg, Mendelssohn, Johann Strauss, Schumann, Bizet, Brahms and Tchaikovsky; and a number of "traditional" Folk-songs, Patriotic Airs, National Hymns and National Songs; a few popular ballads of the 19th century whose copyrights had expired; but also a few compositions from lesser-known (and today mostly forgotten) composers who must have been under contract to Schirmer in the 1920's to produce a few examples of "special material" for situations that couldn't be covered by the other tuneful melodies — these latter works included such melodramatic filmic titles that were the predecessors of the underscore or "cue music" that now comprises most film scores:

    "Allegro Misterioso Nottorno" by Gastón Borch, 
    "Agitato Misterioso" by Otto Langley
    "Indian War-dance" by Irénée Berge
    "Valzer Appassionato" by Theodora Dutton
    "Western Allegro" by Edward Falck

Mood Music evolved as an outgrowth of music publishers who began supplying taylor-made light music and dramatic cues using composers who were known for Cinema Music.
Recordings on disc were soon produced. By the 1940s, in the United States, two New York selling agents (Emil Ascher, Inc. and Thomas J. Valentino) began to offer exclusive representation of various European libraries. Music packagers in Hollywood during the 1950s, found ways to re-package B-movie film cues into libraries to score the new medium of television and a few radio shows along the way.
Latter-day companies in the 1960s and 1970s evolved using modern marketing techniques to provide a variety of more contemporary music styles for not only shows and series, but for the increasing market for commercial and promotional jingles. Although such companies may be listed in media directories as sources of Production Music, we omit them from this history since, by and large, their styles do not overlap the Light Music genre, and their composer/arrangers may be a bit less skilled than those composers listed in the Light Music Hall of Fame.
The primary source of early information below on this is "Journal Into Melody", a periodical newsletter from the Robert Farnon Society, a light music society in England. Articles on Mood Music have appeared by David Ades, David Mardon, Alan Heinecke and Nick Farries. We have noted issues and pages from the newsletter as sources wherever appropriate. Other source material came from CD liner notes of Production Music/Mood Music Archival CDs. Later research from a variety of books and sources has revealed the methods of the Hollywood Music packagers.