The composers, I should imagine, are only waiting to be asked to write it. Certainly none of them has ever shown any hesitancy about composing incidental music for the spoken drama. Mendelssohn wrote strains for _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ which seemed pledged to immortality until Granville Barker ignored them; the Wedding March is still in favour in Kankakee and Keokuk. Beethoven illustrated Goethe’s _Egmont_; Sir Arthur Sullivan penned a score for _The Tempest_; Schubert was inspired to put down some of his most ravishing notes for a stupid play called _Rosamunde_; Grieg’s _Peer Gynt_ music is more often performed than the play. More recent instances of incidental music for dramas are Saint-Saëns’s score for Brieux’s _La Foi_, Mascagni’s for _The Eternal City_, and Richard Strauss’s for _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_. Is it necessary to continue the list? I have only, after all, put down a few of the obvious examples (passing by the thousands upon thousands of scores devised by lesser composers for lesser plays) that would spring at once to any musician’s mind. Of course it has usually been the poetic drama (do we ever hear Shakespeare or Rostand without it?) which has seemed to call for incidental music but it has accompanied (with more or less disastrous consequences, to be sure) the unfolding of many a “drawing-room” play; especially during the eighties. When the first moving picture was exposed on the screen it seems to have occurred to its projector at once that some kind of music must accompany its unreeling. The silence evidently appalled him. A moving picture is not unlike a ballet in that it depends entirely upon action (it differs from a ballet in that the action is not necessarily rhythmic)--and whoever heard of a ballet performed without music? Sound certainly has its value in creating an atmosphere and in emphasizing the “thrill” of the moving picture, especially when the sound is selected and co-ordinated. It may also divert the attention. On the whole, more photographed plays follow the general lines of _Lady Windemere’s Fan_ or _Peg o’ My Heart_ than of poetic dramas such as _Cymbeline_ or _La Samaritaine_. The problem here, however, is not the same as in the spoken drama. For in motion pictures a poetic play sheds its poetry and becomes, like its neighbour, a skeleton of action. There is no conceivable distinction in the “movies” (beyond one created by preference, or taste, or the quality of the performance and the photography) between Dante’s _Inferno_ and a picture in which the beloved Charles Chaplin looms large. The directors of the moving picture companies have tried to meet this problem; that they have not wholly succeeded so far is not entirely their fault.