Composed by Mark Knopfler, of Dire Straits.
You can actually hear some themes from that movie sound track in their Brothers in Arms album.
20+ posts in and no mention of Moulin Rouge! (2001)? It’s not even consistent on the era of songs used, let alone period appropriate. From “The Sound of Music” to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.
Looking through that old thread (mentioned in Post #19) for things that might fit here, I suggest Ghost Dog - The Way Of The Samurai (Samurai Showdown) which is just fine!
Not unusual for a Tarantino picture! All his soundtracks are mixes of spaghetti western soundtracks, 70s rock and other eclectic tunes.
The soundtrack for the Adam Sandler film Just Go With It is mostly remixes/mashups of classic Police and Sting tunes.
A lot of “edgie” indie films from the late 90s and early 2000s tried to be “unusual” by all having a similar soundtrack mix of ambient electronic music, trip-hop, and old school hip-hop.
Wang Chung did the entire soundtrack for To Live and Die in L.A. The director, William Friedkin, told them he didn’t want a track with the same name as the movie title. They wrote one anyway, and he liked it so much he used it in the film: Wang Chung To live and die in L.A - YouTube
Dario Marianelli’s sublime, Oscar-nominated score for the 2005 Pride & Prejudice remake was purposefully composed as if it were classical music that the characters might themselves have performed or listened to: Soundtrack - Pride and Prejudice - Dawn - YouTube
In Bob Dylan’s Oscar-winning song “Things Have Changed,” written for Wonder Boys, he sings, “The next sixty seconds could be like an eternity” exactly one minute before the song ends: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9EKqQWPjyo&ob=av2e
That was because Louis and Bebe Barron were New York avant-garde musicians, and not members of the Hollywood musician’s union, so they couldn’t get a “Music by” credit. This film was AFAIK, the very first with an electronic score.
Originally, the Barrons were brought on board only to produce the sample of “Krell music” that was played, but when the director heard what they had, they decided to use it for the whole score. A great decision.
As I noted recently in another thread, the Barrons didn’t use a theremin in their work, relying on their own constructions. A theremon was used by Bernard hermann in his score for The Day the Earth Stood Still. This wasn’t its first use in film, by far, but it was one of the most memorable (The poster for the film Theemin – A Musical Odyssey features a picture of Gort from TDTESS) Hermann actually used two theremins in his score.
Hermann came up with several unusual scores. In addition to the theremin-heavy YDTESS, he used almost exclusively screeching strings (inspired by bird sounds) for Psycho and used a largely brass orchestra with no strings for Jason and the Argonauts.
Stanley Kubrick’s score for 2001: a Space Odyssey deserves mention. He had originally used classical music only for a “workprint” feel, as a stand-in for the original score that Alex North (who wrote the music for the Kubrick-directed Spartacus) was to write. But Kubrick decided he liked the clasical music better, and stayed with it for the final release. After that, most of Kubrick’s films used mostly classical scores, or cassicaly-derived scores (or current pop music). Interestingly, North did compose a score for 2001, which was recorded. It has been re-recorded since, and commercially released.
The novel Crash by Ballard (the basis of the Cronenberg movie) was published in 1973, before any William Shatner movie with that title was made. As far as I know, Ballard’s novel was the first work of fiction to use that title.
God, am I not allowed to express some strong opinions about a lame, cliched Oscar-bait movie using the title of an earlier, quirky, cult movie? I guess I just shouldn’t voice any opinions about this stuff, because the idea of art inspiring powerful feelings in people is just fucking unthinkable, isn’t it?
I recently watched The Andromeda Strain and it has an extremely effective electronic score. Totally works as music for a scifi thriller, futuristic but creepy and unsettling.
The soundtrack for I Am Sam was all cover versions of Beatles songs. Unusual in that the plot of the movie had nothing to do with the Beatles.
Knopfler also did the soundtrack for Local Hero, which is atmospheric and wistful, but not traditionally the kind of music one would associate with the highlands of Scotland. But it turns out to have been a surprisingly good choice for setting the mood.
Ladyhawke’s soundtrack was very 80s, and the movie was very ambiguously set around the 12th to 13th century, going from clothing and arms and armor, along with the eclipse and some similarities to some stories. While I can get behind the argument that “classical” music is nearly as many hundred years out of date as current music for something set in medieval times, it’s far less jarring than hearing a synthesizer in a period film. The film itself was pretty well done, the soundtrack was pretty horrible even at the time.
Big deal. “Crash” is a single word and therefore cannot be claimed as the definitive title of anything. Paul Haggis no more stole the word to use as a title than William Shatner did. And you get into a hissy fit about it every time you mention the damn movie, which is all the damn time.
ON TOPIC: Even though the soundtrack for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off used a bunch of pop songs, it was never commercially released because director John Hughes thought it was too weird to work as an album.
A Clockwork Orange featured the first musical usage of the vocoder:
Most of the score also prominently features Moog analogue synthesizers.
Aguirre, The Wrath of God has a very distinctive soundtrack showcasing the mellotron to synthesize a human choir:
Chariots of Fire is also noteworthy for its super-1980’s digital synth soundtrack for a period film about the 1920’s.
Search the IMDB for Crash and you get a boatload of hits. If you can find movie (good luck) or a book that is older than this, I’d like to see it. 
Fact is movie and song titles often get reused.
Howard Shore made a point of not using any electronic instruments in the soundtracks for the Lord of the Rings movies. Since his use of electronics has already been mentioned, this was an important point. He felt the live orchestra recordings worked with the organic feel of the movies.
question - was all the music for the film “The Piano” original to the movie?
And they can’t be copyrighted anyway.
The original music in City Lights was composed by Charlie Chaplin, one of the few times the lead actor created a music score. Chaplin could not read or play music, but composed the score by humming parts of it having others take it down and orchestrate it.
Britt Daniel of the band Spoon was co-composer of the Stranger than Fiction soundtrack, for which he used a few Spoon songs stripped of all vocals. It was jarring for me (as a fan of that band, unaware of his involvement at the time I saw it) to hear songs I was already familiar with presented as pure instrumentals. They weren’t near-sounding reinterpretations either. I assume he just took the original masters and potted down the voice tracks.
Unfortunately the soundtrack album had the original versions with vocals. I might have bought it had it retained the instrumentals from the film.
another (sort of) related question - when did background music soundtracks become the norm for film? was it always? China Syndrome is the only film I can remember without background music - there must be others, right?
Oddly, this is the first thing that came to my mind as well, when I saw the thread title.
And the movie spawned a huge Scott Joplin renaissance.
The China Syndrome has no music at all save a song played over the opening credits which, within the film, is playing over a car radio, and some background music coming from a jukebox in the bar scene.