Abstract
The established practice of producing film music in the USA has a number of distinctive features related both to the specificity of a composer’s (and his collaborators’) work in the system of commercial cinema and to the diversity of film music as such. In this paper the author consecutively analyses the four forms of existence of film music: film score, soundtrack, component of mediatext and concert arrangement. Composer’s sketches, orchestrations and arrangements of certain themes are compared; the concert «fortunes» of some film scores and the present state of the sources of film music are reported.