Music can create a convincing atmosphere of time and place. 
 
There are a variety of ways of achieving an atmosphere of time and place, or, musically speaking, "color." This emphasis on color does not mean that musical line should or does go unused, however. The primary reason film composers have traditionally stayed away from complex line and structure in music is that such complicated structures cannot successfully be emphasized without competing with the dramatic action; i.e., it is bad film music. The answer to the problem of color and line, as it applies to film music, is that musical color can, to an extent, be created just as effectively by the confluence of individualized lines (a more contrapuntal texture) as by the arbitrary piling up of dissonance in a chord. Examples of this kind of contrapuntal coloristic writing abound in the scores of both David Raksin and Hugo Friedhofer. Raksin's score for the little-known film The Redeemer is full of canons and fugatos; Friedhofer's score to Joan of Arc has several highly contrapuntal sequences. 

Roy A. Prendergast: "The Aesthetics of Film Music"