The silent Cinema [611349]

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The silent Cinema [611349]

Byadmin ianuarie 1, 2024

Cambridge Books Online
http://ebooks.cambridge.org/
A History of Film Music
Mervyn Cooke
Book DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814341
Online ISBN: [anonimizat]
Hardback ISBN: [anonimizat]
Paperback ISBN: [anonimizat]
Chapter
1 – The ‘silent’ cinema pp. 1-41
Chapter DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814341.002
Cambridge University Press

1 The ‘silent’ cinema
As has often been remarked, the cinema has never been silent: the so-called
silent ﬁlms which represented the ﬁrst ﬂowering of the medium from the1890s to the late 1920s often used sound as a vital part of the ﬁlmic experi-ence. Accompanying music was only one of a diverse range of sonic optionsavailable to exhibitors in the early years of cinema; yet the familiarity of thefairly elaborate musical provision characterizing the later years of silent ﬁlm(c.1914–27) has tended to result in the assumption that music was both con-
stantly used and deemed aesthetically viable well before this period. As RickAltman has argued, however, during the early development of the movingpicture ( c.1895– c.1913) it was not uncommon for ﬁlms to be projected with
no organized sound component at all (Altman 2004, 193–201). Y et, by thestart of the 1920s, ﬁlm-music pioneer George Beynon could declare withoutfear of contradiction: ‘Allowing the picture to be screened in silence is anunforgivable offense that calls for the severest censure. No picture shouldbegin in silence under any conditions’ (Beynon 1921, 76).
Why sound?
Altman’s careful research established that ‘silent ﬁlms were in fact some-times silent ,…a n dw hat’s more it did not appear to bother audiences a bit’
(Altman 1996, 649); but audience noise and direct audience participationwere more prominent at the turn of the twentieth century than they are intoday’s cinema in the West, so to this extent ﬁlms were never truly experi-enced in silence. When Andy Warhol made his almost static silent ﬁlms inthe 1960s he assumed the audience would supply sounds, thereby partici-pating in the artistic event (Weis and Belton 1985, 369); and audience noise,though reduced in modern times, has remained part and parcel of the cin-ematic experience, most prominently in India. The desirability of maskingor discouraging audience noise is one of the many possible explanations –some practical and others aesthetic – that have been advanced to accountfor the provision of some kind of sound element to accompany screeningsof silent ﬁlms.
Another reason for the provision of sound in the early years of cinema
may have been to mask intrusive noise both inside and outside the projectionvenue, including the sound of trafﬁc passing by and the distracting whirring
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2 A history of ﬁlm music
of the projector itself. Conventional mo dern projectors still generate a fair
degree of noise: the experimental ﬁlm-maker Stan Brakhage, who attemptedto make genuinely silent ﬁlms in the 1950s, attested to his irritation at havingneglected the fact that viewers would in effect never be able to watch his ﬁlmsin total silence because the sound of the projector would always be present.Mechanical quietness was used as a selling-p oint when some early projectors
were marketed: around 1900, for example, publicity for the Optigraph notedthat with rival projectors ‘the noise is so great that, as a rule, it is necessary tokeep a piano or other musical instrument going while the motion picturesare being shown, to prevent annoyance to the audience’ (quoted in Altman2004, 89). The issue of projector noise duly became a much-vaunted butnot entirely convincing theory for the origins of ﬁlm music: as ﬁlm theoristSiegfried Kracauer pointed out, ‘this explanation is untenable; . . . the noisyprojector was soon removed from the auditorium proper [into a projectionbooth], whereas music stubbornly persisted’ (Kracauer 1960, 133).
In those silent ﬁlms that purported to represent reality, the absence of
naturalistic sounds might have been considered a more serious impedi-ment to plausibility than the absence of dialogue. Y et even when ﬁlms arescreened without any accompanying sound, the viewer will tend to imag-ine noises that correspond to the images depicted. It is difﬁcult to watchthe plate-smashing sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s silent classic The Battle-
ship Potemkin (1925) or the images of spoons striking glass bottles in Dziga
Ver tov’s The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) without ‘hearing’ the appro-
priate sound internally. (Vertov’s sensory suggestiveness even extended toimplying a smell: he directly juxtaposed images of nail-polishing and ﬁlmediting, both of which use acetone.) Audiences responded appropriately tosuch visual stimuli from the earliest years of cinema: at an early screen-ing of The Great Train Robbery (dir. Edwin S. Porter, 1903), silent images
of gunshots reportedly caused spectators to put their ﬁngers in their ears(Altman 1996, 648). MGM’s trademark roaring lion was born in the silentera as a result of the studio’s desire for an arresting image that would ‘sound’loud. In 1929 French director Ren ´e Clair, lamenting the use of gratuitous
sound effects in the early sound ﬁlm, declared that ‘we do not need to hear
the sound of clapping if we can seethe clapping hands’ (Weis and Belton
1985, 94). Such internalized sounds were believed by Brakhage to emanatefrom a ‘silent sound sense’ (Brakhage 1960). This phenomenon, referredto as subception or subliminal auditive perception by psychologists, wasexploited by numerous makers of silent ﬁlms, who peppered their productswith visual simulations of sound ranging from simple knocks at the doorto graphically realized explosions. Some silent ﬁlms, such as Franz Hofer’sKammermusik (1914), placed a heavy emphasis on scenes of music-making
and on the act of listening to music, which may have a powerful associativeeffect even if no music is heard by the audience (Abel and Altman 2001, 93,
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3 The ‘silent’ cinema
96–7, 102–6). Furthermore, a direct correspondence between images repre-
senting the production of music and other sounds, and the act of listeningto such sounds, became after c.1909 a useful device – unique to the cinema –
not only for implying the existence of diegetic space beyond the conﬁnesof the screen, but also a simple (and at the time novel) form of narrativelinkage in the montage; thus some silent ﬁlms came to have what have aptlybeen termed a ‘virtual sound track’ (Altman 2004, 214–16).
In real life, movement is never viewed in strict silence; indeed, without
special acoustic facilities, total silence is a physical impossibility even whenviewing static objects. In modern sound ﬁlms, room tone (i.e. ambientsound appropriate to the location depic ted on screen) is specially recorded
so that it can be dubbed onto ostensibly silent scenes and thereby preventthe audience from simply assuming that the sound system has failed (Weisand Belton 1985, 395); it can also be used to replace ambient backgroundnoise lost during the process of dubbing dialogue. Actual silence on thesoundtrack would be unrealistic in both cases, and unacceptable exceptin contexts where it is used deliberately as a means of disconcerting theviewer, as in the work of French director Jean-Luc Godard. When AlfredHitchcock wanted to create a threatening silence in The Birds (1963), he
preferred the use of a subliminal electronic humming noise rather than acomplete absence of sound (Truffaut 1967, 225). As ﬁlm theorist B ´ela Bal ´azs
observed, the silent ﬁlm was a paradox: it could not of itself reproduce silenceas an artistic effect, since silence is relative and can only be appreciatedwithin a context of sounds (Bal ´azs 1953, 205); thus, when a car is driven
away in complete silence at the end of The Birds , the same vehicle having
demonstrated its noisy engine in a previous scene, the effect is unsettling.In short, as French director Robert Bresson pointed out, ‘the sound trackinvented silence’ (quoted in Weis and Belton 1985, 323) – or at least gave ita value that it did not possess in the silent ﬁlm.
Silence in a musical context, however, has since the earliest years been
an important stock-in-trade of accompanists of silent ﬁlms and ﬁlm com-posers, who have appreciated the fact that the sudden cessation of musicwhen the latter is expected to be continuous can have an enormous dramaticimpact on an audience. The phenomenon was debated in the motion-picturetrade press during the heyday of the silent ﬁlm, with some commentatorsapproving of a strategic use of silence and others advocating continuity atall costs: in 1912, Moving Picture World advised musicians that a maximum
silence of ten seconds was a useful rule-of-thumb (Kalinak 1992, 49). Organ-ist Dennis James related how, when his instrument malfunctioned duringa live accompaniment to a modern screening of a silent Harold Lloyd com-edy, one member of the audience afterwards praised him for interpolatingso dramatic and unexpected a silence (McCarty 1989, 66–7). Even wellafter the advent of the sound ﬁlm, Leonid Sabaneev anxiously warned ﬁlm
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4 A history of ﬁlm music
composers against recoursing to abrupt silence on the grounds that the
device ‘gives rise to a feeling of aesthetic perplexity’ (Sabaneev 1935, 21),though a few years earlier the trenchant critic Harry Alan Potamkin – inthe context of his general lambasting of the excessive use of music in theexhibition of silent ﬁlms – praised a Paris showing of Abel Gance’s J’Accuse
(1918) for the orchestra’s ‘terriﬁc’ silence when the war dead come to life:‘What vaudeville “fan” does not know the effectiveness of silence during anacrobatic feat? This is the point: since music is inevitable, we can make thebest use of silence by selecting the inter vals carefully at which the music will
be hushed’ (Potamkin 1929, 295).
In silent comedies dependent upon slapstick, and to enhance the excite-
ment of major sound events in serious silent ﬁlms, real sound effects weresupplied by special machines such as the Kinematophone or Allefex, whichmight be located behind the screen to enhance spatial verisimilitude, or byperformers using the kind of sound-generating paraphernalia still familiar inmodern radio drama. In France, these sound-effects performers were knownasbruitistes , and some commentators believed that, if handled creatively, an
imaginative use of sound might correspond to the bruit musical developed
by Italian futurist artists during the First World War (Lacombe and Porcile1995, 24–5). Unfortunately, no such high artistic aims prevailed in movietheatres, where the mindless use of sound effects was roundly criticized bymany contemporaneous critics on account of its essential crudity and oftenexcessive volume. This habit was in part responsible for the all-too-frequentrecourse to unsubtle sound effects in modern commercial cinema, in whichFoley artists (named after Jack Foley, who pioneered such techniques in hiswork on early sound ﬁlms in Hollywood during the 1940s) habitually sup-ply artiﬁcial and over-prominent sounds for virtually all noises in a ﬁlm, nomatter how trivial. Many are both redundant and somewhat condescendingto audience intelligence, but sound-effect production had become so slickby the advent of the talkies that its retention in the sound ﬁlm was inevitable.In the work of sound-sensitive modern ﬁlm-makers, however, effects maybe integrated with the musical score so that they work together in the sound-track, the latter (as has long been overlooked, even in ﬁlm scholarship) nowbeing increasingly treated as an indivisible composite greater than the sumof its parts (Altman et al. 2000, 341).
Why music?
Music may initially have been supplied at ﬁlm screenings simply because it
has always been an inevitable adjunct to almost all forms of popular enter-tainment. Early moving-picture shows in the mid-1890s were little more
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5 The ‘silent’ cinema
than show-booth attractions: fairgrounds, vaudeville and travelling shows
have traditionally been noisy affairs, and for the latest novelty spectacle tohave been presented without some kind of aural stimulation would havebeen inconceivable. In this regard, it is important to note that music wasnot necessarily performed inside an exhibition venue, nor at the same timeas a ﬁlm was being shown. Altman has drawn attention to the signiﬁcanceof music as a ballyhoo device for attracting custom before patrons had evenset foot in the venue: live music might be played at the entrance, or recordedmusic blared out into the street through a barker phonograph horn (Altman1996, 664, 674), and even the musicians inside the projection room mightbe instructed to play loudly so they could be heard in the street (Altman2004, 131). As cinema music became more elaborate and of better quality,the live performance of musical numbers – again not necessarily related to,or played simultaneously with, the ﬁlms being shown – could be as strongan attraction to customers as the moving pictures on offer.
The author of one of the ﬁrst serious texts on ﬁlm music stated that
music had been speciﬁcally conceived as compensation for the absence ofnaturalistic sound (London 1936, 34). One of its early exponents, MaxWinkler, opined categorically that music was added to ﬁlm in order to ﬁllthe void created by the absence of dialogue: ‘music must take the place ofthe spoken word’ (quoted in Limbacher 1974, 16). But music was by nomeans the only medium that might be used for these purposes. Apart fromsound effects, other techniques included live narration, which had been aprominent feature of magic-lantern shows and fairground moving-pictureattractions when barkers had provided a simultaneous commentary on theimages. Sometimes reciters (also known as ‘impersonators’) delivered linesin an attempt to synchronize with the lip movements of the ﬁlm actors,an activity in which the comedian Leopold Fregoli specialized in the late1890s (Prendergast 1992, 4). As late as 1908, an American venue secretedactors behind the screen and had them perform synchronized dialogue in anattempt to trick the audience into believing that the ‘talker’ ﬁlm they werewitnessing constituted a genuine technological miracle (Abel and Altman2001, 156–66). The most celebrated live narrators were the Japanese benshi ,
who were star attractions in the silent cinema and survived well into thesound era (Dym 2003); elsewhere, however, verbal narration died out onceﬁlm-makers had evolved editorial techniques sophisticated enough for thesequencing of the ﬁlm’s visual images to carry the necessary narrative infor-mation (Fairservice 2001, 11).
As silent cinema developed, and especially after c.1912, music came to
play a crucial role in shaping and conditioning the viewer’s response tomoving pictures. Kathryn Kalinak has proposed that music, by its veryphysical presence, created a sense of three-dimensionality singularly lacking
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6 A history of ﬁlm music
in the projected image: while the ﬁlm was projected from the rear of the
hall to the screen at the front, so music played at the front was projectedbackwards over the audience and ‘through a kind of transference or slippagebetween sound and image, the depth created by the sound is transferred tothe ﬂat surface of the image’ (Kalinak 1992, 44). The process of humanizingthe silent moving image with music was regarded by some commentators,notably Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, as a quasi-magical process inwhich the spectator’s fear of the irrationality of the ghostly medium wasexorcized:
Music was introduced as a kind of antidote against the picture. The need
was felt to spare the spectator the unpleasantness involved in seeing efﬁgiesof living, acting, and even speaking persons, who were at the same times i l e n t…[ M ] usic was introduced not to supply them with the life they
lacked – this became its aim only in the era of total ideological planning –but to exorcise fear or help the spectator absorb the shock.
Motion-picture music corresponds to the whistling or singing child in the
dark. (Adorno and Eisler 1994 [1947], 75)
This view was echoed by Kracauer, who found soundless moving pictures
‘a frightening experience’ and that ﬁlm music had a beneﬁcial effect onthem: ‘Ghostly shadows, as volatile as clouds, thus become trustworthyshapes’ (Kracauer 1960, 134–5). More mundanely, the use of exciting ortear-jerking musical accompaniments of an increasingly elaborate naturebecame perhaps the most effective mechanism for persuading spectatorswillingly to suspend their disbelief. As Claudia Gorbman has pointed out,this process – as familiar in the modern sound ﬁlm as it was in the silentcinema – conveniently involved an abrogation of critical faculties, renderingthe viewer ‘an untroublesome viewing subject’: ‘When we shed a tear duringa pregnant moment in a ﬁlm melodrama . . . instead of scofﬁng at itsexcess, music often is present, a catalyst in the suspension of judgment’(Gorbman 1987, 5–6). Thus ﬁlm-makers from the early days used music as‘their panacea for encouraging audience empathy’ (Bazelon 1975, 13). Thisconcept was expressed as early as 1926 by Paul Ramain:
all that is required of the orchestra in the cinema is to play harmonious
background music with the idea not of being heard but of creating anatmosphere to sink us into our subconscious and make us forget therustling paper, the shufﬂing feet, etc. in the auditorium . . . The role ofmusic is therefore subsidiary, helping to put us in a trance with a vaguebackground hum. (quoted in Mitry 1998, 248)
Cognitive psychologists have begun the daunting task of attempting to
explain how the brain’s functions enable this to happen (Cohen 2000,365–8).
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7 The ‘silent’ cinema
The birth of ﬁlm music
The origins of ﬁlm music are traditionally traced to Paris in the early 1890s,
where Emile Reynaud’s animated Pantomimes lumineuses were presented
in November 1892 with piano music sp ecially composed by Gaston Paulin,
and a showing of short ﬁlms by the Lumi `ere brothers in December 1895
received a piano accompaniment from Emile Maraval, and a harmoniumaccompaniment when their show opened in London in the following year.At the launch of Vitascope in a New Y ork music hall in April 1896, DrLeo Sommer’s Blue Hungarian Band performed. The experimental ﬁlm-maker Georges M ´eli`es played the piano himself for the Paris premi `ere of
hisLe Voyage dans la lune in 1902. These ventures continued the long-
standing practice of accompanying other types of popular entertainment,such as magic-lantern shows, vaudeville and melodrama, with appropriatemusic.
Many nineteenth-century lantern shows were elaborate affairs carefully
sequenced for dramatic effect, and bolstered by narration and (even in thecase of some illustrated scientiﬁc lectures) appropriate musical accompa-niment. ‘Illustrated songs’ , in which popular tunes were accompanied bylantern slides while the audience sang along, were one form of entertain-ment that was carried over directly into early cinemas, which in the ﬁrst partof the silent era continued to provide a varied bill of vaudeville-style fare;early projectors combined both motion-picture and lantern-slide technol-ogy (Altman 1996, 660–7). So popular were illustrated songs in the USA –and so essentially different from the frequently melodramatic tone ofimported European ﬁlms in the early days of silent movies – that RichardAbel has plausibly suggested they were responsible not only for the initialsuccess of the nickelodeon industry (see below) but also as an early exampleof a distinctively American psychology that would come to be importantin the later development of a national cinematic style (Abel and Altman2001, 150–1). Illustrated songs gradual ly disappeared from nickelodeons
in 1910–13, perhaps in response to a widespread desire for movies to betaken more seriously: this new-found aur a of respectability required silent
contemplation on the part of the audience, and an avoidance of popularculture.
Although it would be decades before synchronized pre-recorded sound
established itself in the cinema, several leading inventors attempted to com-bine image and sound in this way as early as the 1890s. Thomas Edison’sKinetograph, on which work beg an in 1889, was developed speciﬁcally to
provide a visual enhancement to music reproduced on his already successfulphonograph – a reversal of the more common subordinance of music tovisual image that soon came to dominate mainstream cinema. Both Edison’s
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8 A history of ﬁlm music
Kinetograph (camera) and Kinetoscope (projector) were conceived with the
aim of synchronizing image and sound, and it is now known that Edisontook the credit for some technological marvels that had in fact been inventedby others (Allen and Gomery 1985, 57–8); but, no matter who was respon-sible for it, the challenge of synchronization proved to be too ambitious forits time and the handful of Kinetophone sound ﬁlms his team produced hadunsynchronized accompaniments. After other devices for recording accom-paniments on disc or cylinder were demonstrated at the Paris Exposition in1900, some ﬁlm-makers furthered the attempt to use pre-recorded sound; inGermany, Oskar Messter worked on his Kosmograph disc system from 1903onwards and began to release Tonbilder ﬁlms in 1908 with recorded music,
and ﬁlms of musical numbers accompanied by ‘an incredible gramophonesynchronized to the pictures and driven by compressed air’ enjoyed popu-larity in Sweden in 1908–9 (Lack 1997, 14–15). These experiments were lessthan satisfactory on account of poor synchronization, lack of ampliﬁcationand the need to change sound cylinders or discs every ﬁve minutes or so.The absence of a standardized system also meant that the initiatives werenot commercially viable: apart from a short-lived revamping of Edison’sKinetophone productions in 1913–14, such ventures had already dwindledin importance around 1910.
As the craze for moving pictures spread, the nature of their musical
accompaniment varied considerably according to the context in which theywere shown. Mechanical instruments were popular initially, and these pre-served an audible link with the fairground; even as late as 1913, three-quarters of projection venues surveyed in San Francisco still had nothingbut mechanical music, and close on 90 per cent had provision for it (Altman1996, 685). Nevertheless, live music was always common, especially in caseswhere touring motion-picture attractions were presented in vaudeville the-atres or music halls to the accompaniment of the venues’ resident ensembles.This appears to have been the case with tours of the Vitascope and Biographshows and similar attractions in both the USA and Europe during the later1890s; in Paris, caf ´e-concert and music-hall entertainments also came to
include motion pictures, which formed part of the bill of fare at famousvenues such as the Olympia and Folies-Berg `ere. The German entrepreneurs
Max and Emil Skladanowsky toured Scandinavia with their Bioskop showin 1896, and the incomplete set of performing parts that survives revealsthe musical accompaniment to have included both specially composed cuesand an extract from Glinka for use with a sequence depicting a Russiandance. Another compilation, similar in function, was prepared by LeopoldWenzel for a royal cinematographic show at Windsor Castle in 1897 (Marks1997, 30–50). The American touring exhibitor D. W. Robertson set out witha newly purchased Edison Kinetoscope in 1897 and by 1906 was advertising
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9 The ‘silent’ cinema
shows with ‘descriptive musical accompaniment’ (Abel and Altman 2001,
125).
The success of these and other itinerant motion-picture enterprises led
to a major boom in the establishment of nickelodeons in the USA, whichbegan to appear in c.1905 and numbered some 10,000 by 1910; after their
humble beginnings, these establishments catered for increasingly discern-ing audiences who would pay more for luxuries such as comfortable seatsand music. A parallel development in France, also beginning in 1905–6, sawCharles Path ´e and L ´eon Gaumont establish salles de cin´ ema in numerous
provincial towns. It was in venues such as these that the initial showbooth-style ‘cinema of attractions’ became gradually supplanted by more sub-stantial ﬁlms with a strong narrative orientation, and with these came moreambitious musical accompaniment. Comments published in the trade pressseem to indicate that a perceived need for incidental music was growingstronger by c.1907 and that, by c.1911, music accompanying the picture
was regarded as more useful than the independent musical numbers thathad been performed previously; musical provision also became increasinglystandardized as a result of the systematic attempts of production compa-nies to promote a consistent manner of ﬁlm accompaniment in preferenceto the widely contrasting types of aural stimulation on offer at variousestablishments, which had formerly been regarded by the latter as compet-itive selling-points (Altman 1996, 677–9, 690). The production companiesdid this partly through the medium of live demonstrations, either givenby touring representatives or by invitation to exhibitors to attend presenta-tions at major urban venues, especially in the period 1911–14 (Altman 2004,272–3).
Categories of ﬁlm music
At an early stage it was recognized that there were two fundamentally dif-ferent types of ﬁlm music. On the one hand, the music might be whatmodern ﬁlm scholars describe as diegetic: in other words, it formed partof the ﬁlm’s narrative world (diegesis) and its purported source was often,though not exclusively, visible on the screen. On the other hand, the musicmight be nondiegetic, serving as approp riate background listening. Diegetic
music-making in the visual image could easily be matched by a synchro-nized instrumental or vocal accompaniment – whether supplied live or ona gramophone recording – and this procedure became especially popu-lar in c.1907–8 (Altman 1996, 682), being referred to speciﬁcally as ‘cue
music’ . As greater attention was paid to the provision of nondiegetic music,such accompaniments drew increasingly on features of the well-established
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10 A history of ﬁlm music
symbiosis between music and drama that had in the nineteenth century
shaped the development of major theatr ical genres such as opera, ballet and
(above all) melodrama (Shapiro 1984). According to one early twentieth-century commentator, the basis of the musical component in melodrama(‘which accompanies the dialogue and reﬂects the feeling and emotion of thespoken lines’) is simplicity of construction and subservience to the words:‘It usually accompanies the most sentimental passages in the pla y…,f o l –
lowing the hero and heroine most obstinately. But the villain too will havehis little bit of tremolo to help him along his evil path’ (O’Neill 1911, 88).
Recapitulation is used ‘to remind the audience of a previous situation’ , latera standard ﬁlm-music technique; but on the whole ‘both music and dramaof this class have no great artistic value. The music is simply called in tobolster up the weakness of the drama. It is used to stimulate (by what I maycall unfair means) the imagination of the audience, and to help the actor’(O’Neill 1911, 88).
Since many inﬂuential silent-ﬁlm directors had been schooled in melo-
drama, the transferral of its characteristics to the silver screen was inevitable.Stagings of melodrama had utilized live organ or orchestral incidental musicto enhance the audience’s emotional response and to suggest character typesor geographical locations, the choice of appropriate music being indicatedin the scripts and aided by the existence of anthologies of specially selectedmusical extracts. These were all featur es of early ﬁlm music, which directly
inherited melodramatic clich ´es such as the use of string tremolo and delicate
pizzicato for tension and furtiveness respectively, and loud stinger chordsto emphasize physical action or rousing lines (Gorbman 1987, 33–5; Marks1997, 28). These simple devices, combined with background music lullingthe spectator into an uncritical state, remained useful in inferior melodra-matic ﬁlm drama because, as Yves Baudrier put it, ‘if the music is taken away,there is a risk of losing the necessary minimum emotional warmth whichmust exist for us to believe (however temporarily) in the sentiments we aresupposed to be feeling, attracting, through a sort of magic, the complicityof the audience’ (quoted in Mitry 1998, 253).
The importance of music as a mood-enhancer in early cinema was
reﬂected in the common practice of having live or recorded music played onﬁlm sets during shooting to inspire the actors, a procedure later occasion-ally used in the making of sound ﬁlms by directors such as John Ford,Alfred Hitchcock (who, while shooting The Birds , used a drummer on
set to terrify the actors in the absence of the ﬁlm’s sophisticated aviansound effects), Stanley Kubrick, Sergio Leone, David Lynch, Ken Russelland Peter Weir. Cecil B. DeMille, for example, used the slow movement ofDvoˇr´ak’s New World Symphony to establish the mood for his portrayal of
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11 The ‘silent’ cinema
1.1Live music-making was often employed to inspire actors during the shooting of silent ﬁlms, as seen here in
the making of The Little French Girl , directed by Herbert Brenon in 1925. (Museum of the Moving Image)
the Exodus in The Ten Commandments (1923). Geraldine Farrar, a silent-
ﬁlm star who combined careers as an opera singer and screen actress,recalled that after her ﬁrst experiment with using an on-set pianist toinspire her performance, ‘I always had a musician at my elbow whosesoulful throbs did more to start my tears than all the glycerine drops oronions more frequently employed by less responsive orbs’ (quoted in Karlin
1994, 162). The image of music as a substitute for glycerine was echoedby later observers of ﬁlm-making practices, and contemporaneous com-mentators found some pathos-inducing music laughably self-indulgent,for example Alphons Czibulka’s Winterm¨ archen (1891), its theme identi-
cal with the contemporaneous hit tune Hearts and Flowers by Theo T obani.
The most stereotyped and clich ´ed idioms used to accompany silent ﬁlms
survived into the sound era almost exclusively in a context of parody, ﬁgur-ing prominently in comedy and cartoon scores; but the tributes were oftenaffectionate.
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12 A history of ﬁlm music
Improvised accompaniments to screenings of silent ﬁlms might typi-
cally be provided by a pianist or harmonium player, sometimes resourcefulenough simultaneously to play piano with one hand and harmonium withthe other (Huntley [1947], 25). In its idealized but rarely attained form, agood keyboard accompaniment mediated between the image and the spec-tator, just as an effective pre-composed score would come to do in the soundcinema: as Bernard Herrmann later observed, ﬁlm music may be consideredas ‘the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reachingout and enveloping all into one single experience’ (Herrmann 1945, 17). Onemajor advantage of improvised accompaniments was their ability, when skil-fully executed, to lend a sense of continuity to the narrative; ﬁlm music in thelater silent era was sometimes continuous from start to ﬁnish, though pre-arranged compilation scores (see below) tended to be highly sectionalized;strategically placed gaps in the aural continuum were also sometimes nec-essary merely for practical reasons. The ability of all kinds of music to createcontinuity and enhance a sense of momentum became increasingly evidentin the second decade of the century. Kurt London believed that the raisond’ˆetre for ﬁlm’s musical accompaniment was ‘the rhythm of the ﬁlm as an art
of movement’ (London 1936, 35). Kracauer described music as ‘a meaning-ful continuity in time’ and declared that music in ﬁlm causes us to perceive‘structural patterns where there were none before. Confused shifts of posi-tions reveal themselves to be comprehensible gestures; scattered visual datacoalesce and follow a deﬁnite course. Music makes the silent images partakeof its continuity’ (Kracauer 1960, 135). Mitry concluded that the ‘real time’component of music ‘provides the visual impressions with the missing timecontent by giving them the powers of perceptible rhythm’ (Mitry 1998, 265)and felt that musical continuity was necessary to compensate for what hefelt was an inherent inadequacy of ﬁlm editing:
it is all too apparent that the editing of a series of ﬁxed shots establishes a
feeling of continuity but is unable, unlike moving shots, to create the sensation
of the continuous, since this sensation is reconstructed intellectually andnot perceived as such – which means that reality appears as though it werean idea or memory; or, to put it another way, it appears restructured .
(Mitry 1998, 162)
The habitual use of intertitles to convey information or dialogue essential
to the narrative was a major impediment to the continuity of silent ﬁlms,though the ease with which they could be replaced by intertitles in differentlanguages for export was one factor contributing to the rapid internationaldissemination of new releases.
Another of music’s many functions was to play mild intellectual games
with the ﬁlm’s spectators, who might be amused by appropriate references
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13 The ‘silent’ cinema
to certain popular songs they were already familiar with through participa-
tion in illustrated-song shows. This practice proliferated in the ﬁrst decadeof the century when the popular-song industry enjoyed its own boom,but as early as 1910 at least one commentator had noted that it was anentirely pointless procedure if members of the audience failed to recognize,or did not know, the song being quoted (Abel and Altman 2001, 238). Thesetopical allusions were sometimes unaccountably light-hearted even duringserious scenes: for example, at a British screening of The Queen of Sheba
(dir. William Fox, 1921) the ensemble cheerfully trotted out ‘Thanks forthe Buggy Ride’ during the spectacular chariot race (Karlin 1994, 156). Onetechnical manual went so far as to lambast such musical puns as ‘not onlyworthless, but offensive’ (Beynon 1921, 2). Such literal-mindedness in the-matic allusion persists in mainstream narrative cinema, which frequentlydraws on appropriate song tunes which the audience might be expected torecognize. Tin Pan Alley songs and jazz standards are today usually heardas diegetic performances, since these seem marginally less contrived thanthematic allusions in the nondiegetic score; the tunes are often renderedby instruments alone in an attempt to make the allusion subtler by sup-pressing the relevant lyrics. Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) and Hannah
and Her Sisters (1981) provide good examples of the use of appropriately
entitled instrumental standards in their nondiegetic music tracks, thoughthese are spotted with structural as well as punning intent (Marshall andStilwell 2000, 14). A far less subtle example occurs in An American in Paris
(1951; see Chapter 4) when Gene Kelly dances with his love in a jazz caf ´e
to the diegetic accompaniment of Gershwin’s ‘(It’s Very Clear) Our Love isHere to Stay’ – and feels the need to point out the title to her in case it wasn’tquite clear enough.
The popular classics were plundered for suitable extracts for use with
silent ﬁlms, while the style of freshly composed cues drew heavily on theidioms of romantic opera and oper etta. The most inﬂuential by far was that
of Wagner, whose name is invoked time and again in contemporaneouscommentary on music in the silent cinema. A journal proclaimed in 1911that all musical directors were disciples of Wagner (Flinn 1992, 15), and theinﬂuence was manifested both in speciﬁc compositional techniques such asthe use of leitmotifs as both narrative and structural device – consideredto be a cutting-edge technique in early ﬁlm music and persisting to thepresent day, in spite of the attempts of later commentators to discredit it –and in an aspiration towards unendliche Melodie in the interests of musico-
dramatic continuity. The Wagnerian ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk became
applied to the cinematic medium as a whole, and the connection emphasizedthe vital role played by music in shaping the impact of the drama (Paulin2000).
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14 A history of ﬁlm music
Camille Saint-Sa ¨ens and ﬁlm d’art
Original scores were rare in the early years of silent ﬁlm. A singular example
came into being when French cinema, which achieved international marketdominance in 1906–10 largely through the phenomenal success of CharlesPath ´e’s production company and the work of L ´eon Gaumont, attempted
to reach a high artistic plateau with the launching of the intensely the-atrical style of ﬁlm d’art . Unlike other ﬁlm companies, the Soci ´et´e Film
d’Art employed renowned stage directors, screenplay writers, actors fromthe Com ´edie Franc ¸aise and established composers in its striving for a quality
product. The best-known music by Camille Saint-Sa ¨ens, such as ‘The Swan’
from The Carnival of the Animals , was already familiar in French cinemas
(R. S. Brown 1994, 53), so it was logical enough that he be invited to composeas c o r ef o rH e n r iL a v ´edan’s eighteen-minute L’assassinat du Duc de Guise
(dir. Andr ´e Calmettes and Charles Le Bargy), which launched ﬁlm d’art on
17 November 1908 in a programme at the Salle Charras featuring two otherﬁlms with original music by Fernand Le Borne and Gaston Berardi.
The ever-practical Saint-Sa ¨ens made his ﬁlm-scoring task easier by
reworking extracts from an unpublished work, his symphony Urbs Roma
(B. Rees 1999, 382) – and, according to a review of L’assassinat published two
weeks after its premi `ere screening, composed his ﬁlm score ‘in front of the
screen as the ﬁlm was being projected’ (quoted in Abel and Altman 2001, 54).In contrast to the bittiness of much ﬁlm music in this period, Saint-Sa ¨ens’
music for L’assassinat , performed by classical instrumentalists drawn from
the orchestras of the Concerts Colonne and Concerts Lamoureux, showedhow structural coherence could articulate the drama across relatively broadtime-spans, and it proved to be prophetic of the later mainstream ﬁlm com-poser’s art. Prophetic too was Saint-Sa ¨ens’ decision to recycle his ﬁlm music
for concert use (as Op. 128, for the original ensemble scoring of wind, piano,harmonium and strings), a procedure later adopted by many composers whowished to rescue their ﬁlm music from its ephemeral source; his publisher,Durand, also issued a version for solo piano intended for use in projectionvenues which could not afford the full ensemble.
Contemporaneous reviewers of L’assassinat declared that the promoters
of such productions ‘cannot imagine them without the help of a power-
ful music which from the point of view of the audience will replace the
human voice in the minute details of its expressivity . . . [T]here is the
great display, the whole kit and caboodle of invisible yetpresent music, the
mystery appropriate for cinematographic evocations’ (quoted in Abel andAltman 2001, 50–1). The ﬁlm received critical acclaim in France, thoughsome observers lamented its utter subservience to old-fashioned theatrical-ity, and others later exhibited it with designedly ridiculous music (Sadoul
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15 The ‘silent’ cinema
1948, 541). It exerted a powerful inﬂuence on global ﬁlm production, which
quickly turned to canonic works of literature – and even opera – as fodderfor more ambitious silent-ﬁlm treatments. In the UK, an early original scorewas written by operetta composer Edward German for the Ealing ﬁlm Henry
VIII in 1911 (Huntley 2002); in the USA, original scores did not begin to be
produced in earnest until later in the decade.
Cue sheets and anthologies
Production companies had meanwhile begun to take a keen interest in thenature of the music that might accompany exhibitions of their products. In1907, for example, Gaumont began publishing a weekly pamphlet entitledGuide Musicale for distribution to exhibitors in France. In 1909, Edison
Pictures in the USA started publishing cue sheets in the pages of its Edi-
son Kinetogram to encourage the selection of appropriate musical numbers
from both classical and popular sources to accompany screenings of itsﬁlms, and a range of similar suggestions began to appear in the trade press.A major motivation behind this initiative was the apparent ineptitude ofmany movie-theatre pianists, amongst whom the standard of proﬁciencywas wildly variable. Few intelligent movie-goers seemed to agree with JeanCocteau’s opinion that ‘one can only love this pianist who created sound cin-
ema’ (quoted in Lacombe and Porcile 1995, 27). London recounted a typicalexample of what was undoubtedly wid espread audience dissatisfaction with
shoddy accompaniments:
a man in a cinema audience . . . had been sitting in long-suffering silence
while a very bad pianist accompanied the ﬁlm. When the heroine was aboutto seek an end of her troubles by plunging to a watery grave, he called out toher image on the screen, in a voice full of disgust: ‘Take the pianist with you,while you’re about it!’ (London 1936, 41)
In France, mediocre pianists were so commonplace that they had their own
name ( tapeurs ).
Cue sheets were supplemented by, and sometimes made speciﬁc refer-
ence to, more substantial published anthologies of motion-picture musicthat were organized by mood or dramatic type. In France, no fewer than30 such anthologies were available by 1910, and some original pieceswere specially commissioned for this purpose (Lacombe and Porcile 1995,
30–1 )–ap r o c e d u r e that adumbrated the modern practice of setting
up music libraries from which pre-existing cues can be sourced rela-tively cheaply. One of the ﬁrst anthologies to appear in America wasGregg A. Frelinger’s Motion Picture Piano Music , issued in 1909. Another
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16 A history of ﬁlm music
American pioneer of these publications was Max Winkler, who persuaded
his employer, the New Y ork publisher Carl Fischer, to back the issuing of cuesheets; Winkler claimed this occurred in 1912 but Altman has demonstratedthis date to be erroneous, the relevant initiative having probably dated fromas late as 1916 by which time many other rivals were involved in similarenterprises (Altman 2004, 346–7). In Winkler’s own much-quoted words,‘extracts from great symphonies and operas were hacked down to emerge as“Sinister Misterioso” by Beethoven, or “Weird Moderato” by Tchaikovsky’(Max Winkler 1951, 10). A popular favourite was Rossini’s William Tell
overture, which proved ideal for chases or what were termed ‘hurry’ scenes,while Beethoven’s Coriolanus overture was deemed ‘suitable for tree-felling
or lumber-rolling’ (Irving 1943, 225).
In 1913 John S. Zamecnik, a former pupil of Dvo ˇr´ak’s, published a collec-
tion of 23 original keyboard cues as the ﬁrst volume of a series entitled The
Sam Fox Moving Picture Music , his approach to the task showing a typical
predilection for short repeated segments. Other American publishers whoprovided scores and parts for movie music were G. Schirmer and MorsePreeman. In 1916, Walter C. Simon conceived a novel ‘Phototune’ formatin which eleven different eight- or sixteen-bar keyboard compositions weresuperimposed in a single-page chart, the principal barlines extending unbro-ken from the top to the foot of the page to show the alignment, and relatedkeys used ‘to enable the musician to instantly jump from place to placeon the sheet as may be desired’ (facsimile in Altman 2004, 264). GiuseppeBecce’s Kinothek (its title a contraction of ‘Kinobibliothek’), published in
instalments in Berlin in 1919 and in the USA by Belwin, was a seminalanthology, and Becce later collaborated with Hans Erdmann and LudwigBrav to produce the encyclopaedic Allgemeines Handbuch der Filmmusik in
1927. In 1924 Ern ¨oR a p ´ee, a Hungarian with wide experience of musical
direction in cinemas both in Europe and the USA, issued in New Y ork hisMotion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists , and followed this a year
later with an Encyclopaedia of Music for Pictures .R a p ´ee recognized a general
paradox of ﬁlm music, to which attention is still often drawn today:
If you come out of the theatre almost unaware of the musical
accompaniment to the picture you have just witnessed, the work of themusical director has been successful. Without music the present dayaudience would feel utterly lost. With it they should obtain an addedsatisfaction from the show, and still remain unconscious of the very thingwhich has produced that satisfaction. (quoted in Lack 1997, 34)
Several of the themes and techniques popularized by cue sheets and
anthologies such as Rap ´ee’s, many of which were directly inherited from
melodrama, became clich ´es that remain ﬁrmly in the popular imagination:
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17 The ‘silent’ cinema
for example, diminished-seventh chords for villains, ‘weepie’ love themes
on solo violin and the bridal march from Wagner’s Lohengrin for wedding
scenes. The last was brutally dismissed by Adorno and Eisler: ‘The per-son who around 1910 ﬁrst conceived the repulsive idea of using the BridalMarch from Lohengrin as an accompaniment is no more of a historical ﬁgure
than any other second-hand dealer’ (Adorno and Eisler 1994 [1947], 49).Diminished-seventh harmony was routinely used for scenes of evil and vil-lainy, as shown by a typical cue entitled ‘Treacherous Knave (Villain Theme,Rufﬁans, Smugglers, Conspiracy)’ composed by Zamecnik for The Sam Fox
Moving Picture Music in 1927 (facsimile in Kalinak 1992, 62). The impor-
tance of this simple chord, already long outdated in concert music, as amelodramatic device was outlined by a pianist in Anthony Burgess’s novelThe Pianoplayers (1986) recalling the basic instructions he had received from
his mentor as he embarked on the art of silent-ﬁlm accompaniment:
Here’s a chord you can’t do without, he said, if you’re a picture palace
pianoplayer. Y ou use it for ﬁghts, burst dams, thunderstorms, the voice ofthe Lord God, a wife telling her old man to bugger off out of the house andnot come back never no more. And he showed me . . . Always the same likedangerous sound, he said, as if something terrible’s going to happen or ishappening (soft for going to happen, loud for happening) . . . and you canarpeggio them to make them like very mysterious.
(quoted in Kershaw 1995, 125)
‘Soft for going to happen, loud for happening’ was to remain an absolutely
fundamental approach to dynamics in much later ﬁlm music.
So-called ‘special music’ , expressly designed to accompany speciﬁc ﬁlms,
became more common after c.1910. The idea originated in the use of musi-
cal extracts to accompany highly compressed silent ﬁlms of popular operas,which may be one reason why the subsequent development of ﬁlm musicwas so indebted to operatic prototypes. In 1911, for example, the commer-cially successful Italian ﬁlm Dante’s Inferno appropriated music from Boito’s
Meﬁstofele (Marks 1997, 73–4). In the same year, the Kalem Company in
the USA commissioned the ﬁrst sustained series of special piano scores,featuring the work of Walter C. Simon, an experienced theatre musicianwho also published a Progress Course of Music for budding cinema pianists.
Simon’s highly sectionalized scores, which included one for the three-reelArrah-Na-Pogue (dir. Sidney Olcott, 1911), juxtaposed arrangements and
original compositions, consolidating existing performance practices. Manyof the items were structured on the principle that short segments could berepeated ad lib . until a visual cue (e.g. an intertitle card) prompted a shift
to a new musical idea. Kalem’s venture was followed in 1913 by a similarseries of piano scores issued by Vitagraph. From c.1916 onwards there was a
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18 A history of ﬁlm music
proliferation of ‘photoplay’ library music arranged for ﬂexible instrumen-
tation (ranging from large orchestras down to a violin-and-piano duo orsolo piano as a bare minimum), taking the form of both classical extractsand original cues based on compositional principles similar to those in theearly keyboard anthologies. Prominent composers and arrangers of suchlibrary music were Ernst Luz (Photoplay Music Co.), Zamecnik (Sam FoxPhotoplay Edition), J. C. Breil (Sc hirmer) and Otto Langey (Chappell).
Although such music was offered at competitive prices, and some of it was
evidently geared towards players of limited abilities (the difﬁculty of sight-reading more elaborate ‘special’ scores in advanced keys having been onefactor which inhibited the widespread adoption of accompaniments basedon complex classical repertoire), interest in the idea was not as widespreadas might have been predicted, since many projection venues continued toarrange their own music to cut costs. Similarly, as ﬁlm music developedduring the sound era so studios came to realize that commissioning originalmusic was often cheaper than having to pay to use copyright material ormeet reproduction fees on existing recordings.
V enues and ensembles
The often modestly appointed nickelodeons were very different from theluxurious picture palaces that became prominent in the second decade ofthe twentieth century. The ﬁrst venue of this kind, the Omnia-Path ´e, opened
in Paris in December 1906; nearly ﬁve years later, the former hippodrome atPlace Clichy was transformed into the 3,400-seat Gaumont-Palace, featuringa Cavaill ´e-Coll organ and, at the venue’s inauguration on 11 October 1911,
an orchestra of 60 conducted by Henri Fosse. A description of a Gaumont-Palace programme from January 1913 reveals that an orchestral overturewas followed by the screening of short actualit´ es(including a colorized
documentary about butterﬂies) and a comedy ﬁlm, followed by an orchestralentr’acte , after which came more documentaries and a two-part ﬁlm about
Napoleon (Lacombe and Porcile 1995, 22, 27). The ﬁrst of the gargantuanAmerican picture palaces was the Strand on Broadway, New Y ork, whichopened in 1914 and could also seat in excess of 3,000 spectators; its musicwas provided by a 30-piece orchestra and enormous Wurlitzer organ.
In keeping with the grandeur of the viewing facilities, serious narra-
tive ﬁlms had grown considerably longer in duration and more sumptu-ous in their production values. Most early movies were only one reel inlength, a single reel holding up to 1,000 feet of ﬁlm stock and running forapproximately ﬁfteen minutes at the projection speed of sixteen frames persecond often used in silent ﬁlms (though shooting and projection speeds
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19 The ‘silent’ cinema
could vary considerably: see Brownlow 1980). As multi-reel ‘feature’ ﬁlms
became popular, so narrative continuity became even more important andthe more lavish production values seemingly cried out for correspondinglyelaborate musical accompaniment. It was not uncommon to exploit the per-formance space by using antiphonal effec ts, such as the locating of trumpets
at the rear of the hall to provide an echo device in a Belfast tour of The Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse (dir. Rex Ingram, 1921), screenings of which also
featured special sound effects to suggest the hooves of the galloping horses(Huntley [1947], 27–8). Prestigious screenings were sometimes mountedin revered theatrical venues. For example, Eugene Goossens conducted theLondon Symphony Orchestra in the Royal Opera House for the screening ofa silent version of The Three Musketeers (dir. Fred Niblo), starring Douglas
Fairbanks and shown in the USA with a score by Louis Gottschalk. For theLondon show, part of a season of silent epics mounted at the opera houseby United Artists in 1921–2, Goossens based his compilation score heavilyon the work of August Enna, an obscure composer whose music ‘ﬁtted any-thing, and also conveyed a spurious impression of great emotional depth,making it very suitable for my purpose’ (quoted in Kershaw 1995, 128; seealso Morrison 2004, 176). In 1926, a silent ﬁlm of Richard Strauss’s operaDer Rosenkavalier was shown in the Dresden Opera House, not in a popular
projection venue – as Adorno and Eisler, who were disturbed by the culturalimplications of the venture, might well have preferred it to have been (seeChapter 4). In 1925, the Paris Op ´era hosted the premi `ere of Pierre Marodon’s
ﬁlm Salammbˆ o, featuring music by Florent Schmitt, and two years later
the same venue screened Abel Gance’s Napol´ eon(see below), with a lavish
accompaniment featuring live actors and full chorus. In New Y ork, the ﬁnestﬁlm-related musical performances were those masterminded by respectedmusic director Hugo Riesenfeld at picture palaces that rivalled opera housesin their opulence; his classical credentials as a former leader of the ViennaOpera and the Metropolitan Opera orchestras were impeccable.
Instrumental ensembles resident in movie theatres of varying sizes
ranged from duos (e.g. violin and piano, or piano and drums), throughsmall groups of ﬁve or six players up to (by the 1920s) large orchestras with40 players or more – the formation of the latter in major cities in both theUSA and Europe sometimes resulting in a dwindling of the ranks of lead-ing symphony orchestras. A lone pianist might be employed to accompanyﬁlms during the week, with an ensemble brought in for better-attendedweekend shows or to launch a high-proﬁle new picture. Some featuredsoloists, especially violinists and ‘funners’ who specialized in witty musicalcommentaries, commanded considerable popular followings in their ownright (Berg 1976, 244–5). The small ensembles were often versatile. Cinemaorganist Gaylord Carter recalled:
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20 A history of ﬁlm music
The ﬁrst thing you had to have, if you had any kind of a combo, was the
drummer. So you could get the punches and riﬂe shots and cataclysmicthings like an earthquake. Y ou’d need a trumpet for bugle calls. And it wouldb en i c et oh a v eac l a r i n e t…Y o uh a dt oh a v eu s u a l l yo n ev iolin and a second
violin. Y ou wouldn’t have a viola, but you’d have a cello and maybe a bass.
(interviewed in McCarty 1989, 49–50)
Violas were considered to be a dispensable luxury (London 1936, 46), and
they are still often omitted in the string arrangements of modern ﬁlmscores, which may feature just one rather than the two violin lines cus-tomary in classical orchestras. Percussion was absolutely vital in providingonomatopoeic effects. According to a contemporaneous report, a resource-ful percussionist at the Bijou Dream theatre in New Y ork in 1909 made thescreen characters appear to ‘talk, almost; they groan, they laugh, kiss, whisperunder his magic touch’ (Marks 1997, 67). Comic drumming effects in par-ticular were a direct holdover from vaudeville. Alberto Cavalcanti noticedthat percussive effects could produce a far greater impact than realisticsounds:
An airplane was ﬂying towards us [on screen]. The music director ‘cut’ the
orchestra, and a strange, frightsome sound began, and got louder andlouder. It was nothing like an airplane, but very frightening. When I gothome I was still wondering how this noise was done. Then I got it. It was anoise I had known all my life – an open cymbal beaten with two soft-headeddrumsticks. How familiar! Y et it had lost its identity, and retained only itsdramatic quality, used in conjunction with the picture. Pictures are clear andspeciﬁc, noises are vague. The picture had changed a cymbal noise into anair-noise. That is why noise is so useful. It speaks directly to the emotions.
(Weis and Belton 1985, 109)
As Altman has shown (1996, 698–9), production of musical sound effects
was by no means restricted to the drummer, and the piano proved to beequally versatile in capable hands: such die getic effects appear to have dom-
inated accompanying music in c.1908–12.
Resident music directors were variously referred to as music illustra-
tors, ﬁtters or synchronizers – the last term then used differently from itsmodern application, in that synchronization was more a matter of ﬁndingmusic of exactly the right length for a particular scene rather than attempt-ing to tie its details to speciﬁc on-screen events (Kalinak 1992, 58). Musicdirectors were responsible for arranging and conducting appropriate reper-
toire drawn either from the classical extracts or short original pieces pub-lished in anthologies, from cue sheets, or preparing freshly selected passages;such pre-existing material might be linked by specially composed or impro-vised transitions. The fact that music was often accorded a high degree of
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21 The ‘silent’ cinema
importance is shown by the working practice of Riesenfeld, who habitually
edited segments of ﬁlm himself or had the projector run at variable speedsso that the images would ﬁt better with the musical extracts he had selected(Buhrman 1920).
Photoplayers and cinema organs
Silent-ﬁlm pianists had frequently struggled with inferior instruments andlimited technique, one journal’s editorial making a plea that nickelodeonpianos should either be tuned or burnt – and preferably replaced by instru-mental groups ( Moving Picture World , 3 July 1909). The piano and hum-
ble harmonium were supplanted in grander venues by mechanical key-board instruments (photoplayers) which exploited up-to-date pneumaticand electric technology to include integrated sound-effect mechanisms,and then by specialized and highly versatile cinema organs, of which notedmanufacturers included Compton, Marr and Colton, Robert Morton, Estey,Barton and Moller. The most imposing organs were made by Kimball andWurlitzer, both regarded as status symbols for any venue prosperous enoughto be able to afford them. Wurlitzer became involved in the motion-pictureindustry in 1909 when they found an application for their mechanical instru-ments as vehicles for nickelodeon ballyhoo, but from 1910 onwards theydevoted attention to the cinema organ and by 1916 organ sales had begunto overtake the dwindling demand for photoplayers (Altman 2004, 335). Atthe grand end of the spectrum was the Kimball organ at the Roxy Theatre,New Y ork, originally planned to have been played by no fewer than ﬁveorganists seated at ﬁve independent consoles – an ambitious scheme laterreduced to three performers, who nevertheless still had at their disposal atotal of eleven manuals and three pedal boards operating in excess of 300stops.
Most theatre organs had at least two manuals, and the console could
often be raised and lowered on a special elevator for added visual impact;translucent panels were designed to reveal patterns of coloured lights withinthe instrument’s casing, and this enhanced the sense of virtuosic show-manship. Capacity for mechanical sound effects was considerable andcould include the sounds of surf, hail, aeroplanes, birds, various whis-tles (e.g. police, train and steamboat), horses’ hooves, ﬁre gong, klaxonhorn, electric bell and a crockery-smashing effect comprising ‘a clev-erly devised electro-pneumatic crane which literally drops metal plates
onto a metal surface below’ (Whitworth 1954, 308). Cavalcanti scathinglyobserved that the provision of such novelties ‘will give you some ideaof the absurdity of referring to “the great days of the silent cinema”’
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22 A history of ﬁlm music
(Weis and Belton 1985, 101). Genuine untuned percussion instruments
(traps) were operated by thumb and toe pistons, with tuned percussion(various metallophones, chimes and xylophones) played via the keyboards.Ranks of pipes might be disposed antiphonally on opposing sides of the pro-jection screen, and the enormous Christie instrument at London’s MarbleArch Odeon even included full-length 32
/primereeds.
In many venues both organist and orchestra would be involved in per-
formances, with the organist playing a reduction of the orchestral musicfor matin ´ees and participating with the orchestra in the evening shows; it
was common practice for the organist gradually to start playing after theorchestra had been in action for 30–45 minutes, allowing the instrumen-talists to drop out one by one and take a break before reassembling for agrand ﬁnale (McCarty 1989, 24). The organist might also be called upon toprovide improvised transitional passages between orchestral items. Organ-ists were primarily required to imitate orchestral effects, and those whosounded as if they were playing in church were unpopular. Among the mostrespected American organists during the 1920s were Gaylord Carter, MiltonCharles, Jesse Crawford, Lloyd Del Castillo, Ann Leaf, John Muri, Henry B.Murtagh, Albert Malotte and Alexander Schreiner, and their art was takensufﬁciently seriously for the Eastman School of Music in Rochester to befounded speciﬁcally to provide instruction in it (McCarty 1989, 45), withsimilar training provided by special schools in other American cities. Regi-nald Foort made history by giving a radio broadcast from the organ of theNew Gallery Cinema in London’s Regent Street in 1926 and, along withartists such as Quentin Maclean and Firmen Swinnen, helped establish thecinema organ as a concert instrument in its own right.
The many composers and musicians who beneﬁted from apprenticeships
as silent-ﬁlm accompanists on piano and/or organ included composers suchas Jacques Ibert in France; Dmitri Kabalevsky, Dmitri Shostakovich andDimitri Tiomkin in the Soviet Union; and, in America, jazz musicians CountBasie and Fats Waller. The cinema organ survived well into the sound era,but playing standards continued to vary wildly. As late as the early 1950s,one commentator lamented (in terms equally applicable to commercial ﬁlmmusic in general) that
the music demanded from the cinema organist by managements is only too
often cheap and tawdry. Frequently it is associated with songs of a sicklysentimentality that has fostered an abuse of the tremulant and a paucity ofregistration . . . Managers have a habit of insisting that this is the kind ofthing the public demands, forgetting or choosing to overlook thatpicture-going audiences do not know what they want, but accept what theyare given and imagine it must be good if it is played to so large a public.
(Whitworth 1954, 309)
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23 The ‘silent’ cinema
Music for silent epics
Among the most ambitious ﬁlms distributed on the eve of the First World
War were the Italian historical epics that took the movie-going world bystorm in 1913–14. Quo vadis? (dir. Enrico Guazzoni, 1913) occupied nine
reels and for its New Y ork screenings in 1914 was furnished with a scorecompiled from music by composers such as Gounod, Puccini and Wagnerby exhibitor Samuel L. Rothapfel. Though musically uneducated, ‘Roxy’Rothapfel was a sensitive businessman who felt that clich ´ed and over-
familiar music should be avoided, as should novelty trap drumming andgratuitous sound effects; his quest for musical quality seems to have beensuccessful, since one reviewer remarked that the admission price for Quo
vadis? was justiﬁed by the music alone (Marks 1997, 97). The Punic War
epic Cabiria (dir. Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) was even more lavish, occupying
twelve reels and shot to a massive budget with thousands of extras. It wasfurnished in Italy with a score compiled by Manlio Mazza from popularclassics linked by modulatory passages. For American showings of the ﬁlm,Mazza’s score was adapted by Joseph Carl Breil, a composer of incidentalmusic for stage plays who had compiled scores for various ﬁlms d’art in
1911–13, among them the famous Sarah Bernhardt vehicle Queen Elizabeth
(dir. Louis Mercanton, 1912), for which Breil claimed his score was entirelyoriginal apart from its (anachronistic) use of the British national anthemto accompany the defeat of the Spanish Armada (Marks 1997, 102). Breil’sadapted score for Cabiria – which, like his music for Queen Elizabeth , fea-
tured leitmotivic construction – was an extravagant affair scored for largeorchestra and unseen chorus. It undoubtedly served as a useful preparationfor his subsequent and inﬂuential collaboration with the ground-breakingdirector D. W. Grifﬁth, whose reﬁnement of narrative editing techniquesand encouragement of a naturalistic style of acting established him as themost important ﬁlm-maker of the era.
Grifﬁth’s Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation (1915), costing in excess of
$100,000 and the longest ﬁlm so far made in the USA, met with phenom-enal success and considerable controversy arising from its racist content –which led to its being banned in numerous states and censored in others.The ﬁlm was ﬁrst screened (under the title The Clansman ) in Los Angeles
in February 1915 with a score compiled by Carli Elinor, who believed that‘there was no need for original music since so many good tunes had alreadybeen written’ (Darby and Du Bois 1990, 3). The theatre’s publicity proudlyproclaimed: ‘The arrangement and selection of the music for “The Clans-man” was accomplished after a diligent search of the music libraries of LosAngeles, San Francisco and New Y ork. T o select and cue the scenes it wasnecessary to run the twelve reels comprising the story eighty-four times;
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24 A history of ﬁlm music
and also to render a perfect score six complete full orchestral rehearsals
were necessary’ (facsimile in Marks 1997, 134). Composers whose work wasfeatured in Elinor’s compilation included Beethoven, Bizet, Flotow, Mozart,Offenbach, Rossini, Schubert, Supp ´e, Verdi and Wagner. A sextet of vocal
soloists joined the orchestra for certain items.
Breil’s hybrid score for this three-hour epic, partly original and partly
compiled, contained well over 200 individual musical cues and was ﬁrst usedwhen the ﬁlm was screened in New Y ork in March 1915. The score appearsto have been prepared under the close supervision of Grifﬁth himself, andincluded metronome markings as an aid to synchronization (Karlin 1994,161). The director evidently regarded the New Y ork opening as more impor-tant than the West Coast premi `ere, as suggested by reporter Grace Kingsley
in the Los Angeles Times (8 February 1915), who noted that Breil and Grifﬁth
were collaborating on the score for the upcoming New Y ork screenings andcommented that the music was to be
no less than the adapting of grand-opera methods to motion pictures! Each
character playing has a distinct type of music, a distinct theme as in opera.A more difﬁcult matter in pictures than in opera, however, inasmuch as anyone character seldom holds the screen long at a time. In cases where thereare many characters, the music is adapted to the dominant note or characterin the scene.
From now on special music is to be written in this manner for all the big
Grifﬁth productions.
Breil’s original cues included a theme for ‘The Bringing of the African to
America’ which took its lead from Dvo ˇr´ak in its use of syncopation and
hints of pentatonicism, several numbers in popular dance forms (with aclear penchant for waltz rhythm), an attempt to represent the diegetic musicsung by the character of Elsie Stoneman as she strums her banjo, and anamoroso love theme. Civil War songs appeared alongside extracts from the
classics, the most memorable of which was the use of Wagner’s ‘Ride of theValkyries’ to accompany the equestrian riders of the Ku Klux Klan. Accordingto actress Lillian Gish, director and co mposer argued intensely over the
‘Valkyrie’ material: Grifﬁth wanted some of the notes to be altered but Breilrefused to ‘tamper’ with Wagner, whereupon the director remarked that themusic was not ‘ primarily music’ but rather ‘music for motion pictures’; he
clinched his argument by noting that ‘E ven Giulio Gatti-Casazza, General
Director of the Metropolitan Opera, agreed that the change was ﬁne’ (Gishand Pinchot 1969, 152). Jane Gaines and Neil Lerner have demonstratedhow Breil’s syncopated ‘African’ theme (which acquired the label ‘Motif ofBarbarism’ when published in a piano album in 1916) was used throughout
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25 The ‘silent’ cinema
the ﬁlm to promote the image of black men as primitives (Abel and Altman
2001, 252–68). A simple repeated falling semitone in the bass was used topunctuate and create tension in the scene in which Gus preys on Flora, thistechnique looking ahead to modern economical scoring methods.
Breil’s love theme from The Birth of Nation met with success of its
own when it was entitled ‘The Perfect Song’ and furnished with lyrics forpublication; other selections from the score were issued in arrangementsfor piano and for ensemble. These were amongst the earliest commercialspin-offs in the history of ﬁlm music, and later silent-ﬁlm scores began toinclude a ‘big theme’ in an attempt to cash in on the marketability of suchmaterial. By 1927, the abuse of ‘theme scores’ had become so acute that onecommentator lamented the ﬁlm composer’s tendency towards ‘ theme-ing
an audience to death’ (quoted in Altman 2004, 376). In an early exam-ple of using ﬁlm tie-ins to sell independent popular songs, the faces ofCharlie Chaplin and other movie stars began to be featured on the coversof sheet music, no matter how tenuous the connection between music andﬁlm (Barrios 1995, 106). Major hit songs from ﬁlm scores began with thetheme song to Mickey (dir. F. Richard Jones and James Y oung, 1918; music
by Neil Moret), and towards the end of the silent era million-copy saleswere achieved by Rap ´ee’s songs ‘Charmaine’ and ‘Diane’ , from What Price
Glory? (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1926) and Seventh Heaven (dir. Frank Borzage,
1927) respectively: the trend continued with hit songs from the Jolson vehi-cleThe Singing Fool during the transition to pre-recorded soundtracks (see
Chapter 2).
Breil’s and Grifﬁth’s collaboration on Intolerance (1916) failed to equal
either the artistic or commercial success of The Birth of a Nation in spite of a
grossly excessive budget of nearly $2 millio n. Other joint projects included
The White Rose (1923) and America (1924); Breil also contributed original
music to ﬁlms by other directors, including The Birth of a Race (dir. John
W. Noble, 1918). In 1930, after the introduction of the sound ﬁlm, a com-pressed version of The Birth of a Nation was released with a synchronized
orchestral score adapted from Breil’s by Louis Gottschalk, who had beenresponsible for the music for several of Grifﬁth’s later silent ﬁlms (includingThe Fall of Babylon , 1919). The familiarity of Breil’s score for The Birth of a
Nation on both sides of the Atlantic led to an increased interest in the com-
position of original ﬁlm music, no doubt prompted by the realization thatthe more sophisticated narrative structuring pioneered by Grifﬁth seemedto demand more sophisticated accompaniment. Breil had shown how thecharacter of individual Wagnerian leitmotifs could be transformed to servedramatic developments: as he himself put it in 1921, ‘the motif must in itsfurther presentations be varied to suit the new situations. And the greatest
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26 A history of ﬁlm music
development of the theme must not appear in the early part of the score, but
towards the end where is the climax of the whole action’ (quoted in Marks1997, 156).
An entirely original score was composed for The Fall of a Nation (dir.
Thomas Dixon, 1916) by Victor Herbert who, like some later commen-tators, objected to the use of pre-existing classical music on account ofthe potential distraction it offered to an audience already familiar with thematerial. (However, as Mitry pointed out (1998, 31), visual images of famil-iar objects can just as easily conjure up distracting personal reactions in aviewer.) According to a review in Musical America , ‘Mr. Herbert’s stimu-
lating score clearly indicates the marked advance that music is making inthe domain of the photoplay and should prove encouraging to composerswho have not yet tried their hand at this type of work’ (quoted in Karlin1994, 161). The Fall of a Nation proved to be Herbert’s sole venture into ﬁlm
scoring, but others were more proliﬁc: among the notable composers of orig-inal scores in the USA were William Axt, Gottschalk, Henry Hadley, LeoKempinski, Ernst Luz, David Mendoza, Joseph Nurnberger (who suppliedan overture to Elinor’s score for Grifﬁth’s The Clansman ), William F. Peters,
Rap´ee, Riesenfeld, Victor Schertzinger (including a score for Thomas Ince’s
Civilization , 1916), Louis Silvers, Mortimer Wilson and Zamecnik. Several of
these had started their careers in ﬁlm as cue-sheet compilers, and some col-laborated with others in joint arrangements. A well-known pairing was Axtand Mendoza, who provided music for Ben-Hur (dir. Fred Niblo, 1925) and
many other Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer productions; such team efforts contin-ued as a familiar working pattern in Hollywood music departments duringthe early sound era. It remained common for individual ﬁlms to be screenedwith different scores in different locations: The Four Horsemen of the Apoc-
alypse , for example, was scored independently by Axt, Gottschalk, Luz and
Riesenfeld (McCarty 2000, 119). High-proﬁle original scores composed onthe eve of the advent of sound ﬁlms were Wilson’s The Thief of Bagdad
(dir. Raoul Walsh, 1924), and Riesenfeld’s The Covered Wagon (dir. James
Cruze, 1923), Beau Geste (dir. Herbert Brenon, 1926) and Sunrise (dir. F. W.
Murnau, 1927) – the last reissued with synchronized recorded music in thesame year as the phenomenal success of The Jazz Singer marked the demise
of the silent ﬁlm.
Although original scores were generally favourably received, Wilson’s
landmark contribution to The Thief of Bagdad was harshly criticized in one
review for its harmonic boldness that incorporated ‘bizarre extensions, aug-mentations, depleted sixteenths, vigorous minor forte passages and otherincongruous music idioms under the guise of oriental music’ , the com-plainant picking up on the press agent’s infelicitous hyperbole to ask: ‘Whenthe music of the world is at the disposal of an arranger and the libraries are
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27 The ‘silent’ cinema
rich in beautiful numbers, written by renowned composers, suitable for
accompanying such a delightfully fantastic picture, why worry any one manto write a new “note for every gesture”?’ (quoted in Anderson 1987, 288–9).
Charlie Chaplin and music for comedies
One successful director and star of silent ﬁlms who took music especiallyseriously was Chaplin, who began his acting career as a prot ´eg´eo ft h e
silent-comedy director Mack Sennett in 1913. In the following year Chaplinstarred in Sennett’s feature-length Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914), which
includes a scene inside a typical nickelodeon of the day, complete withpianist located to one side of the projection screen. Chaplin directed all hisown ﬁlms from 1915 onwards and the popularity of his baggy-trouseredtramp character earned him a million-dollar contract with First Nationalin 1917. Chaplin liked to control all parameters of his ﬁlms and as such canbe regarded as an early auteur director. A self-taught amateur musician, he
‘composed’ the music for many of his ﬁlms, believing (like many of the moredidactically inclined ﬁlm commentators of the time) that ﬁlmed entertain-ment could expose to good music audiences who might not otherwise beminded to listen to it. In reality, Chaplin depended heavily on the skillsof various orchestrators and arrangers in order to realize his sometimesprimitive musical raw material. On the evidence of the music by Eric Jamesand Eric Rogers accompanying the 1971 re-release of Chaplin’s directorialfeature debut, The Kid (1921), a characteristic mixture of physical comedy
and melodrama, the main ingredients were a sentimental lyricism, mock-sinister music for villains, circus slapstick for comic capers, a light operettastyle enlivened by occasional ragtime syncopations, folksy jauntiness, sten-torian pomposity and banal Edwardian waltzes. Use might also be made offamiliar song melodies appropriate to the plot: examples are to be found inArthur Kay’s score to The Circus (1928), prepared under Chaplin’s super-
vision at the time and reconstructed by Gillian Anderson in 1993. WilfridMellers, commenting on Chaplin’s recourse to banality as a source of pathos,described his music as a paradoxical ‘apotheosis of the trivial’ (Irving et al.
1954, 104).
After the advent of sound, Chaplin resisted dialogue but showed himself
keen to use synchronized music and sound effects in his ﬁlms; he claimedthe credit for the music of all seven of his sound features for United Artists,including City Lights (1931), The Great Dictator (1940) and Limelight (1952),
which won the Academy Award for Best Score when re-released in 1972. Heconfessed that a major advantage bestowed on his work by the sound ﬁlmwas the fact that he could now exert absolute control over the constitution
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28 A history of ﬁlm music
of the soundtrack and not be at the mercy of the exigencies of differing
projection venues, as was the case in the silent era. Among the composerswho assisted him were Arthur Johnston ( City Lights ), Meredith Willson
(The Great Dictator ), Raymond Rasch and Larry Russell ( Limelight ). Carl
Davis later paid tribute to the consistency of Chaplin’s ideas: ‘how is it thatthe Chaplin style maintains itself through widely differentiating and widelychanging arrangers? There is a line that goes through, no matter who isworking with him. He’s saying, “I like it like this,” he’s humming the tunes,he’s making the decisions about the harmonies and orchestrations. Thereare important lessons in melody and economy to be learned from Chaplin’smusic’ (quoted in E. James 2000, xv).
InModern Times (1936), silent segments featuring typical Chaplin
clowning were juxtaposed with sometimes satirical sound elements; the
1.2Charlie Chaplin (left) and David Raksin (right), reminiscing about their collaboration on
Modern Times (1936) after seeing a ﬁnal print of Limelight in 1952.
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29 The ‘silent’ cinema
elaborate score was conducted by Alfred Newman and arranged by Edward
Powell and newcomer David Raksin, who updated the silent-era idiom witha greater use of ostinato and dissonance. R aksin recalled the collaboration:
Charlie would come in with these musical ideas and we would work on
them together, because he didn’t read or write music. It’s a total mistake forpeople to assume that he did nothing. He had ideas. He would say, ‘No, Ithink we should go up here, or we should go down there ’…B u th eh a d
ﬁred me after a week and a half because he was not used to having anybodyoppose him. And I was just saying, ‘Listen, Charlie, I think we can do betterthan this.’ Eventually, he hired me back on my own terms.
(interviewed in R. S. Brown 1994, 285)
Raksin recalled the friction coming to a head when he dared to suggest
Chaplin’s old-time music-hall idiom was vulgar; after his reinstatement onthe project he spent hours with Chaplin developing musical sketches whilerunning the ﬁlm repeatedly in the projection room (Raksin 1985, 162).During the subsequent recordings sessions, Newman snapped his baton andrefused to work with Chaplin when the latter accused his exceptionally ﬁneorchestra of complacency: the sessions had to be completed by orchestratorEddie Powell, Raksin having sided with Newman in the dispute (Raksin1985, 170).
Newman’s and Raksin’s Chaplin-based score in places included examples
of a technique popularly known as ‘mic key-mousing’: illustrative musical
effects synchronized with speciﬁc events in a ﬁlm’s physical action. Theterm was derived from Walt Disney’s famous cartoon character (who ﬁrstappeared on screen in 1928), but the procedure had also been common inmusic for live action: animation had borrowed some of its musical tech-niques from the circus, vaudeville and silent live-action comedies such asthose starring Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Gaylord Carter providedorgan music for many of Lloyd’s ﬁlms in the later 1920s, and recalled howthe comedian instructed him to make effects with musical devices, suchas stinger chords, rather than resorting to realistic sound effects, and wellunderstood the power of music to bolster weaker moments in his ﬁlms:on one occasion Lloyd told the organist, ‘when they’re laughing, play soft.It’s when they’re notlaughing that I need you’ (McCarty 1989, 53–7). After
its initial popularity in serious sound ﬁlms of the Hollywood Golden Era,mickey-mousing became discredited for its essential redundancy and fre-quent crudity, and even as early as 1911 some commentators had expressedthe opinion that comedies were best played without musical accompani-ment to maximize their effectiveness (Altman 1996, 681).
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30 A history of ﬁlm music
Chaplin himself disliked mickey-mousing and strove to avoid it alto-
gether when adding synchronized music to his silent ﬁlms after his reloca-tion to Europe in 1952. Between 1958 and 1976 he worked in Switzerlandon new but old-fashioned scores to his classic comedies with his ‘musicassociate’ , Eric James, who was legally bound not to claim authorship ofany of the ﬁlms’ music – even when on their ﬁnal project he had to sug-gest virtually all the material to the ailing Chaplin (E. James 2000, 66,111–12). Like Raksin’s, James’s account of their collaboration reveals thatChaplin could not read music, nor play the piano with any more thanthree ﬁngers, and would messily thump out tunes on the keyboard orsing them, using a tape recorder to preserve his ideas if his music asso-ciate were not present at the time, so that they could be polished, har-monized and subsequently scored: the process often took an inordinatelength of time, with great attention paid to detail and much irascibilityon Chaplin’s part. An unusual form of shorthand, which demonstratedhow unoriginal his thematic style could be, was to jot down verbal aides-
m´emoire indicating, for example, ‘ﬁrst two notes of Grieg’s “Morning” , next
four notes, those in the opening bars of Liszt’s “Liebestr ¨aume”’ and so on
(E. James 2000, 71). His obsessive desire to control all aspects of the sound-track extended to personal interventions at recording sessions, on mattersconcerning both recording levels and aspects of scoring – James learning thatif he cued principal melodies into various alternative instruments’ perform-ing parts in advance it would save considerable time when Chaplin changedhis mind.
Early ﬁlm music in Europe and the Soviet Union
The early market dominance of French and Italian ﬁlm productions waschecked by the First World War, which effectively allowed Hollywood totake the lead, though for a time ﬁlm-making continued to ﬂourish in thoseScandinavian countries that took no part in the conﬂict. During the earlywar years, a major Hollywood studio could easily release several feature ﬁlmsper week, going on to make massive proﬁts through distribution practicessuch as enforced block-booking and the monopolization of theatre owner-ship. At the end of the First World War, 90 per cent of all ﬁlms shown inEurope were of American origin (D. Cook 2004, 41). As European cinemaregained its strength during post-war reconstruction, it was not uncom-mon for established composers of concert music to compose ﬁlm scoresfor major silent productions, this situation contrasting sharply with thatprevailing in the USA. As Bernard Herrmann once remarked of later Holly-wood practice, ‘America is the only country in the world with so-called “ﬁlm
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31 The ‘silent’ cinema
composers” – every other country has composers who sometimes do ﬁlms’
(quoted in Thomas 1997, 189).
In France, several prestigious scores accompanied bold ﬁlms made by
young avant-garde directors associated with the ﬁlm theorist Louis Delluc.One of the most memorable of these so-called ‘impressionist’ ﬁlms was Mar-cel L’Herbier’s L’inhumaine (1924), featuring a score by Darius Milhaud and
described by David Cook as ‘an essay in visual abstraction thinly disguisedas science-ﬁction; it ends with an apocalyptic montage sequence designedto synthesize movement, music, sound, and color [tinting]’ (D. Cook 2004,305). Swiss composer Arthur Honegger was asked to provide scores for AbelGance’s La Roue (1922), which Cocteau deemed to be as important to the
development of cinema as Picasso had been to the development of painting,andNapol´ eon(1927), a ﬁlm which Gance himself described as ‘music of light
which, gradually, will transform the great cinemas into cathedrals’ (Ballard
1990, xxi). According to Henri Colpi, Gance drew his cinematic inspirationfrom musical structures: he used musical notation to help him edit part ofLa Roue , this notation then being passed on to Honegger so that he could
match the ﬁlmic rhythm with appropriate music (R. S. Brown 1994, 20);but Honegger testiﬁed to Mitry that he in fact ‘ran out of time and did notcompose a single note for La Roue . He merely assembled an arrangement
with special sound effects’ (Mitry 1998, 384). Famously, the breathless edit-ing in the ﬁlm’s depiction of the rapid motion of a train inspired Honegger’smechanistic symphonic poem Paciﬁc 231 (1924), a score which later formed
the basis for ﬁlmic interpretations by Mikhail Tzekhanovsky (1933) and byMitry himself (1949). Before his collaboration with Honegger, Gance hadalready conducted notable experiments with the music for his ﬁlms, usingit as a potent structural tool: for example, in La Dixi` eme symphonie (1917;
music by Michel-Maurice L ´evy), the continuity of the score compensated
for, and complemented, the designedly bitty nature of the ﬁlm’s treatmentof the process of assembling a symphony worthy to succeed Beethoven’sNinth (Lack 1997, 36–7).
Gance had been strongly inﬂuenced by Grifﬁth’s Intolerance , both in
speciﬁc shooting and editing techniques and in a tendency towards mega-lomania. Napol´ eonoriginally ran to 28 reels in length, itself merely the ﬁrst
part of a planned six-ﬁlm cycle, and was designed to have images shown onthree screens simultaneously using the Polyvision process; Gance claimedthat he developed this triple-screen presentation in order to realize his ambi-tion that the ‘visual harmony’ and complexity of cinematic images shouldbecome directly analogous to a musical symphony (Lacombe and Porcile1995, 34). Similar parallels were drawn by other French ﬁlm-makers andtheorists such as Emile Vuillermoz (‘composition in the cinema is with-out a doubt subject to the conﬁned laws of musical composition. A ﬁlm is
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32 A history of ﬁlm music
written and orchestrated like a symphony’), L ´eon Moussinac (‘cinegraphic
rhythm . . . has an obvious counterpart in musical rhythm . . . the imagesbeing to the eye what the musical sounds are to the ear’), Germaine Dulac(‘only music is capable of stimulating the same sort of impression as the cin-e m a…t h ev i s u a li d e a…i s inspired by musical technique far more than any
other technique or ideal’) and L ´eopold Survage (‘The basis of my dynamic
art is colored visual form (serving a similar function to that of sound in
music)’: quotations from Mitry 1998, 111–13). Survage declared the struc-tural functions of musical and cinematic rhythm to be similar, though suchparallels were felt to be specious by Mitry and many others (Mitry 1998,118). Nevertheless, an overriding concern to achieve audio-visual ‘rhythm’was an explicit preoccupation in Gance’s screenplay for Napol´ eonand its
visual realization. While shooting, Gance had music played on set by a trioof violin, cello and organ, claiming (somewhat more prosaically) that it wasnecessary ‘not only to give the mood, but to keep everyone quiet. Y ou cancapture their attention more easily by the use of music. In the scene wherethe young Napoleon lies on the cannon . . . he had to cry in that scene. Hecouldn’t, until the musicians played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata ’ (quoted
in Anderson 1988, xlii). During editing, some elaborate montage sequenceswere cut to ﬁt music that had already been composed. The screenplay calledfor the Marseillaise and Dies irae to take starring roles: in a deleted scene,
the organist playing the latter ‘looks up with strange, terrible eye s…s t o p s
playing momentarily, and says in solemn, terrifying tones: “I am buryingthe Monarchy!”’ (Ballard 1990, 40). Later versions of the ﬁlm with synchro-nized sound featured a form of stereophonic reproduction for Honegger’sscore (D. Cook 2004, 308) and alternative music by Henry Verdun, a formersilent-ﬁlm pianist who hailed from the music halls and did not possess anacademic background (Lacombe and Porcile 1995, 48).
Erik Satie composed an idiosyncratic score for Entr’acte (dir. Ren ´e Clair,
1924), a short avant-garde ﬁlm, designed to be screened between the twoacts of Francis Picabia’s Dadaist ballet Relˆache , which (like many provocative
artistic events in Paris at the time) came close to provoking riots amongst itsﬁrst audiences. Satie not only composed the music: he also appeared in theﬁlm (as Milhaud was later to do in La P’tite Lilie ), clutching his umbrella and
appearing to jump off the terrace of the Th ´eˆatre des Champs-Elys ´ees. Surre-
alist and witty, the essentially non-narrative Entr’acte was matched by frag-
mentary music which, while referring ironically to contemporaneous pop-ular styles in places and wryly distorting Chopin’s Funeral March to accom-pany shots of a camel-drawn cort `ege, remained as detached and dispassion-
ate as its composer’s concert works (Marks 1997, 167–85). As Stravinsky latercommented of Satie’s importance to twentieth-century music in general, heopposed to ‘the vagueness of a decrepit impressionism a precise and ﬁrm
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33 The ‘silent’ cinema
language stripped of all pictorial embellishments’ (Stravinsky 1936, 93).
Satie’s music, which was revived in a synchronized re-release of Entr’acte
in 1967, was considerably ahead of its time in its use of obsessive repeti-tion (easier to synchronize than fully blown themes, as later ﬁlm composerswere to discover) and fragmentary, unrelated ideas in a kaleidoscopic auralmontage ideally suited to the creative dissolves, superimpositions and trick
photography of Clair’s cinematography. At times Satie chose to draw outthe black humour in the images: for example, popular dance-hall clich ´es
are heard when we see, in slow motion, the mourners cavorting behind thecort`ege. When they begin to run after the out-of-control hearse, however,
the music turns surprisingly sombre and eventually builds up an extraordi-nary momentum for the frenetic and dizzying rollercoaster ride with whichthe ﬁlm concludes. Some sense of autonomous structure is created by Satie’suse of a spiky and insistent ritornello ﬁgure for the full ensemble, servingas an obvious musical punctuation mark whenever it recurs.
Less adventurous composers active in the French silent cinema were
Marius Franc ¸ois Gaillard ( El Dorado , dir. L’Herbier, 1921), Roger Des-
ormi `ere ( A quoi rˆ event les jeunes ﬁlms? , dir. Henri Chomette, 1924), Henri
Rabaud ( Le Miracle des loups , dir. Raymond Bernand, 1924; Le Joueur
d’´echecs , dir. Bernand, 1925) and Yves de La Casini `ere, who collaborated
with Cavalcanti ( Rien que les heures , 1927; En Rade , 1928). Concert com-
poser Jacques Ibert provided music for Clair’s Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie
(1927), while Le Mensonge de Nina Petrovna (dir. Hanns Schwarz, 1929)
launched the career of Maurice Jaubert, celebrated in the 1930s as the doyenof French ﬁlm composers (see Chapter 8).
Cinema in Germany before the First World War featured substantial
compilation and hybrid scores, such as those by Joseph Weiss for Der Stu-
dent von Prag (dir. Stellan Rye, 1913), its Faustian scenario treated in a
refreshingly non-theatrical manner, and by Becce for Richard Wagner (dir.
Carl Froelich and William Wauer, 1913). Expressionism and Angst took
their hold on post-war German cinema after the impact of Das Cabinet des
Dr Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1919), which was screened in New Y ork
in 1921 with an unorthodox selection of modern music by Debussy, Mus-sorgsky, Richard Strauss, Prokoﬁev, Ornstein, Schoenberg and Stravinsky(Altman 2004, 315), all arranged by Rothapfel and Rap ´ee. Traditional com-
pilation scores continued to be prepared in Germany by Becce, Erdmannand Friedrich Holl ¨ander for the ﬁlms of F. W. Murnau (including Nosfer-
atu, 1922) and other seminal directors. Gottfried Huppertz prepared the
score for Fritz Lang’s Siegfried (1923), which retold the Wagnerian myth
without the accompaniment of Wagner’s music. Lang detested Wagner, andresented the addition of Wagnerian cues to the ﬁlm when it was shown out-side Germany (D. Cook 2004, 98): in the USA, for example, Siegfried was
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34 A history of ﬁlm music
screened in 1925 with a compilation score by Riesenfeld. Huppertz provided
lush music for Lang’s futuristic Metropolis (1927), couched in an expansive
idiom clearly inﬂuenced by Strauss and Zemlinsky but in places hinting atthe harmonic adventurousness of early Schoenberg. Rooted in leitmotivicprocedures, including use of pre-existing themes such as the Dies irae and
theMarseillaise (which is subjected to distortion when the underground
workers turn rebellious), Huppertz’s music includes mechanistic writingfor machinery, dark-hued textures for the subterranean setting, an opulentViennese waltz for ﬂirtation in the gardens, pulsating and struggling musicfor the building of the T ower of Babel, delicate love music, and atmosphericimpressionism for special effects such as the creation of the robot.
The Viennese composer Edmund Meisel achieved international fame
with his music for German screenings of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’scontroversial The Battleship Potemkin (1925). One of at least three indepen-
dent scores composed for the ﬁlm at the time, Meisel’s music remains thebest known on account of the scandal it created: its hard-hitting idiom wasdeemed sufﬁciently disturbing as to warrant suppression of the score in somecountries, including Germany. Eisenstein believed that Potemkin ’s specta-
tors should be ‘lashed into a fury’ by the music, and Meisel achieved this bycomposing aggressively percussive and militaristic cues that use repetitivematerial to powerful cumulative effect. As Alan Kriegsman commented ofthe combined impact of Eisenstein’s vivid imagery and Meisel’s score, ‘Forsheer visceral agitation, there is nothing in all ﬁlm history to rival it’ (quotedin Prendergast 1992, 14). In the words of an early American reviewer,
The score is as powerful, as vital, as galvanic and electrifying as the ﬁlm. It is
written in the extreme modern vein, cacophonies run riot, harmonies grate,crackle, jar; there are abrupt changes and shifts in the rhythm; tremendouschords crashing down, dizzy ﬂights of runs, snatches of half-forgottenmelodies, fragments, a short interpolation of jazz on a piano.
(New York Herald Tribune , 29 April 1928)
The writer noted, however, that the score was not bombastic throughout,
and he was particularly moved by a melody Meisel introduced to representthe people of Odessa: ‘It soars and endears itself to the heart. It is full ofgratitude and the love of man for man. It’s one of the warmest, tenderestpassages that has found its way into the cinema-music repertoire.’ Espe-cially impressive was the manner in which the combination of Eisenstein’smontage techniques and Meisel’s obsessive music manipulated the specta-tor’s temporal perceptions, as when a few seconds of real-time tension onthe Quarterdeck are stretched out to form an utterly compelling extendedclimax in the ﬁnal reel.
As evidenced by his later collaboration with Prokoﬁev (see Chapter
9), whose services he initially wished to acquire for Potemkin , Eisenstein
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35 The ‘silent’ cinema
believed in the necessity to establish a genre of ‘sound-ﬁlm’ in which the
music and images were governed by an interdependent audio-visual struc-ture far more sophisticated than the formulaic approach to scoring alreadyprevalent in the popular ﬁlm industry. But not all commentators were lavishwith their praise for the music of The Battleship Potemkin . The English com-
poser Constant Lambert declared that Meisel’s score was ‘a great improve-ment on the ordinary cinema music of the time, but it would be idle topretend that it was a worthy counterpart of the ﬁlm itself’ (Lambert 1934,223). While recognizing that Meisel was only a ‘modest composer’ andthat his score was ‘certainly not a masterpiece’ , the ever-elitist Adorno andEisler nevertheless praised him for avoiding a commercially viable idiomand noted that the music’s modernistic aggressiveness impacted powerfullyon the ﬁlm’s spectators (Adorno and Eisler 1994 [1947], 123–4).
Meisel also wrote music for Eisenstein’s October and Walter Ruttmann’s
experimental documentary Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (both 1927; for
the latter, see Chapter 7). Eisenstein drew attention to the audio-visual struc-tural parallel by which Meisel’s cue for the toppling of the statue of AlexanderIII in October was played in retrograde when the statue subsequently ‘ﬂew
back together’ (Taylor 1998, 181). In his music for Ilya Trauberg’s The Blue
Express (1929), Meisel used a jazz band, though the ﬁlm was in some coun-
tries accompanied by Honegger’s Paciﬁc 231 (Lambert 1934, 209). Meisel
was fascinated by the possibilities of sound montage, undertaking experi-mental work at Berlin’s German Film Research Institute and in 1927 issuing(on the Deutsche Grammophon label) r ecordings of onomatopoeic instru-
mental sound effects for ﬁlmic use; in 1930, shortly before his untimelydeath, he recorded his music for both Battleship Potemkin and Blue Express
for the purposes of sound-on-disc synchronization when the ﬁlms werere-released.
The development of cinema in the Soviet Union had been personally
encouraged by Lenin, who (for its propaganda value) regarded it as themost important of all art forms: ﬁlm production came under the control ofthe People’s Commissariat of Education in 1919, two years after all those whoworked in ﬁlm – including pianists – were organized into a trade union. As inother countries, Soviet silent ﬁlms could be accompanied by anything froma lone pianist up to a full orchestra of 60 players, as was to be found in Kiev’sShander cinema, where complete Tchaikovsky symphonies might be per-formed as part of the programme. Original but pastiche scores – one datingfrom as early as 1908 – were composed by Alexander Arkhangelsky, DmitriAstradantsev, Yuri Bakaleinikov, Igor Belza, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov andGeorgii Kazachenko (Robinson 1990, 46–9; Egorova 1997, 5–7). Musical cuesheets proliferated in the early 1920s, the Soviet ﬁlm industry having accel-erated production in the wake of the enormously successful importation ofGrifﬁth’s Intolerance .
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36 A history of ﬁlm music
Shostakovich, the most famous musician who worked in the Soviet silent
cinema, initially gained valuable experience as a pianist at the Bright Reel,Splendid Palace and Piccadilly theatres in Leningrad, where he worked inthe mid-1920s in order to support his family. Later he composed a ﬂam-boyant orchestral score for The New Babylon , directed by Grigori Kozintsev
and Leonid Trauberg in 1929; as was the case with Saint-Sa ¨ens’ score for
L’assassinat du Duc de Guise , the music was made available in a version
for solo piano for use in small venues. According to Kozintsev, ‘we at oncecame to an agreement with the composer that the music was to be con-nected, not with the exterior action but with its purport, and develop inspite of the events, regardless of the mood of the scene’ (quoted in Egorova1997, 8). For this reason, Shostakovich in places supplied what might onthe surface have appeared to be anempathetic accompaniment: in an articlebemoaning the impoverished state of much ﬁlm music, the composer drewattention to a scene in an empty restaurant at the end of the second reelwhich is overlaid with music depicting the imminent onslaught of the Prus-sian cavalry, and to a moment in the seventh reel in which the music depictsthe melancholy and anxiety of a soldier, not the merry-making by whichhe is surrounded (Shostakovich 1981, 23; Pytel 1999, 26). Synchronizationbetween image and music is notable during a seminal scene in the sixth reelin which piano music by Tchaikovsky is supplied for a diegetic keyboardmeditation; however, as Fiona Ford has noted in her unpublished study ofthe ﬁlm’s musical sources, by building repeated material and pauses intothe score at appropriate places Shostakovich afforded the conductor sev-eral ‘recovery opportunities’ so that image and music would not come todiverge too uncontrollably in live performance (Ford 2003, 39). Typical ofits composer’s early style and replete with sardonic parodies of popularidioms, including several slick waltzes to characterize the bourgeoisie andcircus-like galops reminding the listener that Soviet ﬁlm in the silent eraremained deeply rooted in the cinema of attractions, Shostakovich’s scoremade effective use of famous melodies such as Offenbach’s can-can (fromOrpheus in the Underworld ) and the Marseillaise , these being appropriate to
the ﬁlm’s French setting; no fewer than three songs from the French Revo-lution are used to support the Soviet ideology underlying the ﬁlm’s action.The Marseillaise had previously been used by Meisel (for a similar reason)
inPotemkin .
In spite – or perhaps because – of its visual and musical interest, The New
Babylon was not a success. Audiences found the ﬁlm and its music incom-
prehensible, and some alleged that Shostakovich had been drunk when hecomposed the score. Like Potemkin , international paranoia resulted in the
banning of the ﬁlm in various countries. In the Soviet Union, Shostakovich’soverly challenging music was quickly ditched, and thus one of the most
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37 The ‘silent’ cinema
intriguing and original scores of the silent era lay forgotten until its revival
in the 1970s (see below).
The strong tradition of artistic ind ependence from international styles
that characterized the German and Soviet silent cinemas was the excep-tion rather than the rule. Elsewhere the global market was dominated byﬁlms imported from the USA, and (to a lesser extent) inﬂuential Euro-pean countries such as France, Germany, Italy and the UK; in less powerfulcountries, indigenous cinema and its associated ﬁlm music inevitably strug-gled to come into existence during the silent era. A typical example was thesituation in Greece. Film music in the silent era was here considered notfor its aesthetic value, but principally as a means of luring audiences intocinemas; lavish orchestral accompaniments were reserved almost exclu-sively for American ﬁlms featuring famous stars, with native Greek ﬁlmsusually having to make do with a pianist, sometimes with the addition oftwo to three instruments and perhaps a singer (Mylon ´as 2001, 22, 197).
The high-proﬁle nature of music for imported ﬁlms was perpetuated bythe fact that these ﬁlms made the most money, thus readily permittingcinemas to ﬁnance the often costly orchestras required: one of the mostpopular ensembles serving this function in c.1914–15 was that directed by
I´annis Krass ´as at the Kyv ´elis cinema in Athens. By the end of the silent
era, Krass ´as was music director at the capital’s P ´antheon cinema, where his
contribution still mainly consisted of conducting popular classical pieces
(such as overtures by Adam, Supp ´e and Rossini) as simple introductions
and interludes to each ﬁlm screened; there was no direct link between thesubject-matter of the music and the subject-matter of the picture. OriginalGreek ﬁlm music ﬁrst emerged in 1917 when The ´ofrastos Sakellar ´ıdis wrote
a score for the Italian ﬁlm operetta The Nine Stars and, in the following year,
Dion ´ysios Lavr ´azas composed original music for voices and a fourteen-piece
ensemble to accompany the imported ﬁlm Pierrot’s Ring . Sakellar ´ıdis went
on to compose music for two more foreign ﬁlms, Daughter of the Waves
and Barbara, Daughter of the Desert – the latter featuring an original song
entitled ‘Kam ´omata’ (‘Antics’), which became a popular attraction and was
featured by Krass ´as at the P ´antheon in 1928–9. The ﬁrst original score for a
Greek silent ﬁlm was that by Man ´olis Skoulo ´udis for Daphnis and Chlo¨ e(dir.
Or´estes L ´askos, 1931), partly based on ‘archaic motifs’; but by this time the
sound cinema had already made its way to Greece (Mylon ´as 2001, 18–23).
Postlude: the silent-ﬁlm revival
The ﬂexibility of sound provision in the silent cinema made the medium
unpredictable, with ﬁlms never shown in precisely the same way on more
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38 A history of ﬁlm music
than one occasion. This spontaneity was immediately lost once synchro-
nized soundtracks were permanently ﬁxed onto ﬁlm stock in the 1930s; but,although it may have seemed so to pessimists at the time, the loss was notirrevocable. Connoisseurs of silent cinema long lamented the sound era’sinevitable neglect of ﬁlm as an art enhanced by live sound, and variousattempts were made to reinstate something of this abandoned dimension:the experimental ﬁlm-maker Ken Jacobs, for example, mixed pre-recordedand live sound in screenings of his work (Weis and Belton 1985, 370), whileWarhol, in The Chelsea Girls (1966), used two screens, one silent and the
other with sound. Film-music scholars soon afterwards began to resurrectthe glories of the silent era by embarking on a systematic preservation ofhistoric scores, and this initiative was subsequently enhanced by the creativework of numerous composers – many of whom were born long after thedemise of the silent cinema – commissioned to provide classic silent ﬁlmswith new music that at once tapped into the strengths of the old traditionand made the works seem more relevant to the modern age.
Landmark authentic scores for silent ﬁlms were reconstructed, by schol-
ars and performers such as Gillian Anderson and Dennis James, not merelyto languish in historical archives but more importantly for resurrection inlive performance in conjunction with screenings of the images for whichthey were originally prepared. Anderson’s ﬁrst such project was a recreationin 1979 of Victor Alix’s and L ´eo Pouget’s score to one of the last great classics
of the silent era, The Passion of Joan of Arc (dir. Carl-Theodor Dreyer, 1928);
her later reconstructions included Breil’s score for Intolerance and Wilson’s
forThe Thief of Bagdad . James resurrected the art of the cinema organist in
a series of screenings at Indiana University, the Ohio Theatre and elsewherefrom 1969 onwards, and in 1971 reconstructed the score to Grifﬁth’s Broken
Blossoms (1919); he worked on many other reconstructions and live organ
accompaniments, including music for Gance’s Napol´ eon(McCarty 1989,
61–79). Many historic scores were systematically catalogued and preserved atnational and university archives in the USA, with some institutions (notablyNew Y ork’s Museum of Modern Art) committed to mounting live perfor-mances of them to accompany showings of the relevant ﬁlms. High-proﬁletours that married screenings and live orchestral accompaniment becamerelatively common, an important example being the exposure accorded toShostakovich’s music for The New Babylon : commercially recorded for the
ﬁrst time (in the form of a suite) by Soviet conductor Gennadi Rozhdestven-sky in 1976, Shostakovich’s complete score was relaunched with the ﬁlm atthat year’s Paris Film Festival and was widely performed live to accompanyscreenings in both Europe and the USA in 1982–3. At around the sametime, the performing parts for Meisel’s Battleship Potemkin music were dis-
covered, permitting this seminal score to be reconstructed (Kalinak 1983).
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39 The ‘silent’ cinema
Silent ﬁlms were revived earlier than this within the Soviet Union, some-
times with memorable results: a new score to Potemkin was composed by
Nikolai Kryukov in 1950, and in 1967 a surprisingly effective score compiled(by others) from pre-existing orchestral works by Shostakovich accompa-nied a re-release of October on the occasion of the ﬁftieth anniversary of
the Revolution, the composer’s propulsive ostinato textures ﬁtting well withimages such as the rapid jump cuts conveying the stuttering of machine-gun ﬁre and here proving just as agitational as Meisel’s Potemkin . Simi-
larly, a new score for Potemkin was fashioned from parts of Shostakovich’s
symphonies when the ﬁlm was restored to mark its ﬁftieth anniversary in1975.
New scores were widely commissioned in the 1980s to accompany re-
releases of silent ﬁlms in theatrical, televisual and video formats. Carl Davisscored Napol´ eon(1980) for Thames T elevision and the British Film Insti-
tute, including some of Honegger’s original music, and received a standingovation at the London premi `ere (Ballard 1990, xiii); Davis also scored The
Thief of Bagdad (1984), Intolerance (1986) and the 1925 Ben-Hur (1987),
his music for the last taking inspiration from Bruckner to achieve reverencein biblical scenes. Other Davis projects included Grifﬁth’s Broken Blossoms
(1919) and Eric von Stroheim’s Greed (1923), and a British tour of his new
music to The Phantom of the Opera (dir. Rupert Julian, 1925) with the Hall ´e
Orchestra in 2002 continued his popular successes in the ﬁeld. In 1986,Grifﬁth’s Intolerance celebrated its seventieth birthday and was furnished
with a new score by Antoine Duhamel and Pierre Jansen at the AvignonFilm Festival. In sharp contrast to traditional scoring techniques, GiorgioMoroder supplied an up-to-date (and therefore almost instantly dated) syn-thesized music track to a shortened and colour-tinted restoration of Lang’sMetropolis in 1983; the inclusion of modern pop songs provided, according
to Claudia Gorbman, ‘a choruslike commentary on what is seen, some-times with brilliant irony. Some listeners, their primary attention dividedbetween the lyrics and the [newly subtitled] “dialogue,” ﬁnd this difﬁcultto assimilate’ (Gorbman 1987, 20). Metropolis has inspired many modern
musicians to endow it with new music, including the Alloy Orchestra, ClubFoot Orchestra, Peter Osborne, Bernd Schultheis and Wetﬁsh. Huppertz’soriginal orchestral score was reconstructed by Berndt Heller for video releasein 2002. Two years later the Pet Shop Boys’ Neil T ennant wrote a new scoreforPotemkin .
Other composers, arrangers, keyboard players and ensembles who con-
tributed to the silent-ﬁlm revival included James Bernard, Neil Brand (ofLondon’s National Film Theatre), Carmine Coppola (who provided a con-ventional hybrid score for the American release of Napol´ eonin 1980), The
Curt Collective, Alan Fearon, Edward Dudley Hughes, Robert Israel, Adrian
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40 A history of ﬁlm music
Johnston, Benedict Mason, Richard McLaughlin, David Newman, Michael
Nyman, Paul Robinson, Geoff Smith (applying his hammered dulcimers toclassics of German silent expressionism), Joby Talbot, Jo Van den Boorenand Wolfgang Thiele (who reworked Erdmann’s music to Nosferatu ). Vet-
eran cinema organists such as Gaylord Carter came out of retirement tocontribute their own reminiscences of the silent era: Carter had remainedactive as a silent-ﬁlm accompanist in the 1960s and in 1986–7 recordedhistorically authentic accompaniments for the video release of Paramountsilents. These included Lang’s The Golden Lake (1919) and The Diamond
Ship (1920), and DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923), the original
compilation score for which had helped to popularize Dvo ˇr´ak’sNew World
Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (Huntley [1947], 27).At the other end of the stylistic spectr um, British saxophonist Jan Kopinski’s
slowly evolving modal jazz found an unlikely application in his 2004 scoreto Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930), where it was nevertheless perfectly
in tune with the leisurely pace and haunting visual beauty of the Russiandirector’s bold images.
Adrian Johnston’s music for Harold Lloyd’s Hot Water (1924; Thames
TV, 1994) is a model example of a silent-ﬁlm score conceived for a modern
1.3George Fenton conducts a live performance of his orchestral music from the BBC television series The Blue
Planet at Manchester in 2006, sustaining the venerable tradition of touring exhibitions of silent ﬁlm.
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41 The ‘silent’ cinema
television audience. It uses a mere six instruments with resourcefulness and
imagination in an idiom sufﬁciently sophisticated to satisfy contemporarytastes but deeply rooted in traditional scoring techniques, even down tothe prominent use of the Dies irae in a ghostly sequence. Carter recalled
how he used this melody in his organ accompaniment to the unmaskingscene of The Phantom of the Opera : as seen above, the plainchant was used
in Huppertz’s score for Metropolis and thereafter remained one of the most
frequently quoted melodies in later ﬁlm music. Prominent later appearancesin ﬁlms of widely differing styles and genres include Foreign Correspondent
(dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1940; music by Alfred Newman), in which it is sungdiegetically by an unseen choir in London’s Westminster Cathedral beforean attempt is made to push the ﬁlm’s hero off the tower; in Erik Nordgren’sscore to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), where it is several times
suggested merely by its ﬁrst four notes, in addition to receiving a full-blownarrangement sung diegetically by a procession of monks in the context ofthe Black Death; in three of Bernard Herrmann’s scores: his music for thedeath of Hydra in Jason and the Argonauts (dir. Don Chaffey, 1963), in The
Bride Wore Black (dir. Franc ¸ois Truffaut, 1967), and delicately on a harp for
ag r a v e y a r ds c e n ei n Obsession (dir. Brian De Palma, 1975); in The Shining
(dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980; music by Walter Carlos), where an electronicversion alluding to its arrangement by Berlioz creates a sense of forebodingin the main-title sequence; in Sleeping with the Enemy (dir. Joseph Ruben,
1990; music by Jerry Goldsmith), where its famous incarnation in Berlioz’sSymphonie fantastique appears diegetically on a hi-ﬁ system as a symbol
for the male protagonist’s depravity; and in the fantasy animated musicalThe Nightmare Before Christmas (dir. Tim Burton, 1993; music by Danny
Elfman).
Such is the renewed popularity of silent-ﬁlm screenings with live musical
accompaniment that other media, such as television documentary, have inrecent years been adapted for this purpose. Extracts from British composerGeorge Fenton’s substantial orchestral score to the monumental BBC TVseries about the oceans, The Blue Planet ,h a v eb e e np e r f o r m e dl i v ei ns e v e r a l
countries, commencing with a show in London’s Hyde Park in 2002 in whichFenton conducted a live accompaniment to a large-screen projection of thestunning wildlife photography from the series. The venture led to a releaseof a documentary ﬁlm for theatrical exhibition, Deep Blue (dir. Andy Byatt
and Alastair Fothergill, 2004).
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