Tag: accompaniment

Taking a Cue: Accompanying Early Film

Posted on November 15, 2018 by - Articles, Columns, NewMusicBox

Starting in 1908, film industry publications frequently included regular columns by cinema conductors, composers, and arrangers such as Samuel Berg, Ernst Luz, and Clarence Sinn. These articles offered suggestions—sometimes called “musical plots”—to cinema musicians on selecting and performing music for silent motion pictures. By the 1920s, cue sheets published by movie studios and independent publishers had become ornate, including cue titles, musical incipits, length of cue, and other information. The Silent Film Sound and Music Archive currently has 65 cue sheets available for free download and will be adding another 40 later this year.

While some film and film music historians think that these cue sheets were followed closely and that accompanists frequently purchased the music recommended in them, archival materials tell a different story. Cue sheets were often modified, used merely as the basis for ideas, or even ignored. This means that although we have an idea of what some accompanists might have played for individual films, we can’t know exactly what they played for individual screenings.

Many cue sheets in Silent Film Sound and Music Archive’s holdings show notations where the performer swapped out a suggested piece with one they already knew or owned. Claire Hamack, an accompanist whose scores, photoplay albums, and cue sheets are now online at SFSMA, often made changes to cue sheets—including adding her own original music.

For the 1925 film Stella Dallas, she made notes on the cue sheet of pieces she wanted to use in place of those recommended.

Hamack’s cue sheet for Stella Dallas.

Hamack’s cue sheet for Stella Dallas.

She also changed cues for the film When Knighthood was in Flower, a 1922 movie. Hamack replaced suggested themes by William F. Peters and Massenet with Franz Schubert’s “Moment Musical,” Edwin Lemare’s “Meditation,” and other selections. She specifically wrote over the printed titles for cue 5, “While Mary dreamed,” changing it from “Serenade Romantique” by Gaston Borch to “Wakey Little Bird,” and changing the music for cue 11, “It is near to midnight,” from “Romance—German (The Conqueror)” to Grieg’s “Dawn” from Peer Gynt. The cue sheet for The Dangerous Age, a 1927 German film directed by Eugen Illés, is covered with Hamack’s notes, including notation for an alternate, possibly original, theme, and indications that suggestions were replaced with other works (“In the Gloaming” is preferred over Otto Langey’s “Dream Shadows” for cue 23). Other cue sheets, including that for My American Wife (directed by Sam Wood, 1922), also bear short passages of handwritten notation for original themes and motifs. Hamack’s audiences would have heard Hamack’s musical interpretation of the film rather than that of the studio compiler.

The cover of the cue sheet for My American Wife (1922)

The cover of the cue sheet for My American Wife (1922), showing Claire Hamack’s theme.

One great find for SFSMA was a cue sheet created by cinema organist Hazel Burnett for the 1920 film Humoresque. Burnett had an incredible musical career, beginning by playing for live theater and small cinemas in the Midwest and working her way up to being a featured organist at the famed Aztec Theater in San Antonio. (More on Burnett here.) After her death, Burnett’s granddaughter Josephine gave all of her music and other materials to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The Burnett Collection contains a wide variety of resources, including printed cue sheets and full scores, photoplay albums, sheet music, and hundreds of pieces clipped out of The Etude and Melody magazines, which Burnett used as cues. Much of Burnett’s music is marked with performance indicia that confirm that she used it in accompanying silent film.

Numerous pieces of sheet music in her collection are labeled with cue numbers and descriptive notes: Frederick Vanderpool’s “The Want of You” was used for the cue “maw asleep” in one unidentified movie, and Edvard Grieg’s popular “Ase’s Death” accompanied another unknown film’s cue 27: “Mary prostrated.” “No. 5 Molto Agitato” from Breil’s Original Collection of Dramatic Music for Motion Picture Plays is marked as “14 phone rings”, while “No. 6 Andante Misterioso” was used for “[Cue] 2[:] man enters.” Burnett wrote the titles of accompaniment-appropriate pieces on the covers of the photoplay albums that contained the pieces, often including the page number for quick access. She also interleaved pieces of sheet music and pieces cut from Melody and The Etude between pages of her photoplay albums to create original modular scores. For some, it’s impossible to know what film the cues went with, but others are much clearer.

Cues for an unidentified film or films

Cues for an unidentified film or films, Josephine Burnett Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas—Austin

Humoresque is a classic melodrama about a young Jewish violinist. Celebrated film music composer and director Hugo Riesenfeld composed an original score for Humoresque for the film’s premiere, and it was this score that was most likely performed by a cinema orchestra and organist both at its premiere and on the road tour that followed, although Riesenfeld made slight changes to the score depending on where it was being shown. While Burnett almost certainly had access to Riesenfeld’s cue sheet, she compiled a rather different score from her own personal library. She kept two pieces Riesenfeld recommended: Dvorák’s “Humoresque,” which she could hardly avoid, and Bruch’s Kol Nidre. Here’s how her first five cues compare with Riesenfeld’s:

cue sheet

Note: ‘D’ refers to a direction cue or action; ‘T’ refers to the text of an intertitle. Punctuation modernized for clarity.

You can see Burnett’s full cue sheet for the film here. The Ransom Center is currently in the process of setting up a screening of Humoresque with live accompaniment using Burnett’s cues.

Having Burnett’s and Hamack’s cue sheets offers a glimpse of how these tools were used, adapted, or jettisoned by cinema musicians, and also conveys to us how score compilers interpreted scenes and assigned music to them. Would you or I think of recommending “Hail America” by Drumm as a piece for a Tudor-era picture (When Knighthood was in Flower)? Probably not, but prolific cue sheet author James C. Bradford did, and that alone tells us about scoring for early film and how aesthetics and approaches have changed since then. You can explore all of the cue sheets in the Archive by clicking on “Cue Sheets” under “Categories.”

New Music for a New Art Form: Photoplay Music

Posted on November 8, 2018 by - Articles, Columns, NewMusicBox

When we think of the music of the early 20th century, we might think of neoclassicism, Schoenberg, the English music renaissance, jazz, and maybe parlor song or vaudeville. But the advent of the moving picture brought about the development of an enormous amount of new music composed specifically to accompany film. While it’s true that some of the music used by film accompanists was borrowed from the vaudeville hall and stage melodramas, that some film accompanists improvised their scores, and that some film studios commissioned scores from composers for individual films, the majority of cinema musicians in the 1910s and 1920s relied heavily on a new genre, called photoplay music, for creating musical accompaniments to motion pictures of all lengths. Photoplay music consisted of short, evocative character pieces that could be easily strung together to create what is called a compiled score. Photoplay music was sold as individual sheet music titles and in albums or collections of eight to ten pieces, sometimes thematically linked, like Jacobs’ Piano Folio of Tone-Poems and Reveries and Jacobs’ Piano Folio of Oriental, Spanish, and Indian Music.

The Silent Film Sound and Music Archive (SFSMA) is, as its name suggests, a repository of music that was used to accompany films before the widespread use of synchronized records or sound-on-film technology. SFSMA, founded in 2014 to help performers and scholars find silent film music in one location, identifies and digitizes printed music and related materials and uploads them to the Archive, where they can be downloaded for free. Everything is posted under a Creative Commons ODC-By (Open Data Commons Attribution) License. SFSMA’s holdings include hundreds of pieces of photoplay music composed for the new art of the cinema. Although few of the composers of this repertoire are widely recognized today, they created music that helped establish a number of common tropes that still appear in film music. Composers including Helen Ware, Theodora Dutton (Blanche Ray Alden), Erno Rapée, William Axt, J. S. Zamecnik, and many others made a living composing short characteristic pieces for the cinema. All pieces appeared in a piano version, and most also had parts, as cinema ensembles could range from three players—often piano, violin or cello, and clarinet—to forty performers with full string and wind sections.

Composers were under great pressure to continually churn out generic pieces: cinema musicians didn’t want to use the same pieces week after week for different films. At the same time, it was important that photoplay pieces for the same general action or topic had similar characteristics so that accompanists could be consistent in their musical interpretations of films. Works for “hurry” or “gallop” were quick in tempo, mimicked the sound of hoof beats or heartbeats, and employed short note values, all of which suggested the associated speed of motion given in the title. SFSMA’s holdings include more than twenty individual “hurry” pieces, all suggesting speed and urgency. Similarly, “mysteriosos” or “misteriosos” were composed for scenes of stealth, burglary, the grotesque, the eerie, and the supernatural; there are more than thirty of these in the SFSMA database. All of the mysteriosos have things in common, including tempo and texture, but each one has a different primary melody and form, allowing for variety in accompanying.

Misterioso No. 1 (for horror, stealth, conspiracy, treachery)

Misterioso No. 1 (for horror, stealth, conspiracy, treachery) by Erno Rapee and William Axt (New York: Richmond-Robbins Inc., 1923), mm. 1-7.

Misterioso No. 1 (For Depicting Gruesome Scenes, Stealth, etc.)

Misterioso No. 1 (For Depicting Gruesome Scenes, Stealth, etc.) by Otto Langey (New York: G. Schirmer, 1915), mm. 1-7.

The works of Maurice Baron (who also published under the name Morris Aborn) provide a good introduction to the repertoire composed for moving pictures. Baron composed some pieces for specific films, such as his Shakespearean Sketches—Shakespeare adaptations were very popular in silent film, providing artistic gravitas to the medium—but most of his works were designed to be used as part of compiled scores. “Batifolage,” composed in 1926, was designated for “frolics, caprice,” and “Love’s Declaration” is intended to be used to accompany romances. Baron’s “Terror!” and “Suspicions” were intended for mysteries, horror, and domestic dramas. Baron also sought to capture the time in which he lived: “Radio Message (galop)” is meant to depict the urgency and speed of a Morse Code transmission, and “A Busy Thoroughfare” imitates the buggies, cars, trams, and people in an urban area.

“Radio Message” performed by Ethan Uslan (source).

The PianOrgan series, published by Belwin, collected Baron’s pieces into albums, making it easier for accompanists to select generic works by the composer. As Morris Aborn, Baron published western music for cowboy pictures; vice-related characters and events, such as drunk characters, opium dens, and speakeasies; music for battles; music for tragedies; and music for agitated scenes.

Excerpt from Maurice Baron’s “Prelude to a Western American Drama,” performed by the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra (source).

Excerpt from Maurice Baron’s “Valse Pathetique,” performed by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra (source).

Movie-watchers today might not know or think much about photoplay music, but over the last forty years, the showing of silent films with live accompaniment has experienced a renaissance. Ensembles such as the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra use photoplay music to create scores in the same manner accompanists would have in the 1910s or 1920s. Rod Sauer, director of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, researches what music might have been used at showings of the films they accompany, but often selects different pieces that the group feels better convey the action and intent of the film. In creating a compiled score for the film Beggars of Life, for example, Sauer found that some of the music suggested for use with the film had racist connotations, such as using an upbeat cakewalk piece to accompany a scene in which a black character experiences tragedy, so he chose other photoplay pieces for the score. Educators are also using photoplay music: instructors teaching film music, film history, and popular music history have used pieces from SFSMA to demonstrate how a compiled score might be created, and students are scoring short films—both old and new—using music from the Archive.

You can find photoplay music in SFSMA in a variety of ways. If you’re interested in particular composers, you can search by their names. You can also search by “mood,” a silent-era designation that categorized music by scenario. Need a sad piece? A search on “tragic” brings up twelve pieces with “tragic” in the title or mood subtitle. Want to see a collection of similar pieces? Search “album” to find all of the collections in the archive. You can also search by clicking on “sheet music” in the Categories section, and then refining your search by mood, instrumentation, or other factor. To hear recordings of photoplay pieces in a variety of moods, click on “Video and Audio” under Categories to pull up a list of recordings made by silent film accompanist Ethan Uslan. There are hundreds of pieces in the Archive to discover and use for accompaniment or analysis, all of it once an influential force on the development of the cinematic score.