The Oxford History of World Cinema (73 page)

suitable for patterned choreography, some of it open-ended and fragmentary, intended to

mirror the smallest details of stage action.Paradoxically, the theatrical genre with perhaps

the most powerful influence on film music was the one with which its affinity was the

weakest, namely opera. Instrumental arrangements from many hundreds of popular works

(Italian, French, German, English) were called for in silent-film cue sheets of the 1910s

and 1920s; moreover, by that time Wagner's development of a symphonic approach (the

orchestra supplying a continuous commentary), characterized by the use of symbolic

themes, long-range thematic transformations, opulent tone colours, and romantic

harmonies, was so much admired that many leading composers of film scores (including

Joseph Carl Breil, Gottfried Huppertz, and Mortimer Wilson, all discussed below) either

explicitly acknowledged his influence or implicitly imitated his style, albeit with less than

Wagnerian results.As was true of film music's antecedents, accompaniments to silent

films were of many types, so the popular image of the lone pianist improvising (badly, on

an out-oftune relic) to whatever appeared on the screen is only the smallest and darkest

part of a much broader and brighter panorama. All told, musical ensembles fell into four

distinct categories, determined largely by the time period and theatrical milieu.

1.

Viudeville/music hall orchestras accompanied films when seen as part of variety

shows during the early years (mid- 1890s into the early 1900s), and there is considerable

evidence to suggest that the music played during such presentations was as carefully

prepared as it was for all other portions of the show.

2.

When films moved into theatres of their own (nickelodeons, etc., beginning c.

1905), music came with them, principally on pianos or mechanical equivalents. This

phase marks the beginning of film music as a distinct profession, but for a time many

theatre owners neglected the musical end of their operations: some of these pianos were

out of tune, some of the performers quite unskilled. Still, the trade periodicals regularly

mentioned certain theatres featuring music to praise rather than blame; and the

importance of music even in these modest arenas is further attested by the widespread

custom of enhancing programmes with 'illustrated songs' (as in small-time vaudeville

houses).

3.

From about 1910 theatres tended to be built larger, with more impressive facilities

and increased budgets for music: chamber ensembles of anything from three players

(comprising a melody instrument, piano, and drums) to fifteen became common. This

development coincided with radical changes in film production and distribution, as well

as the length and nature of individual films, and led to a growing market for musical

arrangements suitable for film-playing. From 1910 onwards, therefore, there was a great

flowering of film music publications, which continued until the end of the period.

4.

The final phase is that of the grand movie 'palaces', built during the late 1910s and

1920s. There one heard spectacular theatre organs (the earliest models date from about

1912, but they became far more impressive a decade later), sharing the spotlight with

large orchestras and colourful conductors some of whom ( William Axt, Giuseppe Becce,

Carli Elinor, Louis Levy, Hans May, Erno Rapée, Hugo Riesenfeld, Marc Roland, and

others) also became prominent as film composers. At least one such palace could be

found in every town of even moderate size, while metropolitan centres like New York,

London, and Berlin boasted several. The shows became lavish, mingling concert

overtures, vaudeville stars, classical performers, and skits intended as prologues to the

actual films, and these too comprised a rich array, from cartoon and travelogue to the

main feature.

Of course accompaniments were as diverse as the musicians who played them, but

circumstances pressed toward the middle of the spectrum-between improvisation at one

end and full original scores at the other. A keyboard soloist can improvise and play with

expressive subtleties of rhythm not possible for an ensemble, but the quality of

improvisation is apt to flag, the soloist's store of ideas exhausted, when playing for new

films day after day. (Moreover, as witnesses attest, improvisation can be dangerous when

you do not know what is coming next in the film.) On the other hand, complete original

scores were simply not practical or feasible: there were special cases from the very

earliest years, but most films were too short-lived, the distribution system too far-flung,

and performers too varied in ensemble and too uneven in talent to justify commissioned

scores.Since most soloists and all ensembles needed something written out to play, the

practical solution was to rely on compiled/composed mixtures of music, much of it ready-

made or familiar to the performers. Compiled scores for feature films thus became the

great tradition of film music, especially after the appearance of Breil's landmark score for

The Birth of a Nation in 1915. The Breil score, after first being played by orchestras on

tour with the film, was made available to theatres in printed copies, and the policy of

'publication' of a score for distribution with its film was adopted for many subsequent

important American films. Scores survive for many of these films, including: The Battle

Cry of Peace ( J. Stuart Blackton, 1915; S. L. Rothapfel , with Ivan Rudisill and S. M.

Berg), Joan the Woman ( Cecil B. DeMille, 1916; William Furst), Civilization ( Thomas

Ince, 1917; Victor Schertzinger), Where the Pavement Ends (Rex Ingram, 1922; Luz),

The Big Parade (Vidor, 1925; Axt and David Mendoza), Beau Geste ( Herbert Brenon,

1926; Riesenfeld), Wings ( William Wellman, 1927; J. S. Zamecnik); and four films by D.

W. Griffith: Hearts of the World ( 1917, Elinor), The Greatest Question ( 1919, Pesce),

Broken Blossoms ( 1919, Louis Gottschalk), Way down East ( 1920, Louis Silvers and

William F. Peters). Griffith in fact commissioned scores for almost all of his silent

features from The Birth of a Nation on (so long as his finances allowed), but few

Hollywood directors or producers showed a similar interest in music. The majority of

feature films were not supplied with scores for distribution; instead performers were left

to devise accompaniments of their own, aided by cue sheets, anthologies, and catalogues.

MUSICAL MATERIALS

The first and most succinct aids for performers were what came to be called cue sheets:

that is, brief lists of specific pieces and/or types of music to accompany particular films,

with cues and supplementary instructions. At first these lists were relatively crude and

perhaps not all that reliable, but like other aids they became steadily more apt,

sophisticated, and commercially valuable during the second half of the silent period,

reflecting changes in cinema itself. It is interesting to compare the anonymous cue sheet

for the Edison Company's one-reel Frankenstein ( 1910) and the "Thematic Music Cue

Sheet" prepared by James C. Bradford for Paul Leni's popular feature The Cat and the

Canary ( 1927). The former is a typical specimen from the pioneering series published

between 1909 and 1912 in the American edition of the Edison Kinetogram and offers

merely the barest outline of an accompaniment, comprising fourteen cues beginning as

follows:

At opening: Andante -- 'Then You'll Remember Me'

Till Frankenstein's laboratory: Moderato -- 'Melody in F'

Till monster is forming: Increasing agitato

Till monster appears over bed: Dramatic music from Der Freischütz

Till father and girl in sitting room: Moderato

Till Frankenstein returns home: 'Annie Laurie' [etc.]

In sharp contrast, the Canary cue sheet was issued as a lavish eight-page brochure in a

coloured cover (apparently an exceptional format), and spells out sixty-six explicit cues,

using three dozen pieces by more than two dozen composers. It also contains, on the front

and back covers, detailed description of the score's recurring themes, together with useful

'suggestions for playing', cue by cue.

The differences are significant, but there is one key point of resemblance: both lists

feature monuments of nineteenth-century repertoire for crucial scenes. In Frankenstein,

'dramatic music' from Weber's Freischütz is called for five times (vague cues indeed,

probably indicating eerie excerpts from the Overture or the ' Wolf's Glen Scene', to be

performed ad lib), whenever the monster appears; in Canary, the beginning of Schubert's

"Unfinished" Symphony appears four times and is identified as the 'Mammy Theme'. (The

music, according to Bradford, indicates 'the uncertainty and questionable position of this

woman who is distrusted'.) Both scores also mix their classical fragments with morsels in

varied lighter styles: Frankenstein includes a sentimental salon piece and an old-fashioned

parlour song ( Rubinstein's "Melody in F", Annie Laurie); Canary brings together many

comic misteriosos and up-todate popular numbers, all suitable for the film's tongue-

incheek tone. Such jumbles were the norm (though Bradford claims that his suggested

music offers 'a perfect sequence of modulations from one selection to another'), because

they were seen as the most appropriate way to follow the films; and one finds the same

sort of odd but functionally efficient hodge-podge within the period's anthologies and

catalogues.

By the 1920s, the latter materials had become just as elaborate as cue sheets (which, as in

the Bradford example, drew from them extensively for repertoire), after similarly modest

beginnings. Early anthologies were made up of not-too-difficult piano pieces usually

running to no more than a single page, as in Zamecnik's collections of Sam Fox Moving

Picture Music (seventy original pieces in three volumes, 1913-14; a fourth volume

appeared in 1923) and the Witmark Moving Picture Album (an in-house compilation of

101 pieces which had been previously published, 1913). The range of categories was hit

or miss, though there was a recurrent emphasis on music for 'national scenes' and ethnic

groups (especially patriotic songs and exotic pieces of 'Indian' or 'Oriental' music), along

with basic moods (comic, mysterious, pathetic, etc.) and types of action (funeral, hurry,

storm, wedding, etc.). Later anthologies were intended to be more comprehensive and

systematic. For example, all but two of the fourteen volumes of the Hawkes Photo-Play

Series ( 1922-7) contained half a dozen expansive pieces, each by a different English

composer; and, as was then typical, each volume could be obtained in a piano album

and/or in arrangements for small or full orchestra.The most impressive single book of

piano music, however, was Erno Rapée's Motion Picture Moods ( 1924), which contained

370 pieces, many of them of great difficulty, indexed under fifty-three headings. In a

unique format these headings are listed alphabetically on the margin of every page to

facilitate 'rapid reference', but the contents of the book are really too vast for such an

index to do more than steer pianists in the right direction. The group of 'National' pieces

alone extends over 150 pages, beginning with the USA (for which there is the lengthiest

subsection, including patriotic hymns, college songs, and Christmas carols), and then

proceeding alphabetically from Argentina to Wales, with a huge assortment of anthems,

dances, and traditional songs. Rapée followed this the next year with an Encyclopedia of

Music for Pictures aimed at directors of ensembles: the book offered more than 5,000

titles of published arrangements under 500 headings, plus a great deal of space for

additional numbers to be added to the lists, allowing for each theatre to build its own

customized music library. (In recent years, some of these libraries -- for example the

Balaban & Katz collection in Chicago and the Paramount library in Oakland-have turned

up virtually intact, and while each is organized differently, all tend to follow a system

similar to Rapée's.) As a compendium of repertoire, the Encyclopedia was superseded

only by the thematic index in Hans Erdmann and Giuseppe Becce's two-volume

Allgemeines Handbuch der Film-Musik ( 1927), one of the period's last and most

valuable sources.By the mid- 1920s, then, the spectrum of film music publications

encompassed tens of thousands of pieces, some of them arrangements of pre-existent

material, some newly composed for film accompaniment, and some nominally new but

clearly based on existing themes. New or old, the music was then indexed according to

the purpose it could serve in film accompaniment. It would seem that almost any piece

was suitable for more than one context, or at least could be rendered so by changing the

style of performance, no matter how it was marked. Rapée's anthology contains an item

called 'Agitato No. 3', by Otto Langey, whose first strain is obviously modelled on Schu

bert 's "Erlkönig", and the piece is described as 'suitable for gruesome or infernal scenes,

witches, etc.'. But Rapée indexes it under 'Battle', and elsewhere in the anthology, even

more confusingly, the actual beginning of Schubert's own song is categorized as a