Exploring the first exhibitions of films from around 1895 up to the end of the silent film period in 1928, Music and Sound in Silent Film: From the Nickelodeon to The Artist, offers a glimpse of the early cinematic era and the central role that music played in silent film, including an interview with the eminent composer Carl Davis.
“It’s almost certain that a majority of films had some sort of accompaniment while they were being screened and until quite recently the presumption was that a pianist or a group of musicians would play appropriate music to suit the mood of the film but actually the more you dig into this the more you discover that actually there were diverse ways of accompanying films”, says Simon Trezise, Associate Professor and Head of Music at the School of Creative Arts. Accompaniments ranged from the largescale orchestra performances to sometimes inappropriate matching of music to subject matter, rendering a morose film merry or even live narrations of films, playing on satire.
Silent Film and Music around the World
One of the chapters in the book explores the diverse styles of accompaniment around the globe, with some interesting examples, including the use of the ‘Benshi’ in Japanese early cinema.
“The ‘Benshi’ had a really big part in coming between the film and its audience”, explains Professor Ruth Barton, Associate Professor in Film Studies, School of Creative Arts. A ‘Benshi’ was somebody who narrated the film from the audience, telling the film’s story. “If you’ve seen silent films they’re quite hard to follow”, Professor Barton says, and at that time in Japan viewers “went to the film because the Benshi was the person there, not because of the film.”
Professor Trezise adds that the Benshi often satirised the film, stating that the practice was “so popular that when Japanese communities went to California this style of film accompaniment went with them and it carried on after the advent of talkies because it was entertaining.”
The book also looks at the Irish picture houses of the time in Denis Condon’s chapter ‘Players Must Be of a Good Class’: Women and Concert Musicians in Irish Picture Houses, 1910-20’, outlining surprising research which shows how prominent women were in early picture house productions.
"In the
early cinema, women had quite a big part in film-making, much more than they do now ironically”, according to Professor Barton. “One of the things we wanted to try to see was how many women only orchestras there were and this is what Denis Condon has looked at. He’s tried to reconstruct who those women were and what they were doing. They were often single, middle class women, who were educated in music and this was a job that was respectable for women to do.”
Carl Davis and the Silent Film Blockbuster
Professor Trezise interviewed composer Carl Davis as part of the new publication, describing him as a pioneer of live performance of music with silent films. “His biggest breakthrough was the Abel Gance film of ‘Napoléon’; he did that in London with orchestra and it was picked up by Channel 4 which was just starting out back then and they commissioned a whole series of silent film accompaniments by him.” Professor Trezise says that Davis is somewhat of a mediator between “historically authentic and inauthentic” when it comes to music and silent film.
He explains, “he can go back to Beethoven just as the silent film composers did but he would be probably composing and redesigning more than people of the period who had to do a very tight turnaround.” Having more time than his predecessors to think about the scores, his music is often historically appropriate, Professor Trezise says, and he has composed for ‘World at War’, the BBC’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’, as well as Irish silent director Rex Ingram’s ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.’
Professor Ruth Barton has written a critical biography of Rex Ingram and describes ‘‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, as one of the big releases or blockbusters of the time, “these films would’ve had full orchestra”, she says, and their manuscripts were easier to reproduce. “These were very different to the small releases in small towns.”
Contemporary Silent Film?
Professor Barton also highlights the ‘big movement’ around silent film and performance now, arguing that people like to go to see silent films but she says sometimes you will get a completely different and contemporary score to silent film. This is a debate that divides experts and commentators on the genre and is something which is discussed in the book.
Part four of the book ‘Synchronisation and Scoring – Contemporary Reworkings’, includes a chapter on ‘The Modern ‘Silent Film’’ by James Wierzbicki, and the chapter ‘Electroacoustic Composition and Silent Film' by Trinity Assistant Ussher Professor Nicholas Brown, who has composed accompaniment to silent film.
The question at issue, according to Professor Barton, is “should you try as much as possible to replicate the score that the film would have had or do you actually produce a contemporary score to a silent film? These are things that some people feel very strongly about - that you should not have a contemporary score to a silent film - but other people say ‘why not?’, ‘it’s an evolving art work’.”
Music and Sound in Silent Film: From the Nickelodeon to The Artist is published by Routledge.