I’m not huge into silent movies, I mostly tape them for a friend of mine who’s mad for them. Tonight’s I was interested in. Norma Shearer’s last silent film A Lady of Chance, in which she plays a conniving blackmailer who falls for one of her marks. But as I sit here watching it, once again the viewing experience is marred by a new score which I assume was commissioned for the film by TCM. It’s horrible. Does nothing to evoke the period of the film (made in 1928) and in fact sounds so 1950s Hepcat Lite in places that it actively detracts from the film. I can’t watch it on mute at the moment because if I mute out the TV the VCR doesn’t pick up the sound and since I’m tapoing it for someone else I don’t want to decide for her that she can’t hear the music if she wants. But lord, it’s awful. And they do this so often. Commission some huge overblown new score that doesn’t even remotely match the style or mood of the piece. Do they not trust us to be able to relate to the film without a big loud score like films today all have? If they must have a new score, can they not find a composer who can write one that at least evokes the right decade?
Silent films were silent. They didn’t begin to have official accompanying scores until (IIRC) Sunrise. So all previous–and many subsequent–silent films are shown with whatever score anyone who bought the rights to do so has added.
I don’t think it should be surprising to anyone that after-the-fact scores for silent films do not rise to the level of priority (read: $$$) that would attract one of the great–or even just established–film scorers; you’re going to get pretty much bottom-of-the-barrel composers for these jobs. (For the most part: there are many exceptions, like Richard Einhorn’s “Voices of Light,” composed as a score for The Passion of Joan of Arc.)
In other words, it’s totally catch as catch can, and Danny Elfman isn’t returning their phone calls.
Unfortunately, most of the scoring assignments are set up as commissions or prizes to young university-trained composers. Now normally it’s a good thing for the young folks to get opportunity, but they are not trained to appreciate the esthetic of the silent film era. So the effort does more for their resumés than for the films.
This I understand. But we’re talking about TCM here, commissioning in many cases new scores. You’d think TCM, with all its supposed reverence for film, would strive a little harder to choose a score that more closelt matches the film.
There are essentially three kinds of scores: composed scores, compiled scores, and improvised scores.
A composed score is completely original music that has been written specifically to accompany a given film. In the silent days, these were very, very rare. Only the most lavish and expensive films got composed scores. For an example of one, watch Kino’s DVD of Die Nibelungen (1924). It retains the original composed score.
A compiled score is an arrangement of various pre-written music. Classical sources are always good, but there are also whole libraries of music designed to be used in accompanying films–“photoplay music”, it’s called. Each piece generally has suggestions at the top as to what sort of scenes it’s good for, and has numerous start points, end points, and repeatable sections to make it fit whatever time slot is needed. Most films were played with compiled accompaniment, and they often came with cue sheets that had a list of photoplay music titles and where they could be used in the film to assist the orchestra leader.
An improvised score is just that. The pianist (or organist, but surely not a whole theatre orchestra) simply makes up the score as the film is shown. With practice, this is not as hard as it sounds. The vast majority of present-day video releases and live festival screenings have improvised scores, since it’s the cheapest option (only one person for a couple hours, in comparison to the five or six people and many days prep-time for a compiled orchestral score).
Piano-only accompaniment is an anachronism for most silent films. After the early teens, all big and medium-sized cinemas had full orchestras, and small ones at least had a theatre organ. Watch The Man With a Movie Camera (1929), there’s a scene in it showing what a orchestra looked like. It’s only common today because, again, it’s cheap.
Nowadays, there’s also a fourth type of score, the needledrop, so-called because it consists of playing public domain 78 records to accompany your public domain budget videos. These have a bad reputation, since they’re usually slapped together without care (in some cases, just playing the same one over and over again), but if the records are carefully selected and arranged, it’s not much different from a compiled score.
For films TCM licenses from others, they keep the scores already on them. They can be any of the above (not so much needledrop, TCM’s not that cheap, though you do hear it on some of the Chaplin shorts they show occasionally). You might hear a gorgeous composed score by David Shepard, or a compiled score by Mont Alto, or an improvised one by Phillip Carli (all three superstars in the silent film world).
But TCM doesn’t license all their films from others. Turner is sitting on a vast archive of films that have never seen video release, which they’re slowly digging into. Transferring and restoring these films is expensive. Their Young Film Composers competition, started several years ago, helps lessen their costs by getting cheap as free scores to accompany their premieres.
Some of them aren’t so bad, some are bearable, a few intolerable. It’s not so much a matter of being technically well-made–all of them are–as it is being appropriate to the film and subservient to the picture that YFC scores are often lacking in. They’re too big and bold–the artists sacrifice the film in wild grabs for attention. Considering the nature of the contest, that’s unsurprising. I found the new YFC score for Piccadilly (1929) particularly bad. Still, they’re perfection compared to truly terrible accompaniment. I’ve seen Way Down East (1920) live once with a small orchestra who had obviously never accompanied a film before trying to follow its cue sheet in the dark, getting hopelessly lost and playing out-of-sync until eventually they just had to stop. It was a painful experience.
Sorry if this is too off-topic, but what happened to the dialogue? I thought Robert Osbourne had said there was a sequence with spoken dialogue added in post-production because MGM realized they were getting left behind in the talkies game. But we didn’t recall hearing it. Did the score drown it out??
Dusty, thanks for taking the time to explain. That’s interesting information.
The studios reguarly supplied orchestral scores or music cue sheets for their major releases (and many minor releases) from the earliest days of feature films in the 1910s to the end of the silent era in the late 1920s. The first original score commissioned for an American feature was by Manuel Klein for The Jungle (1914), based on Upton Sinclair’s novel. D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) had a studio-supplied score by J. Carl Breil made up of existing music and original compositions. It was even recorded on an LP in the 1970s. Breil also scored Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).
Hundreds of scores were written, or cue sheets assembled, for silent movies in the silent era. Gillian B. Anderson compiled an entire catalog of those scores and cue sheets, and it is available online: Music for Silent Films 1894–1929: A Guide (PDF).
The picture was released in two versions: a silent version, and a version with a music soundtrack and talking sequence. Only the silent version exists today, hence the need to commission a new score.
Oh, I must have missed that part of the introduction. :o
Thanks for the info!
People overestimate how quickly sound films took off. The Jazz Singer (1927) was not a watershed event where everyone turned their backs on silents and never looked back. Outside the big cities, the adoption of sound was really rather slow. The cinema in my hometown, for example, was the first one in the county to install a sound system, and that was in 1931–well into the “sound era”.
That’s why films made even up into the thirties, like Dracula (1931), often had silent alternative versions. Not only could they be exported to foreign language markets easily*, they played here in the silent enclaves that still clung on.
- This was a real puzzler in early sound films. For silents, it was easy–just translate the intertitles (called “subtitles” back then, “intertitle” is a modern coinage). For talkies, they generally resorted to filming multiple versions in different languages (and usually one silent) simultaneously.
I figured you did. I didn’t mean to *inform *you; only to emphasize the fact.
Well, they do what they can. And what they can afford. They (as pointed out above) choose the composer, not the score. Then the composer has pretty much free reign. It would be impractical for them to commission more than one score, on spec, and then choose the best. It would probably be even worse for them to hold a competition, choose a winner, and then reject the score the winner produced.
For that matter, most mainstream movies today have atrocious scores. Why should the silents be any different?