Tweet Queries about organs (and organists)

Rick Altman's Silent Film Sound and Q. David Bowers' Nickelodeon Theaters and Their Music are both good, well-researched resources about what was played in silent era cinemas and with which instruments or instrumentations.

Ben

Where I draw the line is when I think the music calls attention to itself and does not serve the picture. The example I'll use (though it's not a silent) was Phillip Glass's score for "Dracula." Now I actually like a lot of Glass's music, and have liked some of his film scores, but his "Dracula" (especially in its live presentation) was a horrible exercise. Set aside the premise of the project (i.e. they would have put music in origianlly if they could have), which was a completely bogus jumping off point, but what Glass was doing was really a piece of performance art with colored lights shining through from behind the screen, music overpowering dialogue, poor choices in matching music to picture, etc. It was just a mess, and all designed to let you know every minute that Phillip Glass was an artist and so superior to the film on the screen that he had condescended to come down from his musical Olympus and bless the great unwashed with his brilliance and let them know what REAL art was all about--and it certainly wasn't about "Dracula."

Has anybody else seen his performance of his "cantata" to La Belle et La Bete? I quite enjoyed that. In that case, they turned off the soundtrack entirely and just performed the music as thought the film was silent. There were no colored lights on the screen, though the stage lights were on so we could see the musicians and singers it did not obscure the film in any way. I didn't think of the performance as a screening of the film, but, yes, more like performance art. Taken on those terms i think it was a fascinating experiment. If i were recommending someone see the film, though, i would definitely not recommend seeing that--one would of course want to see the film as it was intended to be shown. But for an open-minded person familiar with the film it was worthwhile.

I can see, though, that competing against the soundtrack in Dracula would have been fatal. Sounds like it would have been better to turn off the track altogether and market it not as rectifying something that was lacking but as an artistic re-interpretation of an existing work. Sort of like Spooky-D's Rebirth of a Nation. Artists have been doing mashups for centuries, and as long as it doesn't supplant or purport to be the original work, i'm fine with it.

But, for silent films, if it is purporting to be the original work, it had better be "accompaniment!"

greta