Ben Model’s blog

  • I made my Radio City Music Hall debut yesterday, playing for the graduation ceremony of the School of Visual Arts. I improvised 90+mins of music while the graduates came up and received their diplomas…17 groups in all. I used the RCMH’s 9-foot Steinway grand, which was placed extreme downstage right,…

  • Don’t know if I’ve mentioned this here before, but I’ve been making a study of silent comedy filmmaking and how undercranking was utilized. I’ve discovered the comedians not only knew the film they shot would be shown faster, but they used this to their advantage, making many of their gags…

  • Played for seven shows in the last six days. Performing every day for a stretch like this happens every once in a while. A little traveling involved, but not way far out of town. Sunday afternoon was the final program for The Silent Clowns Film Series, and we had a…

  • There’s a nice write-up on my altscore.com site at the Bioscope blog, run by Luke McKernan. Click here to read it!

  • Here’s a review of a concert by the Green Bay Civic Symphony from yesterday. The orchestra’s final concert of the season was comprised of movie music by Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber, and John Williams. Oh yeah, and me. They performed my orchestral score to Charlie Chaplin’s The Adventurer (score was…

  • Well…a month has flown by since my last posting, and much has happened. no way to catch up but to do it in pieces. Here’s an initial stab at catching up… Last week I spent three days recording scores for ten comedy shorts for the upcoming American Slapstick 2 DVD…

  • This week I launched www.altscore.com, finally. I’ve had this idea for several months but have finally had the down time to build the site and record scores for it. The site is a place where people can purchase and download MP3’s of piano or organ scores by me for silent…

  • Well, March is here — and while my sched of performances is a tad lighter, I’m plenty busy with recording and re-arranging. A high school in Connecticut contacted me a couple months ago about doing a silent film program with one of my orchestral scores…but the school has a band…

  • Spent the afternoon yesterday recording a piano score for The Gusher (1913) for Kino. Am assuming the set this is for will come out later this year. An interesting and fun short, one of those Keystones where you really have to watch everybody to see what the story is, as…