Category: silent film accompaniment
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“Sight-Reading” a Reginald Denny Comedy
One of the questions people ask me is “Do you ever accompany a film that you haven’t seen before?” The answer is “yes”. Although it happens less often than it did a decade or so ago, because now most films either have been restored digitally and an archive can provide a private screener link, or…
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Silent Film Cue Sheets for Comedy Shorts
The “cue sheet” was the most common type of film score during the silent era. These were road maps for the conductors and musicians in movie houses. They were rarely if ever made in collaboration with a film’s director, and there was no requirement that they be adhered to. Most of the cue sheets I’ve…
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40 Years At MoMA
Had it not been for the fact that I was on vacation for about two weeks in June and my seeing a slew of LinkedIn messages congratulating me when I got home, a big anniversary of mine would not have occurred to me. It has been 40 years since my first performance at MoMA, accompanying…
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An Ozu Scoring Clue from Joan Jonas
Last week, I had another one of those film accompanist experiences where a spoken introduction helped shape the way I played for the film. There is currently a major gallery exhibition at the MoMA honoring the work of artist Joan Jonas. In conjunction with this exhibition, the film department has organized one of their “Carte…
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Buster Keaton kinescope from 1950
A rare kinescope of an early television talk show was posted recently. The reason a friend sent me the link, I’m quite sure, is that this 15-minute program manages cover two very important things for me: silent film accompaniment and Buster Keaton. The year was 1950, and Buster appears on an episode of The Faye…
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Flu epidemic silent film from 1919
In February, I was a a guest speaker-accompanist at Antonia Lant’s silent film course at NYU’s Cinema Studies program. One of the films I played for was a 1919 two-reel educational film made in England called Dr. Wise on Influenza. Dr. Wise on Influenza (1919) is an unusual film, as it’s only one I’ve encountered…
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Screening Slapstick, Unrestored
The silent comedy film series that Steve Massa and I and Ron Magliozzi put together in the late 2000s had two hooks. One we utilized to organize the shorts into programs and the other was the real inspiration for the series. The latter was crystallized in an introduction Eileen Bowser gave to one of the…
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Back in the Podcast Saddle, Again (…Again)
Several years ago, I ventured into podcasting as a way of making it easier for me to blog. I figured talking into a mic instead of writing things out saved a bunch of steps, mentally, and would be more efficient. In some ways it was, and in some it wasn’t. It was about the same…
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Live Accompaniment and Air Conditioning
There are two things I often have to ask a theatre to adjust when I arrive at a new venue. One is that the piano be turned around so it’s not facing the audience, and the other is to turn down the amount of light on me and the piano. People are coming to see…
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Chasing Charlie in The Adventurer
I’ve heard the term “baby pictures” used when referring to a composer or other artist’s early work. They were made at a certain point in the artistic arc of a particular creative person, someone whose work has developed and matured and improved. Those early works don’t get revisited and revised. But I really needed to…