Category: silent film accompaniment
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When a Pop Tune in a Silent Movie Isn’t Real…or Is It?
“Sing ‘Fly, Birdie, Fly’,” Angela Fish is prompted by her father in a scene from “Bell Boy 13”. She sits at the piano, beckons Douglas MacLean to join her on the bench, and launches into the song. What do I play here? There isn’t the usual obligatory shot of the sheet music on the piano’s…
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Talking About Silents with the New Yorker
My “right brain theory” about silent film resonated with a journalist recently. It doesn’t usually happen, and I was pleased as punch that this core aspect of the Silent Film medium got included in the video profile made by the New Yorker Magazine, posted in October 2019. It’s the notion that art exists in a…
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My Favorite Silent Film to Accompany Is…
The question I am asked most often at show Q&A’s, social situations and in press interviews is one I still don’t know how to answer. “Do you have a favorite film that you like to accompany?” After 38 years of accompanying silent movies I am still caught off-guard trying to answer this. The truth is…
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Arthur Kleiner – Mid-Century Silent Film Pianist
On Wednesday, Nov 20 at 7pm, there will be a presentation at MoMA about Arthur Kleiner, silent film accompanist. It’s a name classic film fans aren’t familiar with, but he was “the sound of the silents” at the museum for the first three decades of its movie showings. In 1939, four years after the founding…
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When a Whistle Isn’t a Whistle
I make mistakes during shows, and usually I’m the only one who notices. As an artist, often that’s all I come away with from a performance. On Tuesday I used the “toy counter” on the virtual Wurlitzer I often accompany silents with in a few spots, and one use undercut one of the gags, I’m…
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Helping Make More Showings of the 1931 Dracula Happen
There’s another by-product of my doing a live score for the 1931 Dracula, one that I think is a little more important than the issue of whether or not the music should be added or whether it works. It ties in with one of my main interests in silent film. When my daughter was younger,…
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Dracula (1931) – a Horror Movie Without Horror Movie Music
It may be sacrilege to add music to the 1931 Dracula, and it might also be a great idea. It wasn’t until ten or fifteen minutes into a sound-check/run-through last year that I realized…hey, this is gonna work. The two shows I did last year at both the Library of Congress Packard Campus Theater and…
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My New Vlog – And Theda Bara
I don’t know what possessed me to do this, but I’ve started a vlog. I may not have the patience or stamina to stick with it, and I value blogging. Making myself write on a regular basis has helped me a lot. But I wanted to see if doing something similar on YouTube might be…
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Scoring a Chaplin Mutual –What’s in a Name?
In revisiting one of Chaplin’s best comedy shorts, one of my and many others’ favorites, I noticed something slightly unusual about its title. I wrote my first orchestral score for a silent film – this one – about twenty years ago, and it was time it got a gut-renovation. But, where to start? I knew…