Category: silent film accompaniment
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A 1950s Baby Grand for 1910s-1920s Films
“It was Blanchette Rockefeller’s piano,” I was told when I was introduced to the instrument in 2003. This was at the Gramercy Theatre on West 23rd Street, and when I arrived was greeted in the auditorium by Ethel Shein. And by the Steinway baby grand. This was during the last round of renovations for the…
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MoMA’s Arthur Kleiner – Moods on Vinyl
When I was in college, I played for a silent film course taught by MoMA’s Charles Silver. Charles loaned me a few LPs to listen to, since I was new to this. One of the records was Musical Moods from the Silent Films, by Arthur Kleiner. When I gave the album a spin, I realized…
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Colleen Moore’s Earliest Surviving Feature
I’ve recorded a lot of scores for DVD releases, and it’s always interesting to me which ones stick in my mind, and which ones don’t…and everything in between. Creating is such a subjective process and it’s almost impossible to foretell the audience’s experience either during a show or with a recording. For instance, I’ve noticed…
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Straddling Cutaways
There’s a moment in Vidor’s The Crowd that I handle in a similar way to a moment toward the end of Hands Up! with Raymond Griffith. The effect I like to think what I’ve done on the Vidor had is what prompted me to use it on the Griffith. It’s something I learned from Lee…
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Live Music at Silent Film Courses
When I started accompanying films it was still common practice to show silent films, well…silent. They were only available in 16mm prints that had no music tracks. That’s changed thanks to DVDs and Blu-rays and video projection, but having live accompaniment in a film class is still important. I play at a silent film class…
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Ben Model’s Podcast
Every once in a while, after one of my shows, someone will come up to me and ask me if I’m writing a book about silent film accompaniment. My answer is that I’m not, although this blog is pretty close to doing just that. But it wasn’t always…and that’s why I started doing a podcast,…
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A Cup Of Coffee, A Sandwich and You
I know that song from Bugs Bunny cartoons. There’s no other way I’d had have heard of it, except that composer Carl Stalling stuck it in scenes where Bugs or someone else was eating. Carl Stalling had played the organ in movie houses in the 1920s, and this practice of using “song title puns” has…
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A Book of Silent Movie Music
A lot of people ask me at shows if the original music played for silent movies still exists. During an intermission at a double-feature I was playing at Bard about a dozen years ago, someone who said they were involved with music publisher G. Schirmers asked me about this. I said, “Oh, what do you…