About eleven years ago I was hired to compile a book of vintage silent film mood music. To make my selections, I went through inventories of a handful of collections of music published and used during the silent film era… Read More »Silent Era Movie Theater Music Libraries Covered All the Bases…Except One
I don’t know how it got started that 12th Street Rag became the custard pie stereotype of silent comedy music, and I’ll bet it goes back before Joe Franklin’s TV show. The tune has now been replaced by Yakkety Sax… Read More »Knuckles O’Toole Can Sit This One Out
In selecting “appropriate music” for a scene in silent film accompaniment, there’s a fine line between support and simply mirroring what’s onscreen. It’s something I learned and developed during the first few years I was accompanying silents at NYU. It’s… Read More »Matching Music: Dramatic Boost or Overkill
The more shows I do the more I meet people with similar stories about their elder relatives. Great-aunts and great-grandmothers or grandmothers who played for movies back in the silent era. The repeats have confirmed what could easily be fuzzy… Read More »Play Me a Movie
I’ve been a fan of Akira Kurosawa’s since the middle of high school. I forget which year it was, but my English lit class had read what my wife and daughter refer to as “the Scottish Play” by Shakespeare. Earlier… Read More »A New Year’s Resolution, Thanks To Akira Kurosawa
The things you see during a silent film show when you’re the one who’s closest to the screen! As a film accompanist, I’m constantly scanning the frame for information while I’m playing. Impending story developments can be introduced in different… Read More »Arbuckle-Spotting, or: What Emma Clifton and I Saw Last Night
Two main elements in film programming, I’ve found, are knowing the films and knowing where prints of them are. The rest, to a certain degree, is setting the table or parking cars in a lot. Sometimes the prints turn up… Read More »Looking for Squibs
A couple weeks ago TCM aired The Love Light with Mary Pickford, and there was some Twitter chatter I picked up on about it referencing the score on it. This made me think about my now-defunct “altscore” site. It was… Read More »Alternate Scores for Silent Films on Home Video
As a fan and proponent of silent films, I’ve enjoyed seeing that every year at Halloween time, more and more shows of silent films are happening. It’s occurred to me that this means there are a lot of musicians accompanying… Read More »How to Play the Piano or Organ for a Halloween Silent Movie