“Live-Scoring for the Virtual Cinema” – in part two of this conversation, Ben Model discusses what it’s been like to accompany silent films throughout 2021 via live-streams he’s produced and presented out of his home. Ben and co-host Kerr Lockhart discuss: the differences for Ben between the creative mindsets of scoring a silent film while performing in a theater, when recording a score and when hosting a live-stream; the reasons Ben prefers live-scoring a stream to pre-recording the music; thinking of the home viewer as the audience, and more.
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Episode 41 Show Notes:
- To preview or not to preview films before accompanying them
- view The Eagle with synthesized orchestral score based on cue sheets
- Eyewitness account of accompanist in the silent era preparing by looking at the poster and lobby pictures
- Why authentic compiled scores are often not suitable; often repetitive
- Silent Film Sound and Music Archive (sfsma.org)
- Score materials for The Birth Of A Nation
- The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, Rodney Sauer, music director
- The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra – Rick Benjamin, music director
- An excerpt from Metropolis using the original Gottfried Huppertz score
- One of many explanations of the whole tone scale
- Opening of Modern Times
- “In A Mist” by Bix Beiderbecke as an example of whole-tone composition from 1927
- Sponsor announcement by Undercrank Productions: Accidentally Preserved Volume 4
- How has playing for live-streams influenced Ben’s playing?
- Ben discusses scoring the 1916 Italian film “Ceneri” (view here with a score by someone else.)
- Having to play while being a television director
- “You can always play less”
- Excerpt from Ben’s score for The Making of a Stetson Hat
- Ernie Kovacs as a model and playing in the “intimate vacuum” of television (or streaming)
- Sign-offs