University Class Screenings are Great for “Audience Preservation”

When it comes to silent film, university students are an important group of younger viewers to aim for of when it comes to “audience preservation”. The live accompaniment makes a huge difference with students, since they’ll be seeing silent film with recorded tracks in their other class sessions. This isn’t just a theory of mine, it’s based on having done this for a very long time, and on a delayed but positive reaction I’ve gotten.

I accompany silent films at universities every year, and I have been doing this for a little over two decades. It all started with a NYU Cinema Studies class taught by Professor Antonia Lant, and then gradually I was able to do these accompaniment-guest-speaker stints at Columbia University, Ursinus College, Sarah Lawrence College, Bowdoin College, and Montclair State University, often returning every year or every other year. Even after I started teaching my “Silent Storytelling” course at Wesleyan in 2015, I started doing these for other professors there. (I’ll have more about that in an upcoming post.)

What’s confirmed my hunch about the importance of promoting having live music at a college film course is that over the years, every once in a while I’ll encounter a younger fan of classic film who will tell me they took the class I had played in. They’d always say the same thing: that that class session was their favorite of the whole semester.

We silent movie fans know that live accompaniment makes such a difference in terms of the experience of silent film, even if you’re watching one in a theater. This has an even bigger impact for a younger viewers for whom the course they’re taking is probably their first exposure to silent cinema of any kind.

If you are a college or university film studies professor and teach a course on silent film or one that includes a silent film or two, I hope you’ll consider working out some way to have live piano accompaniment for the film.

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I’m accompanying/guest-speakering at 4 different universities in the tri-state area (NY/NJ/CT). This week on September 10, 2026 I will be a guest speaker and accompanist at Professor Jennifer Fleeger’s film history course at Montclair State University. This is my second time playing at her class at Montclair; I had also done this for her classes when she was teaching at Ursinus College during the 2010s. For her class I’ll accompany One Week (1920) with Buster Keaton, everyone’s favorite go-to short for first-timers – as well as maybe one other short film. And then there will be a screening of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (1923) for the student body and the public at 5pm. I’ll also be at Wesleyan, Sarah Lawrence College and NYU this month.

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