Silent Film, Live Music and Contemporary Composition

Abstract

Silent film and live music together force you to think differently about both phenomena. And so, although composers frequently engage with external elements such as texts and non-musical subjects, it is my contention that working with silent film as a musician raises especially interesting challenges. In this chapter, I outline my previous composition work with silent moving images, and conclude with a case study of a recent collaborative project, Night Music (2015). One thing my examples have in common is that they were all conceived for live musical performance with silent film screenings — although some projects have since been released commercially on DVD. This latter point speaks to some recent film music studies research which reminds us of the affective loss sustained in the transition from silent to sound film in the late 1920s and early 1930s: silent film music practice rests on a visible distinction between the screen and the source of sound and music, as in opera where the numinous and magical quality of the action is possible precisely because of the separation between stage and audience by the orchestra. I argue that my own live music and screen work fits in with a tradition of seeking to recover this quality through performances featuring live solo musicians and orchestras, and furthermore that the ritual, simultaneous working through of screen and musical ideas that this work displays aligns it more with certain qualities of opera than with conventional film music practices found in sound cinema.