suggestions for accompanying silent films

Speculates that Caruso’s phonograph records reduced his ability to sway audiences in performance but that this cost is worth the preservation of his voice for generations to come.  Also, the phonograph has “realized what is perhaps the most significant achievement in the history of music. I has developed a condition that will lead to national opera..” (54). Shop girls and lay workers are educating themselves musically and in Latin languages by way of phonogrash. “It will be from just such a start [as Mr. Mildenberg’s municipal opera company] that grand opera will be popularized for the masses.”
Edison on future of sound film, especially making opera available to working class (121).

Conventional silent film score compiled and arrange dby Lou Silvers from Tchaikovsky, Lalo, Debussy and Sibelius, Hebraic, pop and folk melodies. (Fred Steiner in Film Music 1, p. 81)

Premises: aesthetic foundation of opera is “Italian notion of song” – “opera that engenders a state in which one is always listening in anticipation of, or listening toward, [desiring], a place where one knows beautiful singing will take place.” Operatic singing is transcendent and potentially ridiculous “being both miraculous and continually available for parody.” (3)  “Death is immanent in the operatic voice.” “Moments of beautiful singing are always already being mourned.” (4) Poizat: death in operatic narrative allegorizes voice’s tendency to reach beyond melos and signification to “the cry, the shriek, the scream, fading out into after-echoes and silence.” Dramatic conditions created in order to produce cry (logic of vocal jouissance). Zizek: Wagnerian horror is the threat of existing between two deaths, the first biological, the second dying in peace. Abbate: Wagnerian death a Utopian moment allowing operatic immortality, for dead remain in music in sonorous form even after they can no longer authorize it. (5) Grover-Friedlander: “Orphic death” means “song revives the dead, but that revival is overturned by a gesture that is not acoustic (song) but visual (looking back)….hints that the spectral, the visual or the optical is able to bring about the total collapse of whatever has been achieved by the vocal or the acoustic.”  But “the idea of mortality or impermanence is already called for by the frailty of song, by its incapacity to sustain life, or by its passing and ephemeral nature.” (7) But “repetition of song questions the finality of eath, introducing a dimension of immortality.” “What is ephemeral and passing is also what can return.” [<- illogical] Death fails to hold sway. (8)

Basic historical story, stuff you'll find elsewhere.

This book is amazing; it situates its contributions to our knowledge of silent film music – which our copious – within the existing body of literature, providing a solid point of departure for all further study. Marks gives extensive consideration to the availability and state of the historical evidence, and works to piece together the surviving (often partial) scores, advertisements and reviews in order to create a more complete picture of the silent era’s musical practices then has elsewhere been achieved. Marks debunks the notion that there was a period during which anything went musically as long as it covered up the noise of the projector and compensated for the uncanny flatness of the moving image by looking at music for some of the proto-film technologies (vitascope, biograph and bioskop). The more compelling case of bioskop took place in Europe, however, and their film music practices were not immediately taken up in America. In 1909 Moving Picture World dubbed the majority of pianists inadequate movie accompaniests, and only months later Edison published its first guidelines for film accompaniment. Marks observes that the 1910-14 period has been subject to severe music scholarly neglect due to the perceived lack of evidence. Marks finds and considers numerous “special scores,” i.e. scores written specially for particular movies, that predate Birth of a Nation (1915), the oft cited “first.” Birth of a Nation gets its own chapter too, however, for it was a significant and influential achievement. Marks includes numerous facsimiles as well as transcriptions of the surviving parts/scores, and subjects them to paleographic as well as music analysis. I would say this is THE book for silent film music.

A seemingly respectable history of music for silent films, but with no sources cited for its copious quotes and data. Recounts Griffith's views on film music, (inaccurately) deems Birth of a Nation the first movie to have a film score written specifically for it and (accurately) the initiator of a trend. Dwells on instances of inappropriate use of music.

By the time the cinema was born, the pianist and the orchestra had long been established in the living theater.

Marks criticizes this book's characterization of silent film music in his Music and the Silent Film.