Silent Film Sound and Music archive; cue sheets

According to a message from its director, Kendra Leonard, the  Silent Film Sound and Music Archive has received funding for a pianist to record 25 pieces from the repertoire of early ("silent") film. These are promised for September. Students without music reading (or sight-reading) skills will likely find these recordings helpful for a better understanding of the musical resources for early film. We will add an update to this post and an announcement when the audio becomes available.

The Archive overall is small but growing and already has several downloadable documents, including instruction books, sheet music, and a few cue sheets that are not available from other sources.

For more extensive and in-depth information on cue sheets and instructions from the era on how to use them, check our blog posts with the tag "cue sheet".

Hearing the Movies (2d edition) has an example of an early text-only cue list (p. 102) and one with musical incipits, typical of the 1920s (p. 117). The latter—in a series of "Thematic Music Cue Sheets"—were produced mainly for use in second-run independent theaters (that is, theaters that were not owned by a studio and that showed films after their initial presentation in the studio's own theaters; often these were the only movie theaters in small towns). A complete example, with its cover page, appears in this blog post from a "silent movie night" in Kittanning, PA, in 2011. The post itself is interesting and worth reading. We have reproduced just the graphics for the cue sheet below.

If you want to explore the topic of "photoplay music" further, an excellent, very accessible scholarly article is in a recent issue of the American Music Research Center Journal: Rodney Sauer, "Photoplay Music."

Photoplay Music

The Susquehanna Valley Theatre Organ Society has a number of PDFs of photoplay music available for download here. The Silent Film Resource Page of the site also has a number of good links.

(H/T Rebecca Doran Eaton)

Sam Fox, Vol. 2

International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) is a public domain sheet music library (Petrucci Music Library) run on a wiki engine. Browsing through it, I see that they have J. S. Zamecnik's Sam Fox Moving Picture Music, vol. 2 (1913), available for download here. Vol. 1 (1913) is available here. A short profile of Zamecnik by Rodney Sauer is located here.

Market for Photoplay Music

An overabundance of photoplay music? That's what George Beynon claimed in 1918—though he is no fan of the genre, preferring, as he does, the "classics" whenever possible.

A reader writes to him:

I have composed some special music that I think could be cued in on most pictures, and would like to know where I can find a good arranger to make orchestrations. Do you know of any? Is there any demand for such music and would a publisher be interested in buying such compositions?

Beynon replies:

Already the market is flooded with such stuff, but if it be of exceptional merit and suitable for arranging in album form, it would have a chance of a publisher's acceptance. However, we would advise you that it is a hard row to hoe and, at the best, would bring but small remuneration for your creative ability and hard work.

I find particularly interesting in Beynon's reply the stress he places on the music conforming to the proper format.

Photoplay Music

The Exhibitor's Trade Review was a trade paper started by W. Stephen Bush at the end of 1916. Bush had formerly been a contributing editor at Moving Picture World. ETR was distinguished from the start by a very generous music section, which generally ran for several (newspaper-sized) pages and included a column by S. M. Berg (a music publisher specializing in music for film) as well as extensive cue sheets. In April of 1917, the music section began publishing items out of Berg's catalog. Here is the first example (from 14 April 1917), an Allegro Agitato (a type of hurry) by Carl Kiefert.



Notice the highly modular structure, which would allow the player to expand and contract the music as needed. As is typical of hurries, the basic phrase structure at the 8-measure unit is sentential, with a 2-bar basic idea, a repetition of that basic idea, and 4-bar continuation that leads to a cadence. In the first two instances, Kiefert then pairs two sentences with complementary half and full cadences into compound (or double) periods. (The second set of 16 measures is actually a bit more complicated, as m. 24 is actually a tonicized arrival in the minor dominant, but this E-minor chord serves a similar structural function to a half cadence at the level of the compound period.) The third set of 16 measures (p. 2) is similar, except that each of the 8-measure phrases ends with some sort of half-cadence. The fourth and final set of 16 measures is an actual 16-measure sentence, with a 4-measure basic idea, which is repeated, and then an 8-measure continuation.

A PDF scan of the piece is available here.