The Importance of the Cue Sheet. The importance of music as a soundtrack to storytelling is clear. Equally clear is the need, as filmmakers, to correctly license the music you use so that the composers and recording artists are paid for their work, and to avoid legal issues further down the line.
Ever felt emotional listening to your favourite tunes? You are not alone. Music has been a universal feature of the human society, with the power to evoke primal feelings from our cores. Silent films, one of the milestones in the history of film-making, make use of music in this precise manner. Recorded without a synchronised audio track, these films do not contain any audible dialogue, making use of title cards to convey its plot and live music to add more drama to the films.
A pianist or a theatre organist is usually employed in a small town and at neighbourhood movie theatres showing silent films. At larger city theatres with bigger productions, a small orchestra is usually hired together with a solo pianist. However, since the mid-1910’s, massive theatre organs, designed to bridge the gap between the piano soloist and the large orchestra were preferred. One of such, the “Mighty Wurlitzer”, was famed for its ability to simulate orchestral sounds, percussion effects and even novelty sound effects ranging from boat whistles to thunder and rain.
Silent film music is usually performed from sheet music. Initially, sheet music from silent films were compiled directly from Classical repertoire and theatrical repertory music. Subsequently, composers began to adapt passages from their repertoire to create some of the most interesting arrangements in music. In more elaborate productions, musicians are normally provided with a cue sheet, which highlights the dramatic passages of the film.
Improvisation is also common in silent films as musicians are required to react to live situations which may not be noted on the cue sheets. Ben Model, a composer and the cofounder of the “Silent Clowns” series, embraces this approach in his compositions. “I don’t rehearse”, he claims, crediting instead his training in comedic improvisation, which “really opened him up”. A number of countries followed suit and developed their own version of silent films. For example, in Brazil, operattas feature “fitas cantatas”, singers performing behind the screen during a silent film showing. In Japan, “benshi”, a live narrator is engaged to provide commentary and character voices behind the scenes.
The thought of syncing music to film evolved steadily, until the occurrence of a production called “Entr’acte” which commissioned Erik Satie to compose the accompanying music for the film. Satie proceeded to invent an ingenious system of synchronising his music to specific frames in the film, a first in film music. This eventually lead to the “talkies”, which feature dialogue and music together with the film. With the advancement of recording technology along the way, silent film music evolved slowly to become what we hear in the cinemas today.
Take a look at Buster Keaton’s “The General “ and Charlie Chaplin’s “The Pawnshop” below:
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Check out also our previous blogpost to find out about yet another genre of music that led to the development of music in silent films.
Till the next, Play on and Tinkle Away!
About eleven years ago I was hired to compile a book of vintage silent film mood music. To make my selections, I went through inventories of a handful of collections of music published and used during the silent film era — some that were in special collections at libraries around the country and one or two in private collections. I found music of all the genres conductors and accompanists back then needed to create a score, and all the genres one associates with silent movies. Except for one: ragtime.
I found this interesting. I was really expecting to find ragtime pieces in the various collections.
All of the collections of “photoplay music”, including the one of more than 300 pieces for small orchestra that I had come into, seemed as if in the early 1930s someone had gone into movie theaters’ orchestra pits and scooped up their entire now-defunct mood cue library. Every collection had agitatos, misteriosos, love themes, intermezzos, characteristic pieces, chases and hurry music, warhorses from the classical canon, one-steps and two-steps and fox-trots, pop tunes of the day.
But not a single piece of the syncopated music composed in the 1900s-1910s by Joplin, Morton, et al. Search through the 400 or so pieces of vintage silent film music cues and cue-sheets at the online Silent Film Sound and Music Archive, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
So, where did the idea of playing ragtime for silent movies come from? Perhaps when the films began being played on TV in the 1950s and needed music, something simple and that sounded like what people producing these TV packages thought of when they thought of silent movies is what got chosen.
Arthur Kleiner was MoMA’s first silent film accompanist, playing there from 1939-1967. He had accompanied films in the 1920s in his native Germany. Ironically, the 1968 LP Music for Silent Comedies that Arthur Kleiner recorded is mostly ragtime. Interestingly, though, Maple Leaf Rag is the only Joplin tune on the record, and it’s Zez Confrey who’s most represented in that genre — 7 tracks out of the 12 are by Zez. The remaining 4 are mood cues from the silent era, pieces Kleiner had included on his other LP Musical Moods from the Silent Films.
The 50 selections I came up with for The Music of the Silent Films, published in 2015 by MusicSales, have two or three examples of each of the moods I saw covered in the collections I went through, as well as a number of “characteristic” pieces. If you want to use ragtime for your scores, there’s plenty of that already available.