Reel Music Exploring 100 Years Of Film Music Ebook
Mozell Gentges
With more than one million items, the Music Library & Bill Schurk Sound Archives (MLBSSA) is the largest collection of popular music in an academic library in North America. Our recordings include 45s, 78s, 33s, LPs, reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes and CDs. The sound recording collection is supported by books, scores, video/film, hard-to-find periodicals, fanzines, promotional material and archival collections.
The MLBSSA also collects materials in support of BGSU's College of Musical Arts, including scores and recordings for study and performance, anthologies and collected works of individual composers. The Music Library is the repository for works performed at the New Music Festival, held annually by the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music.
Jacqui Deegan was a rock photographer based in Kent, Ohio. Her papers include previously unpublished photographs of bands and artists who played at venues in Ohio - including Genesis, Devo, U2, Pere Ubu, Iggy Pop, and many more.
This free event will showcase an exciting forthcoming documentary Sign My Name to Freedom, a feature-length film about 102-year-old Betty Reid Soskin, her lost music, and her family's experiences confronting Jim Crow style workplace and residential housing segregation in the Bay Area.
Film director Bryan Gibel met Betty in 2016 and encouraged Betty to bring out taped recordings of her music that had been buried in the back of her closet for decades. Over the past eight years he and his crew have been working with Betty and her family members to capture her story and bring this documentary to completion.
The evening's program will include a 20-minute preview sample of the film, Q & A with film director Bryan Gibel and other members of the team, and information about the crowdfunding campaign to support finishing the film.
Don't miss this opportunity for a sneak peak at a documentary in progress that sheds light on the struggles and triumphs of iconic Betty Reid Soskin.
If you cannot attend, but want more information on how to support this project, please visit www.seedandspark.com/fund/sign-my-name-to-freedom and consider donating to the project there!
The film team is currently raising funds to complete the film while Betty is still with us to experience it. Although she is doing well at 102, the clock is ticking given her advanced age. The crowdfunding campaign will run through mid-March, but if the team doesn't hit their fundraising goal for the project, none of the donation pledges will be processed.
You may also want to sign up for their newsletter so you can get information about other upcoming screening opportunities. Last, you can contact the filmmakers directly at fi...@signmynametofreedom.com.
That film historians have only recently begun to recognize film not as a uniquely visual art but as a highly integrated one, one that unites the previously separate mediums of image, sound, and music, stems no doubt from a peculiarity rooted in the beginnings of film history itself. For nearly the first three decades, film was not a fully mechanized art; instead it relied on a strange simultaneity of technically disparate parts, merging mechanically reproduced moving images with live performances of music and sound. Unfortunately, this mix of real and reproduced media led instantly to a critical inequity. Because it was mechanized and represented a new technology, the visual part of the film came immediately to define the film proper. Then as now, film was prized primarily as a visual technology or art.
The history of silent film music is important not only because it challenges this visual-centric model of film, but also because it offers a new and deeper understanding of the term silent. Certainly, if film had been truly silent from the beginning, this section would not exist. If the following documents reveal anything, it is the irony of the most common term used to refer to early film. For in fact, the "silent" period was full of sounds-noise, music, even dialogue and narration. In qualifying the silence of early film, therefore, the documents in this section redefine that silence not as a lack of sound, but as a lack of integration. The undoing of film's silence, in other words, will come not with the inclusion of music and sound, but with their mechanization, the technological innovation that allowed music to be represented alongside the images.
The history conveyed by these documents of music in the silent period also challenges the assumption that the sound of film music was standardized or "classicized" by Hollywood composers of the 1930s and 1940s. Far from being the beginning of a classical tradition of wall-to-wall orchestral music, Max Steiner's "Golden Age" scoring model was, rather, the culmination of three decades of silent film music experimentation.
Like any art form, film has an extensive prehistory. Beginning as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, inventors and artists had been seeking ways not just to represent reality, but to animate it. It wasn't until the nineteenth century, however, with the invention of photography and the cinema-like experiences of the diorama and panorama, that those efforts took off, and as a result audiences were now treated to a flourishing of optical experiments. While some of these early experiments were more popular than others, none was completely successful at both animating the photograph and projecting it onto a large screen for mass viewing.1 That distinction was achieved only at the end of the century, on December 28, 1895, when the brothers August and Louis Lumire, owners of a film and photographic plate manufacturing business in Lyon, France, projected a series of short films, or cinmatographes as they called them, onto the wall of the salon indien at the Grand Caf in Paris.2
In terms of basic technology, these films were similar to the films we watch today, although they were silent and radically shorter. Each was limited to the length of the reel, which at first was only about 25 meters, or one minute, long. These first films were also limited in subject matter. As a surviving playbill for the Paris exhibition reveals, the Lumire films were actualits, or proto-documentaries.3 While many featured the Lumire family and the city of Lyon, one of the Lumire brothers' first production initiatives was to place trained cameramen in major cities and exotic locations all around the world to document life outside of France. The result was short scenics, of places like Venice, Milan, Naples, and even Melbourne. They made these short documentaries not to entertain audiences, but to advertise their film equipment company to a global market.4
The cinema experience for the audience at the Grand Caf was more than just a visual spectacle. In an important footnote at the bottom of the playbill, musical accompaniment by the pianiste-compositeur Emile Maraval was announced. Little is known today of Maraval, nor does the announcement reveal what kind of music he played, whether he penned new music or simply improvised an accompaniment for each short film. Perhaps he changed the style and tempo of his music to suit the topic of each film, giving Venice and Australia different treatments. It is impossible to know5 Nonetheless, the presence of a musician at this first film exhibition is significant. Not only did the Lumire brothers find a way to animate photographs and project them onto a screen in larger-than-life-size form, but they also thought to integrate those images with music.
When a similar group of Lumire cinmatographes was shown to Queen Victoria several months later, the musical part of the experience was somewhat different. As the program for this special occasion announces, the Windsor Castle exhibition was accompanied not by a pianist, but by an orchestra, specifically the Empire Theater Orchestra conducted by Leopold Wenzel.6 Although, again, little is known of Wenzel,7 the exhibition program yields much more information about what the musical part of the experience may have sounded like. On this occasion, not only was the accompaniment orchestral, but it relied to some extent on preexisting music, including selections previously written by Wenzel for the ballet and works by other composers such as Karl Millcker, Olivier Metra, Ernest Gillet, and Charles Gounod. Wenzel also seems to have differentiated filmic action and subject matter through use of varying musical styles and tempi. "Hussars Passing through Dublin," for instance, was paired with a march by Mtra, and the comedy "A Joke on the Gardener" with a waltz by Wenzel, while the final travelogue, "A Moving Train near Clapham Junction," was accompanied by "Metropolitan Galop" by Charles Hubans.
Not all of the earliest film exhibitions followed the Lumire exhibition format, of course, or even used the Lumire technology. In Europe, for instance, early cinema audiences were treated to Max Skladanowsky's Bioskop films;8 in the United States, audiences watched "vitascopes," films projected by Thomas Edison's Vitascope machine.9 While individual technologies varied, all these films appear to have been shown with musical accompaniment.
In the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, film's first home was the vaudeville theater. In this setting, films were not shown as "programs," or uninterrupted collections of short films with different subjects, as in Europe. Instead, the film was simply part of the parade of individual acts that defined the vaudeville program. A short film of a modern dancer or two men boxing, for instance, might have been sandwiched in between a juggler and a comic routine.
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