Although it would appear that the moving-picture drama had opened up new worlds to the modern musician, no important composer, so far as I am aware, has as yet turned his attention to the writing of music for the films. If the cinema play is in its infancy, as certain enthusiasts would have us believe, then we may be sure that the day is not far distant when moving-picture scores will take their places on musicians' bookshelves alongside those occupied by operas, symphonies, masses, and string quartets. In the meantime, entirely ignorant of the truth (or oblivious to it, or merely helpless, as the case may be) that writing music for moving-pictures is a new art, which demands a new point of view, the musical directors of the picture theatres are struggling with the situation as best they may. Under the circumstances, it is remarkable, on the whole, how swiftly and how well the demand for music with the silent drama has been met. Certainly the quality of the music is on a level with, or even better than, the type of entertainment offered. Nevertheless, the directors have not squarely Music for the Movtes faced the issue: they still continue to try to force old wine into new bottles, arranging and rearranging melodies and harmonies contrived for quite other occasions and purposes. Even when scores have been written for pictures the result has not shown any imaginative advance over the arranged scores. It is curious that it seems to have occurred to no one that the moving-picture demands a new kind of music.
The composers, I should imagine, are only waiting to be asked to write it. Certainly none of them has ever displayed any hesitancy about composing incidental music for the spoken drama. Mendelssohn wrote strains for A Midsummer Night's Dream which seemed pledged to immortality until Granville Barker ignored them; the Wedding March is still in favour in Keokuk and Kankakee. Beethoven illustrated Goethe's Egmont; Sir Arthur Sullivan penned a score for The Tempest; Schubert was inspired to put down some of his most ravishing notes for a stupid comedy called Rosamunde; Grieg's Peer Gynt music is performed more often than the play. More recent examples of incidental music for dramas are Saint-Saëns's score for Brieux's La Foi, Mascagni's for The Eternal City, and Richard Strauss's for Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Is it necessary to prolong the list? I have only mentioned, to be sure, a few obvious instances that would spring at once to any musician's mind, passing by the thousands upon thousands of scores devised by lesser composers for lesser plays. Of course, it has usually been the poetic drama (do we ever hear Shakespeare or Rostand without it?) which has seemed to call for incidental music, but, with more or less disastrous consequences, to be sure, it has accompanied the unfolding of many a "drawing-room" comedy, especially during the eighties.
On the whole, as a matter of fact, more films follow the general lines of Lady Windermere's Fan or Peg o' My Heart than those of poetic dramas such as Cymbeline or La Samaritaine. The case, however, is not analogous to that of the spoken drama. For, in motion-pictures, a poetic play sheds its poetry and becomes, like its neighbour, a skeleton of action. There is no conceivable distinction in the movies, beyond one created by preference, or taste, or the quality of the performance and the photography, between Dante's Inferno and a film in which the beloved Charlie Chaplin looms large.
When the first moving-picture was exposed on the screen it seems to have occurred at once to its projector that some kind of music must accompany its unreeling. The silence evidently appalled him.[1] A moving-picture is not unlike a ballet in that it depends entirely upon action (it differs from a ballet in that the action is not necessarily rhythmic), and who ever heard of a ballet being performed without music? Sound certainly has its value in creating an atmosphere and in emphasizing the thrill of the moving-picture, especially when that sound is selected and coordinated. It may also serve to divert the attention. The musical directors of the motion-picture theatres have tried to meet this problem; that they have not so far been wholly successful is not entirely their fault.
It is no simple matter, for example, in a theatre in which the films are changed daily, a general rule even in the larger houses,[2] for a musician to arrange a satisfactory accompaniment for five thousand feet of action which may include anything from an earthquake in Cuba to a dinner in Park Lane, and it is scarcely possible, even if the distributors be so inclined, which they frequently are nowadays, to furnish a music score which will answer the purposes of bands of varying sizes, ranging from an upright piano, solo, to a full orchestra. As for the pictures without prearranged scores, the orchestra leaders and pianists must do the best they can for them.
In some theatres, the chef d'orchestre strikes an attitude of total disrespect towards the picture. He makes up his musical program as if he were giving a concert, not at all with the view of effectively accompanying the action on the screen. In a theatre on Second Avenue in New York, for example, I have heard an orchestra play the whole of Beethoven's First Symphony as an accompaniment to Irene Fenwick's performance of The Woman Next Door. As the symphony came to an end before the picture, it was supplemented by Waldteufel's waltz, Les Patineurs. The result, in this particular instance, was neither altogether incongruous nor particularly displeasing, and it occurred to me that if one had to listen to music while the third act of Hedda Gabler were being enacted, one would prefer to hear something like Boccherini's celebrated minuet or a light Mozart melody rather than anything ostensibly contrived to suit the situation.
On the other hand, there are certain accompanists for pictures who remind one by their methods of the anxiety of Richard Strauss to describe every peacock and bean mentioned in any of his opera-books. If a garden is exposed on the screen, these players swing into. The flowers that bloom in the spring; a love scene is the signal for Un peu d'amour; a religious episode suggests. The Rosary to these ingenuous musicians; Japan brings a touch of Madama Butterfly; a proposal of marriage, O Promise me; and a farewell, Tosti's Good-bye! This expedient of appealing to the emotions through the intellect bears the stamp of approval, it may be admitted, of no less a composer than Richard Wagner.
Waiting the birth of authentic moving-picture music, which a new composer must rise to invent, the safest way (not necessarily the best) is the middle course, one method for this film, another for that. One of the difficulties which arises is the necessity of arranging a score for a theatre with a large band, where the leader must plan his accompaniment, or have it planned for him, for an entire picture before his men can play a note. Music cues must be definite: twenty bars of Alexander's Ragtime Band, seventeen of The Ride of the Valkyries, ten of Vissi d'arte, etc. An ingenious young man has discovered a way by which music and action may be synchronized. I feel the impulse to quote from the vivid report of his achievement, published in one of the motion-picture weekly journals: "Here was a man-sized job—how to measure the action of the picture to the musical score, so that they would both come out equal at every part of the picture, and would be so exact that any orchestra might take the score and follow the movement of the play with absolute correctness. It was a question primarily of mathematics, but even so, it was some time before a system of computation was devised and the undertaking gotten down to a certainty. As an illustration, on the opening night of one of the most notable photoplay productions now before the public, the orchestra, notwithstanding a three weeks' rehearsal, found at the conclusion of the picture that it was a page and a half behind the play's action in the musical setting." Then we learn that Frank Stadler of New York "provided the remedy for this condition of affairs. He remembered that Beethoven had overcome the difficulty of proper timing for his sonatas by a mechanical arrangement known as the metronome, invented by a friend of his." Mr. Stadler then began the measurement of a film with a metronome, a stenographer, and a watch. He quickly discovered that the film ran ten feet to every eight seconds, and he accordingly set the metronome for eight-second periods. The stenographer made a note of the action of the picture each time the bell rang, with the result that when the entire picture had been run off Mr. Stadler had a complete record of the production. All that was necessary then was to select from the classics and the popular melodies the music which would give a suitable atmosphere and a harmonious accompaniment to the theme of the play, so synchronizing the music with the eight-second periods that every bar of it fitted the spirit of the many scores of scenes of the production."
The single man orchestra, the player of the upright piano, need not make so many preparatory gestures. He may with impunity, if he be of an inventive turn of mind or if his memory be good, improvise his score as the picture unreels itself for the first time before what may very well be his astonished vision; after that, he may vary his accompaniment, as the shows of the day progress, improving it here or there, or not, as the case may be, but keeping generally as near to his original performance as possible. He relies, naturally, on a generous use of rum-ti-tum, shivery passages (known to orchestra leaders as "agits," an abbreviation of agitato) to accompany moments of excitement. This music you will remember if you have ever attended a performance of a Lincoln J. Carter melodrama in which a train was wrecked, or a hero rescued from the teeth of a saw, or a heroine pursued by bloodhounds. Recently, in a moving-picture hall on Fourteenth Street in New York, I heard a pianist eke out a half-hour with similar poundings on two or three well-used chords, well-used even in the time of Haydn. The scenes represented the whole of a two-act opera, and the ambitious pianist was trying, with his three meagre chords, to give his audience the effect of singers, principals and chorus, and orchestra.
A certain periodical, devoted to the interests of the moving-picture industry, conducts a department as first aid to the musical leaders and pianists who figure at these shows. In a recent number the editor of this department gives it as his solemn opinion that musicians who read fiction are the best equipped to play for pictures. Then, with an almost tragic parenthesis, he continues: "Reading fiction is the last diversion that the average musician will follow. He feels that all the necessary romance is to be found in his music." Facts are dead, says this editor in substance, but fiction is living and should make you weep. When you cry, all that remains for you to do is to think of a tune which will go hand in hand with the cause of your tears; this will serve you later when a similar scene occurs on the silver sheets.
There is one tune which every capable moving-picture pianist has discovered will fit any Keystone picture. For the benefit of the uninitiated I may state that in the Keystone farces some one gets kicked or knocked down or spat upon several times in almost every scene. I am ignorant of the title of this tune, but wherever Keystone pictures are shown, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Chicago, and even New York, I have heard it. When a character falls into the water, as at least ten of them invariably do, the pianist may vary the monotony of the melody by sitting on the piano or upsetting a chair. In one theatre I have known him to cause glass to be shattered behind the screen. How Marinetti would like that!
However, the day of this sort of thing is rapidly approaching its conclusion, I venture to prophesy. A few of the firms are already issuing arranged music scores for their productions. I might note in passing the score which accompanied Geraldine Farrar's screen performance of Carmen, largely selected from the music of Bizet's opera, and Victor Herbert's original score for The Fall of a Nation, a score which does not take full advantage of the new technique of the cinema drama. It will not be long before an enterprising director engages an enterprising musician to compose music for a picture. For the same reason[3] that d'Annunzio, very early in the career of the moving-picture, wrote a scenario for a film, I should not be surprised to learn that Richard Strauss was under contract to construct an accompaniment to a screened drama. It will be very loud music and it will require a band of one hundred and forty-three men to interpret it. Probably Strauss himself will conduct the first performance; later, excerpts will be played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the critics will say, in spite of Philip Hale's diverting program notes, that this music should never be performed save in conjunction with the picture for which it was written. Mascagni is another composer who should find an excellent field for his talent in writing tone-poems for pictures, although he would contrive nothing more daring than a well-arranged series of illustrative melodies.
But put Igor Stravinsky, or some other modern genius, to work on this problem and see what happens! The composer of the future should revel in the opportunity the moving-picture affords him to create a new form. This form differs from that of the incidental music for a play in that the flow of tone may be continuous and in that one never need soften the accompaniment in order that the voices may be heard; it differs from the music for a ballet in that the scene changes constantly; consequently, time-signatures, mood, and key, must be as constantly shifting. The swift flash from scene to scene, the cut-back, the necessary rapidity of the action, all these are adapted to inspire the future composer to brilliant effort: a tinkle of this and a snatch of that, without working-out or development; illustration, comment, piquant or serious, that's what the new film music should be. The ultimate moving-picture score will be something more than a sentimental accompaniment.
November 10, 1915.
- ↑ In Chapter XIV of The Art of the Moving Picture, Vachel Lindsay says: "The perfect photoplay gathering-place would have no sound but the hum of the conversing audience."
- ↑ This is no longer true.
- ↑ $.