Silent cinema is more prominent now than it has been since the 1920s. Festivals and archival showing abound, and silent films are part of education, entertainment and art. Indeed, one might argue that the silent film aesthetic has remained alive and well (although less prominent) in avant garde cinema (and evident in films like those of Guy Maddin, for example). In 2012 a silent film in a more conventionally narrative form conquered cinema audiences and for the first time since William Wellman’s Wings from 1927 a silent film won the Oscar for best picture.² We are of course referring to The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius, a film which was awarded several Oscars, including for the original soundtrack (which included several prominent references to the highlights of film music history). It is no coincidence that the Academy jury and the world-wide audience were ready to celebrate the silent film art at this time. Around the world we are offered more and more opportunities to experience silent film with music, and a growing number of people have discovered the magic and beauty of silent films with live music.³ A decade ago it was possible to experience this at festivals in metropolitan centres, such as in London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles and San Francisco (and of course at the flagship Pordenone Silent Film Festival). Yet in recent years, silent films with live accompaniment have also resurfaced in smaller nations with different film cultures. To take Sweden as an example, there have been quite limited possibilities to watch silent films: customarily it has been at the cinematheque screenings in Stockholm where a pianist or a small orchestra (usually Matti Bye) has accompanied the films. During the celebration of the anniversary of cinema in the middle of the 1990s, silent film was celebrated in the city of Malmö in southern Sweden with screenings accompanied by symphony orchestras, but this was at the time a very unusual happening in Sweden. Now, twenty years later, even small film festivals in Sweden show silent films, and in the autumn of 2014 the cinematheque in Stockholm commissioned well-known Swedish artists from different music genres to write and perform music to some of the masterpieces of silent film history. The programme committee explicitly asked the question, which is also one of central issues in this book: what will happen when the silent film era meets the 2010s and popular musicians? Further to this, the book asks: with silent cinema so remote, how are current silent film accompaniments conceived?

Where there are silent films, there are musical accompaniments. Many DVD releases have new, specially-written music for the films while others go out of their way to have an ‘authentic’ score from the time of the film’s release. A notable demarcation exists between scores for silent films that espouse the notion of historical veracity and those that aim to furnish something new. At heart, this betrays a profound difference in conception of silent films, on the one hand seeing them primarily as historical documents, works of art essentially imbued with the period of their production, and on the other seeing them as living objects that have new life breathed into them by the performance situation and the new moment of the film’s experience with new music. The former approach represents the important current notion of the museum while the latter represents the possibility of reappropriation, which can produce startling novelty but in some cases involve the crude co-opting of existing culture into something of questionable value.

While in the overwhelming majority of cases there is no aim at an incongruous experience, in some cases there is an evident irony of antiquated visuals allied to some very modern sounding music. However, there is rarely an aim at the contradictory. There is almost always a strong sense of unity between sound and visuals on an abstract level perhaps as much as on an emotional and narrative level. There is often a concern with dynamics and the rethinking of cinema space as partially illusory and partially present (the flat space of the film and the actual space of musical performance). In the past, silent films have attracted sometimes improvising pianists and organists, or composers working with orchestras or small art chamber ensembles. In recent years, however, a whole new breed of musician has become involved, not only pop musicians using electronics but also experimental musicians and ‘turntablist’ DJs, who can spin discs to the action. There are a number of possible reasons for the increased interest of popular musicians, not least the ‘crisis’ in the music industry and the proliferation of ageing musicians wishing to branch out. There is a massive range of films with live and new scores, that run from the historically accurate orchestral scores by scholar conductor Gillian B. Anderson (for example Nosferatu [1922, F. W. Murnau], Häxan: Witchcraft through the Ages [1922, Benjamin Christensen] and Way Down East [1920, D. W. Griffith]), conductor and composer Carl Davis who composes new scores in a film musical classical manner (for example the Harold Lloyd film Safety Last [1923, Fred Newmeyer], Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ [1925, Fred Niblo] and Show People [1928, King Vidor]), to contemporary sounds such as pop producer Giorgio Moroder’s version of Metropolis (original 1927; new version released in the cinema in 1984), which fitted Fritz Lang’s film up with contemporary pop songs and electronic keyboard music, while two decades later dance music DJ and mixer Jeff Mills also provided an electronic score for the film. Gothic heavy metal band Type O Negative’s music from different albums has been used to create a score for Nosferatu. Films such as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin from 1925 have had new scores furnished by top pop act the Pet Shop Boys and avant garde composer Ed Hughes. Similarly, Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) is available on three different DVDs with different scores by Michael Nyman, the Alloy Orchestra and In the Nursery.

As this illustrates, DVD release has encouraged the furnishing of new music for silent films. While in some cases, there is a solid attempt to provide unobtrusive music that merges with the historical character of the film, in other cases the intention is otherwise. A recent more avant garde endeavour would be Peter Rehberg and Stephen O’Malley’s electronics and guitar drone score (as KTL) for Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage from 1921. After live performances, this was released on a DVD known as ‘the KTL version’ and later their score appeared as an option alongside Matti Bye’s score on the high quality Criterion DVD release. Similarly, Häxan: Witchcraft through the Ages has also been made available with multiple soundtracks, one DVD including both the William Burroughs version and Geoff Smith’s hammer dulcimer accompaniment. Indeed, one highly notable phenomenon of recent years is how single films are made available on DVD with different musical accompaniment, thus making for a different cultural object, if not a different film itself. Arguably, silent films with live musical accompaniment are a completely new culture as well as a return to a once-vibrant but seemingly sidelined culture, one of both a different form of cinema aesthetics and a time and place where films retained an immediacy of live performance. In some cases, the rethinking of the film has gone far further. For example, DJ Spooky created a ‘remix’ of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) as Rebirth of a Nation, commenting on the racist assumptions at the heart of the original film in a manner rarely achieved by film historians or cultural critics. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was also recast as something approaching a rock opera, with a rock group performing alongside singers and dancers, while the film was screened on two screens at sides of stage. Such situations, where the film ceases to be the central focus are occasionally evident, such as a recent project in New York where an Oscar Micheaux film was screened with live jazz and people reading unrelated poems and prose texts. This kind of performance resembles in a modern way the early stages of silent film music practice when film screenings were part of bigger programme in the cinema theatre or at vaudeville theatres, when the film was only one of different features amongst dances, conjurer’s performance, songs, and so on.⁴

The growing interest with the audiences around the world coincides with a swelling number of academic books about silent film music. Research and public interest seems in this way to have cross-fertilized each other, and new kinds of silent film music histories have been produced, inspired by the general movement of a turn to among other things a piecemeal history and attention to local film histories in the so-called historical turn.

This involves a return to the sources and to small nation film culture. For example, in his article ‘The Living Nickelodeon’ in the book The Sounds of Early Cinema Rick Altman strongly advocates a much more differentiated and contextual view on silent film music which implies a wider use of primary material.⁵ If scholars writing about silent film music at the end of the twentieth century often pointed out how film music in general and silent film music in particular was unfairly treated, in the twenty-first century we have access to diverse research on the field. Only to mention some of the books from the last fifteen years: the already mentioned The Sounds of Early Cinema edited by Richard Abel and Rick Altman, Rick Altman’s Silent Film Sound, Julie Brown and Annette Davison’s anthology The Sounds of Silents in Britain, and the recent anthology by Claus Tieber and Anna K. Windisch The Sounds of Silent Films: New Perspectives on History, Theory and Practice.⁶

It is no exaggeration to claim that music constitutes a bridge between the old silent film and the modern audience; music is also a channel for non-scholarly audiences to gain an appreciation of silent films. Music has become a means for both musicians and audiences to understand this bygone film art anew. Hence, there is an astonishing parallel to the use of music in the 1910s and the use of music almost exactly a hundred years later. In the 1910s music, as is well known, was an important element in an unofficial campaign to raise the status and cultural prestige of cinema. Novels and theatre plays were adapted, pompous cinema theatres were built, and orchestras or at least chamber ensembles made their entrées. Other types of music, such as opera or romantic music from the nineteenth century, was applied in the cinemas to give a patina of ‘high art’ to the proceedings. The aim was not simply to make cinema seem more legitimate but also to attract audiences with the promise of something beyond the everyday. Around this time, a different way of connecting music and film developed which resulted in original scores or cue sheets – ‘cinema music’ became ‘film music’ in that music became conceived as united with the film. Today music is again at the centre of spreading an interest in silent films, and also is furnishing a different value to this form of cinema, erasing the popular misconception of silent cinema as a primitive form of film which was simply waiting around for recorded sound to come along.

There was undeniably a certain poetic and magic quality connected with the silent film that many artists thought was lost when sound film took over. A substantial portion of these qualities was part of the films themselves, but not least it is imbedded in the music that was played live in the theatre alongside the projected film on screen. Now this magic has transferred to modern media culture with music playing a highly prominent part. This burgeoning culture has so far evaded even the most basic description by scholars let alone any sort of theorization. This book will be the first of its kind in that it aims to bring together writings and interviews to delineate the culture of providing music for silent films. It will include a focus upon scholars whose music is historically accurate and at the other end of the spectrum it will include popular musicians who have no regard for any reconstruction of the film as a historical object but wish to forge it anew as an aesthetic object in the present. It will not only have the character of a scholarly work but also will have something of the manual about how to make music for silent films, in that practical concerns will be addressed. The aim is to approach the subject from more than one angle. Rather than simply looking at music for silent films as a matter for film and music history and historians, it should also be conceived from the point of view of more recent musical practices (both popular and experimental) and art multi-media activities.

The following chapter is K. J. Donnelly’s discussion of novel musical approaches to scoring silent film, titled ‘How Far Can Too Far Go?’ This complements some of the discussion in this introduction and sets out the difference between ‘historical’ scores (which may be reconstructions or historically sensitive) and ‘novel’ approaches. This is a companion introduction and deals with the ‘big picture’ of the developing culture of silent films with live music and general attitudes towards history.

Part I, ‘Archives and Historical Practices’, begins with a chapter by Carolin Beinroth which addresses the use of archives for silent film music, in particular the archive at the Deutsches Filminstitut in Frankfurt. After this, Emilio Audissino’s chapter looks into Gottfried Huppertz’s score for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, detailing how it has been changed and developed over the years. Then, Gillian B. Anderson discusses her reconstruction of the music for Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus, pointing to the specifics of the situation for those aiming to pull together material that is as close as possible to the music that would have existed at the time of the film’s release. Taking a less strict historical view, Michael Hammond then discusses his involvement in constructing a score that is less scholarly and perhaps more generally historically fitting to a cowboy film starring William S. Hart.

Part II, ‘Novel Music and New Issues’, begins with Jeff Smith’s chapter about the Giorgio Moroder version of Metropolis released in the 1980s, called ‘Bringing a Little Munich Disco to Babelsberg’. This chapter deals with one of the earliest instances of a novel score and which has retained something of a controversial reputation. This is followed by Beth Carroll’s ‘Soviet Fidelity and the Pet Shop Boys’, which addresses the surprising instance of the electropop band performing music to Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and includes an interview with the musicians. Christopher Natzén’s chapter, ‘Multiple Soundtrack Versions on DVD: Scoring Modern City Life and Pastoral Countryside’, investigates how different music can change the experience of the same film, experiences that are made available to a wide audience through th...