Composing for Silent Film offers insight, information, and techniques for contemporary composition, arrangement, and live score performance for period silent film. A specialized music composition guide, this book complements existing film scoring and contemporary music composition texts. This book helps today’s composers better understand and correctly interpret period silent film, and to create and perform live scores that align with films’ original intentions, so that audiences notice and grasp fine points of the original film.
Composing for Silent Film analyzes period silent film and its conventions – from Delsarte acting gestures to period fascinations and subtexts. As a practical composition text, it weighs varying approaches, including improvisation, through-scoring, "mickey-mousing," handling dialogue, and dividing roles amongst players. It steers composers towards informed understanding of silent film, and encourages them to deploy contemporary styles and techniques in exciting ways.
For clarity and concision, examples are limited to nine canonical silents: Metropolis, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Mark of Zorro, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, The Black Pirate, Nosferatu, The Phantom Carriage, Daisy Doodad’s Dial, and The Golem.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1. Silent Film Conventions
Issues and cultural contexts of the silent period
Intertitles
Acting style
Special effects
Editing conventions
Chapter 2. Preparation Techniques
Watching in silence
Repetitive viewing
Formalist reading
Apparatus theory
Studying the cultural context of the film
Chapter 3. Planning a Score: Approaches and Considerations
Choice of ensemble
Responsiveness and Mickey-mousing
Incorporating improvisation
Notation techniques
Planning themes
Dividing duties among players
Chapter 4. Finding and Choosing Opportunities
Exploiting or avoiding clichés
Choosing what to play or hit
Leading or not leading
Environmental effects
Emotional readings
Comedy
Chases
The End
Glossary
About the Author :
Jack Curtis Dubowsky is a composer, author, music editor, educator, and filmmaker. Books include Intersecting Film, Music, and Queerness and Easy Listening and Film Scoring 1948–78 (Routledge 2021). Dubowsky is a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Recording Academy, the Motion Picture Editors Guild, and a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
