Needledrop: The Not-So-silent Film

By Amelia Beattie

It may seem counterintuitive to open the inaugural issue of a column about music in film with a piece on silent film. However, if I may borrow your imagination (and about 1000 words of your attention) you will soon realise that the so called ‘silent film’ was oftentimes, anything but. Whilst the term may conjure images of stuffy theatres and stuffier audiences who could hear a pin drop, the reality is far louder. Although the dawn of moving pictures could shoot a rocket into the eye of the moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902) or convince an audience a moving train was advancing towards them (L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, 1895), the progression towards synchronised audio would need another 30 years or so. The ‘silent’ period between the first projected films by the Lumière brothers and the emergence of the ‘talkies’ with 1927s The Jazz Singer was one soundtracked by vaudeville orchestras, self-playing pianos, and frequent noise-complaints. 

Nowadays your average letterboxd buff could probably wax lyrical about the sonic artistry of whatever Nolan film is freshest in their mind (evidently I am not to judge, see column description). However, in the infancy of film, musical accompaniment was at best an afterthought and at times forgone entirely. Commercially available films in the late 19th and early 20th century were typically a smaller feature of the vaudeville circuit, squeezed haphazardly in between two steps and magic tricks. In fact, projected films’ inclusion in a music hall line up was, more often than not, a convenient placeholder to distract a rowdy audience in between set and costume changes. This inattentiveness was shared by the musical accompaniment. The noise of the projector indicated little more than a smoke break for most of the orchestra. Unlike the majority of the dance-based line up which rehearsed to specific tempos and time signatures, projected films had no prerequisite musical requests. The result was that many early film scores were improvised by exhausted lone pianists, abandoned by their orchestral accompaniment or stranded by theatre budget cuts. Early cinematic sound adopted an improvisational approach, with individual live accompanists getting to make it up as they went along, selecting popular songs at will. Projected pictures had a tough place in the pecking order, given that vaudeville itself was hardly valued at much in comparison to its’ high brow cousins in the opera houses. Film scoring was the afterthought of the afterthought. 

Music did not truly find its home in the cinema until the advent of the ‘nickelodeon’ (no – not that Nickelodeon) or the earliest commercial cinemas. Unlike vaudeville before it, these establishments were dedicated entirely to the distribution of film to the general paying public. The general experience was cheap and cheerful. Low ticket fares democratised the moving picture, but limited titles eventually killed the novelty no matter the cost. The novel art of film simply lacked the pace to match desired profit margins and audience expectations.  Early 20th century cinema seemed to be facing a supply and demand issue. The solution: music, and plenty of it. If theatres were unable to produce new titles to ensure ticket sales then the novelty would have to come from another source. Now the lack of standardised soundtracks would become a film's monetary superpower.  Musical accompaniment got a promotion, and that lonely pianist got a buddy on drums. The noise of the instrument was used for two reasons: to engage the audience and to drown out the sound of the projector. If further instrumentation was required a gramophone was employed at the right hand of the projector itself. Should the projection display a violinist, it could now be matched by prerecorded violin stock music. On a rudimentary level music was being utilised as a tool to deliberately enhance the cinematic experience for practically the first time. 

That being said the inclusion of music was far from being a primarily artistic endeavour just yet. After all, ticket sales start before the film, and therefore so must the music. Musical accompaniment spilled from the theatres into a streetwide sonic spectacle. Many early theatres employed local musicians and bands to perform outside the theatre and attract prospective customers with the ‘ballyhoo’. Ultimately though these musicians' livelihood met the fate of so many artists with the rise of automated music replacing live musicians.  Many theatres now included coin operated pianos for curious guests to pay to hear their favourite ragtime classics. The use of the gramophone was also not limited to the projection booth; theatres would adopt early noise amplifiers to project sound into the surrounding street. This spectacle did not always entirely attract the customer, with many descriptions finding the persistent noise disturbing. Especially as picture houses increased in population, the overlapping soundscapes of multiple soundtracks reached an intolerable pitch. One local complainant in 1918 described the artificial noise in no uncertain terms as “tawdry galvanised iron facades and discordant graphophone attachments, screaming mechanical ragtime into the streets”. So next time you might find yourself despairing at an AI assisted script, remember that the protest against creative automation has been a long and tiring one. The backlash against such invasive advertising eventually grew so strong that the practice was outlawed entirely in several major American cities. One can only hope for a similar result for any studio daring to employ ChatGPT as their composer. 

As cinema grew into adolescence there was a shift back towards music as an artistic rather than advertising medium. New regulations from the American Federation of Musicians demanded that theatres exceeding 1500 seats required a minimum of six musicians. This forced theatres to shake up the standard two man piano-and-a-drum combination. The adoption of more musicians meant a new era for silent film scores, with larger numbers allowing for more complex arrangements. Film stock music advanced from reliance on popular stock songs borrowed from the vaudeville repertoire to the production of the first catalogue of film music in 1911 with F.B Haviland’s Moving Picture Pianist’s album. The catalogue did not only feature original compositions — borrowing easy to perform hits — film now had its stock in opera and the classical genre rather than its ragtime roots. 

Film music had not quite been entirely standardised yet, but the introduction of these catalogues of sheet music meant that film music finally found an emotional accompaniment. Rather than pop music chosen at random, musicians could select from a stock of options depending on the emotional affekt that the film required. Although film arrived on the scene as a primarily visual art form, in a short period of time it embarked on an odyssey of sound. The realisation of the sonic potential of film enhanced the musical experience from a technical afterthought, to a marketing gimmick, until a fully actualised auditory experience.