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.

Intersecting Film, Music, and Queerness uses musicology and queer theory to uncover meaning and message in canonical American cinema. This study considers how queer readings are reinforced or nuanced through analysis of musical score. Taking a broad approach to queerness that questions heteronormative and homonormative patriarchal structures, binary relationships, gender assumptions and anxieties, this book challenges existing interpretations of what is progressive and what is retrogressive in cinema. Examined films include Bride of Frankenstein, Louisiana Story, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Blazing Saddles, Edward Scissorhands, Brokeback Mountain, Boys Don't Cry, Transamerica, Thelma & Louise, Go Fish and The Living End, with special attention given to films that subvert or complicate genre. Music is analyzed with concern for composition, intertextual references, absolute musical structures, song lyrics, recording, arrangement, and performance issues. This multidisciplinary work, featuring groundbreaking research, analysis, and theory, offers new close readings and a model for future scholarship.

Despite their name, the silent films of the early cinematic era were frequently accompanied by music and other sound elements of many kinds, including mechanical instruments, live performers, and audience sing-alongs. The 12 chapters in this concise book explore the multitude of functions filled by music in the rapidly changing context of the silent film era, as the concept of cinema itself developed. Examples are drawn from around the globe and across the history of silent film, both during the classic era of silent film and later uses of the silent format. With contributors drawn from film studies and music disciplines, and including both senior and emerging scholars, Music and Sound in Silent Film offers an essential introduction to the origins of film music and the cinematic art form.

Music has played a critical component in the success of films. This volume compiles over 100 years of writings devoted to the subject of film and television music and its practitioners.

The Modernist Screenplay explores the film screenplay as a genre of modernist literature. It connects the history of screenwriting for silent film to the history of literary modernism in France, Germany, and Russia. At the same time, the book considers how the screenplay responded to the modernist crisis of reason, confronted mimetic representation, and sought to overcome the modernist mistrust of language with the help of rhythm. From the silent film projects of Bertolt Brecht, to the screenwriting of Sergei Eisenstein and the poetic scripts of the surrealists, The Modernist Screenplay offers a new angle on the relationship between film and literature. Based on the example of modernist screenwriting, the book proposes a pluralistic approach to screenplays, an approach that sees film scripts both as texts embedded in film production and as literary works in their own right. As a result, the sheer variety of different and experimental ways to tell stories in screenplays comes to light. The Modernist Screenplay explores how the earliest kind of experimental screenplays—the modernist screenplays—challenged normative ideas about the nature of filmmaking, the nature of literary writing, and the borders between the two.

Bowser (specialist in African and African American film) and Louise Spence (media studies, Sacred Heart U.) define and describe the audiences for black films while examining African American film director Micheaux's unique vision and contribution as an artist and novelist and its relation to his work as a filmmaker. With a focus on the first decade of his career, they place his work firmly within his social and cultural milieu, and examine his family background and life experience. They also provide a close textual analysis of his surviving silent films and highlight the rivalry between production companies, dilemmas of assimilation versus a separate cultural identity, and gender and class issues. Contains several b&w photographs.Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

"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 & 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"--

This classic account of the nature of film music aesthetics was first published in 1947. Its value comes from a unique combination of talents and experience enjoyed by the book's authors. Eisler's time at Hollywood gave him a particular insight on the technical questions which arise for composers when music is used in the production of films, while Adorno was able to contribute on wide aesthetic and sociological matters as well as specifically musical questions. Above all, the authors envisaged the book as a contribution to the study of modern, industrialized culture; and, in this respect, it has a particular importance to the whole area of cultural studies. With an introduction by Graham McCann.

The Sounds of Silent Films is a unique collection of investigatory and theoretical essays that, for the first time, unite up-to-date research on the complex historical performance practices of silent film accompaniment with in-depth analyses of relevant case studies.

Between 1895 and 1929, more than 15,000 motion pictures were made in the United States. We call these works “silent films,” but they were accompanied by an enormous body of music, including works adapted or arranged from pre-existing works, as well as newly composed pieces for theater orchestras, organists, or pianists. While many films and pieces are lost, a considerable amount of material remains extant and available for use in research and performance. Music for Silent Film: A Guide to North American Resources is a unique resource on North American archives and English-language materials available in for those interested in this repertoire. Part I contains information about archives of primary source materials including full and compiled scores, sheet music, published anthologies of music, interviews with cinema musicians, periodicals, and instruction books. Part II surveys the English-language scholarship on silent film music in articles, book chapters, essay collections, and monographs through 2015. The book is fully indexed for ease of access to these important sources on film music.