Palgrave Studies in Audio-Visual Culture

New Perspectives on History, Theory and Practice

Claus Tieber, Anna Katharina Windisch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137410726
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

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.

Part I

The Historical Practice of Silent Film Sound

1

Organizing a Music Library for Playing to Pictures: Theory vs. Practice in Britain

Julie Brown

In November 1928, as synchronized sound film was establishing itself, renowned London cinema musical director (MD) Louis Levy proclaimed in a film trade paper:

It would not be too much to say that three-quarters of a musical director’s best work is done in the library. Fifty per cent of his work is in the organizing of his library, and twenty-five in fitting the picture there.¹

Whether other MDs would have agreed with this valuation of different aspects of their work or not, selecting and arranging music to accompany a cinema’s weekly film offerings was certainly the key job of an MD, and had been since at least the early teens. Only a solo pianist or organist could realistically improvise to a film, and many voices in the trade actively discouraged that approach to film accompaniment. Playing from printed music dominated musical practice, and cinema proprietors had long considered a substantial collection of music to be an essential tool of trade for an MD.² The extent to which developing a personal library was promoted as an investment comes out vividly in a statement made by columnist Arthur Roby: it was the MD’s ‘bank’, and ‘there must always be a good balance to draw upon’.³

In this chapter I will examine discussions of cinema music library management in the British film trade papers and then turn to a library that survives from the Theatre Royal Picture House in the city of Bradford, North Yorkshire.⁴ I have examined papers from the years 1915–1930 which cater specifically for cinema musicians and identified six articles specifically on the topic, the first of which appeared in 1922 in a paper for music professionals.⁵ However, getting from the ‘professional uplift’ advice offered in such papers to actual practice remains a key challenge. The Bradford collection is not an unproblematic data source, for reasons I will explain, but scrutinizing it will not only provide a different national perspective to Rick Altman’s and Tobias Plebuch’s accounts of library catalogues in the US.⁶ It will also enable me to consider a library’s contents in the round, rather than through the lens of its photoplay music content, and to compare its organizational system with those proposed in the local trade paper columns. On the evidence of the Bradford library, creating order seems to have been less achievable in practice than the often sketchy advice suggests.

Library size matters

The expectation that solo pianists and musical ‘leaders’ or directors would acquire libraries of music to serve as their tools of trade emerged early in the history of cinema. Almost as soon as British film trade papers started to discuss the musical presentation of moving pictures, they also started featuring and reviewing ‘music received’ – that is, music sent to them by publishers hoping for a plug. Only two weeks after Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly started its regular music column ‘The Picture Pianist’, its author Henry A. Watson formalized the publisher connection by including a section ‘Music Reviews and Notes’.⁷ As little as three months later one moving picture musician’s anxiety about these expectations was registered on the same paper’s ‘Notes’ pages:

I have received a letter from a correspondent in the West of England, which is somewhat pathetic in its way. The writer is a pianist in a picture theatre and has a repertoire of over 600 pieces, which he plays at sight. This wonderful collection, he tells me, includes ‘waltzes, two-steps, intermezzos, and fairly classical music’, and he has had to purchase it all out of a salary of twenty-five shillings a week – less fourpence insurance! He asks what he should do under the circumstances. My advice is brief – look out for another job.⁸

Twenty-five shillings was a very low salary in 1912.⁹

The pianist’s concern is perhaps understandable in an industry in which size mattered: every film seemed to be promoted as the biggest and best, with the most actors, the best costumes and the latest in technology. Similar trends are found in claims and increasing expectations about the musical presentation of moving pictures. Small wonder that this, and the eventual emergence of distributor-produced cue sheets which presupposed access to large stores of music, led some MDs to write to the trade papers to clarify the ‘normal’ size of a library. By the mid-1920s in Britain about 3,000–4,000 ‘sets’ (i.e. pieces for which the MD had a set of instrumental parts for his ‘orchestra’) was periodically cited as average; organist and music columnist George Tootell cited precisely this number in November 1921, but felt that ‘considerably more’ was needed for ‘a large cinema where films are shown with a competent musical setting’.¹⁰ He offered slightly different advice to cinema organists six years later, however, saying that 2,000 pieces was the minimum an organist could get away with – perhaps assuming that s/he would be improvising at least some of the time.¹¹ But experience and judgment varied; only two months later a different contributor to the same journal described a library of the same size as large, without, however, mentioning the size of the cinema itself,¹² and several small orchestras (duos and trios) advertising for work four years later claimed 2,000 or 3,000 items.¹³ By the late twenties expectations had increased. In November 1928, 4,000 would only be suitable for a small theater, according to Levy; 5,000 sets, still ‘a quite small-sized store of music’, would be a better starting point for ‘a fairly large theatre, catering for critical audiences, with the orchestra playing to perhaps only one feature per week’.¹⁴ However much music the columnists suggested their readers acquire, they tended to claim that they personally possessed considerably more. In April 1922 Jean Michaud boasted that he had ‘probably one of the largest privately owned libraries in existence’, at 13,000 numbers.¹⁵ Whether this was an attempt to answer reports in the previous month’s issue of Kinematograph Weekly that the music library of the Strand, New York, extended to an anxiety-inducing 40,000 musical numbers is unclear. Michaud was writing for the Musical News and Herald, a journal for the concert music profession; as his column was likely to be read by conductors working actively in both cinema and concert spheres, it may have felt especially important to set out his professional stall in the face of statistics from a flagship picture palace in New York. Three years later he revealed in another trade paper that his own library had grown to 21,000 items (still boasting that it was the largest in London).¹⁶ Not to be outdone, Levy (then MD of the Shepherd’s Bush Pavilion) slipped into the end of a January 1928 article titled ‘Putting Over the Right Oriental Music’ that he had a library of no fewer than 60,000 numbers (an excuse for lamenting that, even then, he found that he did not possess a ‘Chinese agitato’).¹⁷ Whether 60,000 was a typo for 6,000, a genuine figure, or pure hyperbole, or indeed whether the cinema owned the library rather than him personally, it is equally difficult to tell. In any case, his claim was likely yet another anxiety-inducing blow for his rank-and-file readership, by then facing a very uncertain future. As far as we know, none of these libraries survives.

Whatever its ultimate size, owning and developing a personal music library involved an ongoing financial commitment. Arthur Roby reported in February 1921 that an MD was spending on average two or three pounds per week on music purchases, and was probably also being sent bundles of music ‘on approval’ from publishers.¹⁸ He regularly exhorted cinemas to alleviate the MDs’ financial burden by acquiring these libraries themselves,¹⁹ but tried in the meantime to enthuse his readership to start up a cooperative help scheme: MDs might lend each other a parcel of music for a month, which would save many pounds, ‘especially in the provinces, where the salaries are none too high’.²⁰ He asks his readers to write and tell him if they are willing to exchange; if so, he will put them in communication with each other; it would then simply be a matter of postage. The idea disappeared from his columns as quickly as it had appeared, so it is fortunate that lending systems of more conventional sorts had long provided help for those struggling to justify purchases. Commercial music libraries were quick to advertise in the film trade papers: Library Algernon Clarke did so in Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly as early as November 1911, claiming to have over 10,000 pieces available,²¹ and others soon followed.²² What proportion of MDs took advantage of commercial libraries, and precisely how they used them, is difficult to reconstruct in all its complexity, although it seems likely that they were principally used to supplement core personal collections. Roby reports visiting one cinema in early 1922 and noting that all the music in use was stamped by a lending library: the MD claimed that he had locked up his own music collection for six months to rest it.²³

Managing an existing cinema music library

Despite the ubiquitous advice during the teens concerning music acquisition, it was not until the early twenties in Britain that attention was devoted to how one might best organize a collection once accumulated. Some of the advice was practical, such as how to avoid the widespread tendency to repeat favorite pieces over and over and again. If Roby is to be believed, up until 1920 the matter was generally addressed by a strict rotation system.²⁴ An anonymous columnist with the nom de plume The Veteran offered a slightly less draconian variant of this in 1927: an MD might stack up his chosen music for the week on one of eight clear spaces on his shelves, and not until all eight are full should he re-shelve and hence re-use the music from space one. If he has a sufficiently large library, he could extend this to 10 or 12 spaces, leaving up to 12 weeks between music repetitions. In other advice an MD might also operate a ‘repair shelf’, where he puts any damaged music so that he repairs it before returning it to its rightful place in the library.

Of course, the main library-related advice focused on how to organize and index its music. In the UK ledgers of some sort were the preferred tool, rather than card catalogues. The advice is always to list all pieces owned in one ledger, with some suggesting to do so within a series of organizational categories (which I discuss below as first-level index headings). One should indicate a certain number or attributes such as composer, title, date purchase, catalogue number, size of orchestration, etc. Only one columnist (Levy) suggests including key information and tempo, and another (Michaud) the duration of the piece. Levy actively advises not to include duration, reasoning that even though some MDs do, 99 percent of the time the whole piece will not be heard: ‘The duration depends upon the requirements of the film, not upon the length of the piece of music as published’. When completed, the ledger provides the MD with a full record of the music he owns (Foort, Goldsmith, The Veteran),²⁵ and also helps him to keep track of how many pieces he already has in each category, lest he over- or under-stock in any one of them (Goldsmith). These first-level categories would provide the basis for the shelving system, though Foort and The Veteran also suggests shelving according to folio size.

Each columnist advocates a multi-level indexing system. In the US and Germany such systems took ‘mood’ (Stimmung) categories familiar from photoplay music as their key concepts.²⁶ These ‘moods’ were musical ‘topoi’ that had grown out of theatr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: ‘The Birth of Cinema from the Spirit of Music’
• Part I: The Historical Practice of Silent Film Sound
• Part II: New Approaches to Silent Film Music History and Theory
• Bibliography
• Index