After the Silents

Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926-1934

Michael Slowik

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231535502
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Many believe Max Steiner's score for King Kong (1933) was the first important attempt at integrating background music into sound film, but a closer look at the industry's early sound era (1926–1934) reveals a more extended and fascinating story. Viewing more than two hundred films from the period, Michael Slowik launches the first comprehensive study of a long-neglected phase in Hollywood's initial development, recasting the history of film sound and its relationship to the "Golden Age" of film music (1935–1950).

Slowik follows filmmakers' shifting combinations of sound and image, recapturing the volatility of this era and the variety of film music strategies that were tested, abandoned, and kept. He explores early film music experiments and accompaniment practices in opera, melodrama, musicals, radio, and silent films and discusses the impact of the advent of synchronized dialogue. He concludes with a reassessment of King Kong and its groundbreaking approach to film music, challenging the film's place and importance in the timeline of sound achievement.

1. A WIDE ARRAY OF CHOICES

Musical Influences in the 1920s

ON AUGUST 6, 1926, DON JUAN, THE FIRST FEATURE-LENGTH film to receive a synchronized score, premiered at the Warner’s Theatre in New York City.¹ Because of its identity as the first film with a synchronized score, many studies of the early sound score take Don Juan as their starting point. But beginning with Don Juan would do little to explain the presence of various musical techniques in the film. When a new entertainment form such as sound cinema emerges, it does not immediately adopt a new and clearly defined set of unique practices. Rather, in its nascent stage it looks toward and draws on existing media to constitute its identity.² To understand the trajectory of the early sound score, one must examine the wide array of musical options that were available to sound film practitioners during this period. In short, one must investigate the musical scene in the 1920s.

This approach differs from that taken by Douglas Gomery, a film scholar who remains one of the foremost authorities on Hollywood’s transition to sound. In a series of writings Gomery argues that Hollywood smoothly transitioned to sound in three planned steps: sound cinema was first invented; then it was innovated (brought to the market and altered for profitability); and finally it was diffused (put into widespread use).³ Yet while Gomery’s work has yielded groundbreaking insights into the economic perspective of Hollywood’s transition to sound, his claim for a smooth, planned transition becomes less tenable when examining early sound film aesthetic practices. Implicit in Gomery’s model is that throughout Hollywood’s transition to sound, the product “sound film” remained a stable concept and that Hollywood, from the beginning of the transition, knew what the product “sound film” meant. Aesthetically, however, sound strategies differed from film to film, resulting in a startling array of diverse and often conflicting practices. Thus, while the transition to sound might have been planned on an economic level, this did not translate into an aesthetically consistent or firmly defined product.⁴ Instead, as film historian Donald Crafton points out, Hollywood offered audiences tests of what a sound film could be rather than unified texts.⁵

Musically, the early sound era featured a series of “tests” because the transition to synchronized sound raised numerous aesthetic questions with no firm answers. Should music connect to narrative events, and if so, in what ways? To what extent—and how—should music coordinate with dialogue? How much music is suitable? What is music’s affective potential? Should preexisting or original music be used? What styles of music are best? How can potential hit songs be showcased? What are the cultural connotations of various musical forms and techniques, and how can they be used to cinema’s benefit? To respond to these and other questions, film music practitioners looked to existing musical practices, including opera, theatrical melodrama, stage musicals, phonography, radio, and silent film music.

Moving roughly in chronological order, I begin this chapter by examining music aesthetics in opera, theatrical melodrama, and 1920s stage musicals. I then consider two important sound reproduction technologies in the 1920s: the phonograph and the radio. I conclude the chapter by attending to silent film accompaniment practices, which constitute the sound score’s most proximate influence. Taken together, these preexisting practices offered an array of useful methods for tying music to narrative content, generating affect, using classical and popular musical styles, and connoting cultural prestige.

OPERA

Throughout its history, ranging from the seventeenth century to the present,⁶ opera has featured such an extraordinary variety of forms that it would be misleading to treat the form as having a unified aesthetic practice that monolithically informed the early sound film score. Still, two operatic scoring techniques—leitmotifs and recitatives—would have suggested themselves to early sound film practitioners as particularly viable models.⁷ Of the two practices, the leitmotif has received far more attention from film music scholars. A leitmotif refers to a musical motif or theme that, through consistent reuse, attaches itself to a particular character, situation, or idea in the narrative. A leitmotif thus offers a useful model for any medium seeking to tie musical accompaniment to narrative events. The term leitmotif has become synonymous with the nineteenth-century operas of Richard Wagner, yet ironically Wagner invented neither the term nor the technique. Music historian A. W. Ambros may have first applied the term to Wagner around 1865, and only later would Wagner address the concept in his own theoretical writings.⁸ Moreover, composers such as the enormously popular Giuseppe Verdi used leitmotifs before Wagner did,⁹ though not in as systematic or extensive a manner. Still, the term has become strongly associated with Wagner’s work.

As initially used by Wagner, the leitmotif was a complex, multivalent symbol that fused numerous operatic elements. In Wagner’s operas, especially his cycle of four operas known collectively as the Ring cycle, the leitmotif did not simply label or point to one particular character or object but rather conjured up a realm of ideas. For example, as music scholars John Deathridge and Carl Dahlhaus point out, Wagner’s “spear” motif points not only to the literal spear but also to the god Wotan’s “contract with [the giants] Fasolt and Fafner, the runes of which are carved on the spear’s shaft, and by extension to agreements in general and finally to the connection Wagner sees between all such binding agreements and entanglements in the mythic destiny from which there is no escape.”¹⁰ Wagner also modified his leitmotifs throughout the course of the opera, and they accrued meanings as the work progressed. Moreover, Wagner’s theoretical writings reveal that the concept of the leitmotif functioned for him as a unifying device. By using leitmotifs throughout the course of an opera or series of operas, the composer could link the moment-by-moment levels with the work as a whole to yield a single, unified piece of art.¹¹ Scholars have also argued that leitmotifs suggest the presence of an external narrator. James Buhler, for instance, points out that by attaching motifs to certain story elements and ignoring others, leitmotif-based music “knows” and identifies those story elements that will prove dramatically significant as the story progresses.¹² Thus, the leitmotif implies the regular presence of a sophisticated musical narrator—arguably the “real” principal character in the opera—who organizes and regularly comments on the action as it progresses.¹³

While Wagner and the concept of the leitmotif remained well known in music circles up to the 1920s, writers and composers regularly reduced the complexity of this concept. Film music columnists in the 1910s, for instance, declared that music should connect to characters and narrative themes in a manner similar to the Wagnerian leitmotif,¹⁴ which attests to Wagner’s substantial presence among music practitioners in the early twentieth century. These columnists, however, often reduced the leitmotif to a simple series of signposts that marked—in a simplistic one-to-one correspondence—a certain character or object in the narrative. By the 1920s, film music practitioners were far more likely to deploy what they believed to be a “Wagnerian” leitmotif aesthetic by simply repeating the theme rather than varying it or using it to articulate a wealth of different ideas.¹⁵ Regardless of its complexity or lack thereof, however, the leitmotif served as an important concept for early sound cinema.

If the leitmotif forged a closer link between music and narrative via association, the operatic recitative provided a model for how music could share the same space with voices and communicate affect. A foundation of opera itself, recitative at its most basic level refers to the effort to mimic dramatic speech with song. This often involves using music to accompany two characters as they have a narratively important sung discussion. Used as far back as the seventeenth century,¹⁶ the recitative was by the eighteenth century a formulaic convention and was generally separated quite clearly from the aria, which was a solo number for a singer in which he or she often expressed passion or other emotions. In the nineteenth century the distinction between the aria and the recitative tended to blur, particularly in the operas of Wagner. Still, while not necessarily referred to explicitly as “recitative,” operas continued to present passages of narratively important “dialogue” that was sung instead of spoken.

The beginning of act 2 of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin (1850) shows how recitative music could underline the emotional tone of the singers’ conversation while not interfering with the semantic content of their words. In this scene the two villains of the opera—Ortrud and Telramund—discuss their belief about the true nature of a mysterious knight’s (Lohengrin’s) secret power, and they form a plan to eliminate what they believe to be his magical power. Narratively, the discussion is crucial: it explains and justifies these characters’ actions, and these actions in turn drive much of the remainder of the opera. During this scene the music often precedes a line of sung dialogue with a brief loud note, or sforzando, which suggests the passion and hatred that the two characters feel toward the knight, thus setting the mood for the dialogue to follow. During the pauses between the sung dialogue lines, the music again rises in volume to a forte (high volume). Yet during the lines of song themselves (which function virtually as spoken dialogue), the music is generally either silent or played at piano, a very low volume. A loud chord will periodically punctuate moments in a sentence, especially endings of lines. In this way the music seldom if ever obstructs the audience from understanding the meaning of the sung words, while still chiming in to highlight the passion, anger, and hatred for the mysterious knight expressed in the dialogue. In this situation the emphasis is on the close coordination and timing of the words and music, in which music amplifies emotional expression while still privileging words as the most important sonic element.

The scoring techniques generally used for this sort of recitative are laid out particularly lucidly in composer Nicolas Rimsky-Korsakov’s guidebook Principles of Orchestration. Not only does Rimsky-Korsakov argue that orchestration should be a mere handmaiden to phrases and words, but he also reiterates the technique heard in Lohengrin by stating that outright orchestral outbursts should occur only when the singer is silent, presumably so as not to interfere with the singer’s voice and, if narratively important, the semantic content of the song. Moreover, Rimsky-Korsakov states that the orchestra’s volume level should dip during passages featuring the singer’s voice. The score, however, should not draw attention to these adjustments: “Too great a disparity in volume of tone between purely orchestral passages and those which accompany the voice create an inartistic comparison.”¹⁷ In other words, although opera orchestration is built around and is subservient to the libretto (the text of the opera) in these circumstances, the composer should labor hard to conceal this fact from the audience. During moments in which the libretto conveys narrative developments, then, music should function as an unnoticed assistant. For early sound cinema practitioners searching for ways to allow voices (whether sung or spoken) and music to share space, the principles behind the recitative would have been a useful reference.

Though leitmotifs and recitatives were familiar to film music practitioners, the majority of American moviegoers in the 1920s probably had less familiarity with opera. In the nineteenth century, as music historian Katherine Preston has noted, opera “was a normal part of musical repertory,”¹⁸ and this familiarity with opera extended to less populous areas of the country thanks to traveling opera troupes. The extent to which opera remained a popular entertainment in the early twentieth century, however, remains uncertain. Historian Laurence Levine argues that around 1900, the elite class, believing that change was in the air as a result of the period’s urbanization, rising immigration, and spatial mobility, tried to maintain its privileged position by transforming the space of the “fine arts” via “rules, systems of taste, and canons of behavior.”¹⁹ Opera and symphonic performances became more rarified entertainments, to be consumed only by the small proportion of the population who understood how this music was originally “meant” to be appreciated.²⁰ In this process opera was transformed from popular music to an art form.²¹ More recently, music historian Joseph Horowitz has taken issue with some of these conclusions. He argues that Levine overstates the cultural elite’s impact and that classical music instead became elitist during the interwar decades.²² Despite this disagreement, however, both accounts would suggest that the public’s familiarity with full-length, live opera performances was on the decline by the 1920s and early 1930s. The state of opera companies by the early 1930s affirms this decline. By 1930 in the United States, year-round opera companies existed only in New York City and Chicago, with shortened seasons for opera companies in Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Further suggesting opera’s increasingly elite rather than popular status, opera companies generally operated at a deficit and often relied on wealthy patrons to offset some of their costs.²³ In 1932 the Department of the Treasury deemed that opera could avoid the amusement tax because it was an educational, nonprofit institution.²⁴

By the time that Hollywood transitioned to sound in the late 1920s, most moviegoers would have been familiar with opera primarily through phonograph records, music heard on the nascent medium of radio, and live introductory orchestral overtures for silent films. Enrico Caruso’s opera recordings enjoyed a massive popularity am...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Wide Array of Choices: Musical Influences in the 1920s
• 2. Music in Early Synchronized and Part-Talking Films, 1926–1929
• 3. Toward a Sparse Music Style: Music in the 100 Percent Talkie, 1928–1931
• 4. Interlude: The Hollywood Musical, 1929–1932
• 5. Music and Other Worlds: The Hollywood Film Score, 1931–1933
• 6. Reassessing King Kong; or, The Hollywood Film Score, 1933–1934
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Chronological Filmography, 1926–1934
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List