Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934 (review)

In 2007 the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) released Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934, a four-DVD box set featuring a cross-section of early twentieth-century social-issue films. The vast majority of the films included in Treasures III (thirty-nine of the forty-eight) date from the silent era, so naturally music assumed a significant role in the restoration process. Thirty-nine new scores were commissioned for the project, and these scores figure prominently in the viewing experience. For musical guidance, the NFPF turned to Martin Marks, a pioneer scholar and performer of silent-film accompaniment and music curator for the two previous Treasures DVD projects. Marks’s duties for Treasures III were extensive and included overseeing the selection of music for the entire collection as well as actively participating in many of the scores himself as either a composer or a performer. He also marshaled the help of seven other composers, a small modern jazz ensemble, and a large cadre of student and professional musicians from MIT and the Boston area. The efforts of Marks and his colleagues produced twelve hours of thoughtfully varied, historically informed, and cleverly assembled musical accompaniments. The musical breadth presented in Treasures III makes it a valuable resource for film scholars as well as silent-film enthusiasts, for it captures the ingenuity, spontaneity, and craft of good silent-film accompaniment.

Marks admitted that Treasures III was a difficult assignment. Not only did it include more films than the earlier Treasures sets, but it also presented the challenge of scoring an array of films with similar dramatic arcs. Though Treasures III includes a tremendous variety of films, most fall into the common narrative structure of conflict resolved by moral. Such structural similarity can easily lead to musical monotony, and Marks obviously sought the opposite. As he states in the program booklet, he wanted viewers to be able to “watch a complete disc’s ‘program’ even at one sitting with continued interest and pleasure.”

Marks and his fellow composers addressed this challenge by incorporating a wide range of styles and scoring strategies on each of the DVD s. At the same time, virtually all of the scores make a conscious effort to draw upon accompaniment practices of the silent era, particularly the use of previously composed music from the period. As a result, Treasures III is a compendium of scoring ideas and a model for how composers and accompanists might address the challenge of balancing new and old ideas in a silent film score.

For examples of this variety and attention to technique, we can turn to the opening four films on “Program 2—New Women” (DVD 2). The DVD begins with two brief comedies about temperance activist Carrie Nation: Kansas Saloon Smashers (1901) and Why Mr. Nation Wants Divorce (1901). Charles Shadle composed the music for both films, and his approach is fairly traditional. In both cases, he draws upon familiar songs from the period, such “Little Brown Jug,” “Rock a Bye, Baby,” and the hymn tune “Shall We Gather at the River.” He then weaves these songs into continuous accompaniments, thus producing two scores with both musical interest and historical relevance.

Something similar happens in the very next film, Trial Marriages (1907), but here the style changes dramatically. For this twelve-minute slapstick comedy about the trappings of wedlock, Marks turned to the Aardett Sextet, a six-piece modern jazz ensemble. Like Shadle’s music, the Aardett Sextet’s score makes extensive use of previously composed music from the period. But rather than rely on familiar tunes for quotation, the Aardett Sextet uses the material as the basis for improvisation. This “collective improvisation,” as one group member termed it, skillfully mimics the...