The Rochester Amateurs and The Fall of the House of Usher

In 1928 James Sibley Watson, Jr. (former editor of The Dial), and Melville Webber (an art historian) created a silent film based on “The Fall of the House of Usher” in a Rochester, New York, carriage barn. Using published and previously unpublished documents, it is clear that this amateur film was intended to create a new visual adaptation and interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s original story, rich in the modernist ambiguity of the early twentieth century. A member of this creative circle was a young and not very experienced composer, Alec Wilder. He was asked to create a new score for this film, but in the end his inability to perform it adequately and lack of confidence caused it to be suppressed. The rediscovery of Wilder’s original avant-garde score provides evidence of how he was able to create a modernist composition to mirror the visual perspective of the film. In the mid-1950s, Wilder, by then a respected composer of popular songs, was approached by one of the actors in the original film, Hildegard Lasell Watson, to write a new score. This, written in his more lyrical and popular classical style and creating a more subtle reading of the film’s ambiguities, was synchronized by Dr. Watson to create the authorized version. The film has continued to inspire other contemporary composers, such as Colin Z. Robertson and Iris ter Schiphorst, to create their own interpretations of Watson’s and Webber’s unique adaptation of Poe’s tale.