Editor's Introduction: Special Issue on Silent Film Music

This issue presents four distinct perspectives on music and early film through the mid-1920s, a few years before the advent of synchronized sound revolutionized the industry. While this period is often referred to as the silent era, these films were never truly silent, as has often been noted. As the four authors in this issue abundantly illustrate, the music that accompanied silent film viewings served a multitude of cinematic and sonic purposes within a shifting musical, social, and cultural landscape.

Erin M. Brooks's article considers the meaning of silent film exhibition in the 1910s within the comparatively new Orchestra Hall in Chicago and Symphony Hall in Boston, as well as the more established venue of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. These spaces were devoted to elite European concert music and opera at a historical moment in the effort to distinguish such elevated art from popular entertainment. Yet, as Brooks demonstrates, the presentation of silent films within these spaces blurred these boundaries and those of live and filmed performance, drawing on conventions associated with sacralized music spaces to enhance and complicate the cinematic experience. Her conclusion considers current manifestations of this relationship in recent years through the distribution of filmed opera in movie theaters nationwide, as well as "live synch" performances by symphony orchestras to well-known films in concert halls.

James M. Doering examines another film from the 1910s: the Italian-made Marcantonio e Cleopatra (1913), distributed as Antony and Cleopatra in the United States in 1914. Doering traces the journey of the Chicago-based composer George Colburn and his ambitious, operatic score for Antony and Cleopatra, starting with the film's January 1914 run at Chicago's American Music Theater and later that spring in New York. Drawing on newly discovered sources, however, Doering documents a previously unknown performance of the work in 1915 based on a heavily edited version of the score. In so doing, the article offers "a rare glimpse into the silent film composer's workshop" in the historical moment when the industry began to move toward compilation scores that would continue well into the synchronized sound era.

The two remaining articles move westward in studies of two significant films from the 1920s. Mariana Whitmer presents an in-depth study of the epic western The Covered Wagon (1923) and its equally extravagant score by Hugo Riesenfeld. As Whitmer details, Riesenfeld created a sophisticated, nuanced, thematic musical accompaniment based on a wide variety of preexisting and newly composed musical materials and in dialogue with the novel on which the film was based. Supported by historically informed choices in Riesenfeld's scores, including the use of Stephen Foster's music, The Covered Wagon was seen at the time as a remarkably authentic portrait of westward expansion.

Complementing Whitmer's article is Allison Robbins's study of another western, The Vanishing American (1925), and its musical realization as played by an experienced silent film accompanist in a theater in Colorado. Robbins examines how the theater's keyboardist combined existing cue sheets with "the regional music culture of the Southwest and the Rocky Mountains." As such, the repertoire of the actual West musicalized the cinematic West on-screen. The Covered Wagon and The Vanishing American and their contrasting musical accompaniments by a professional composer and a veteran silent film performer nevertheless reflect shared views on indigenous peoples and the ongoing lure of Manifest Destiny within U.S. culture.

In sum, these four articles illustrate the variety of sources, methods, and approaches to studying film music prior to synchronization. Whether examining composers' compilation scores, discovering unknown performances and performers' choices, or investigating silent film exhibition within classical music venues, the scholarship presented in this issue offers unique accounts of the sounds of early film while reminding us of the remarkable diversity of the presynchronization era.