Introduction to Mute Film Issue

Abstract

©2023 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois We received so many positive reviews of the 2022 Music and Moving Image Conference panel on silent or mute film music that we decided to publish Gillian B. Anderson’s, Yukiko Yuden’s, and Christy Thomas Adams’s papers as is. Most 35 mm films produced in the first three decades of the twentieth century had no soundtrack printed on the moving picture media itself (hence the industry label “silent” to contrast with films with a soundtrack printed with the images). However, their projection or screenings were accompanied by live or recorded sound effects and music, making their presentation a performing art (anything but silent, but still not generally with any talking).1 It was, in fact, this absence of speech that led to the appellation “talkies” to early recorded-sound pictures. Together these three articles present an international picture of early film music practices. Anderson focuses on the synchronized relationship between accompaniments and pictures that connected the pathos formulae in the moving pictures with those in the music, establishing the foundation upon which all subsequent moving picture accompaniments were based. She documents the use of live synchronized accompaniments in large and small cities in the United States among the top directors, deluxe cinemas, and even regular solo keyboard accompanists. Yoden shows how the classification of “East Asian” (the pathos formulae for it) related to the actual characteristics of some East Asian music used in Japanese cinemas. She used “humdrum tools, a set of resources for computational music analysis, to analyze multiple pieces from a macro perspective.” Adams focuses on the amount of new information about Mascagni’s score for Rapsodia Satanica that she discovered in music publisher Ricordi’s archive. She documents how many copies were printed, how much they cost, how much Mascagni was paid, the process of score preparation, and the relationship between Ricordi and Cines, the producer and the Italian film industry in general.