- Drazin cites Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Arsenal (1928) as one of his favorite silent films.
Yesterday I posted the first half of my conversation with longtime silent film accompanist David Drazin, in which he discussed his musical background and how he got started playing for silent-film screenings. In the second half, Drazin shared some of what he learned about the silent era from three decades of accompanying films. The previous post left off with Drazin admitting that, for the first ten years of playing to movies, he never rehearsed before a screening. Eventually he changed his tune (pun intended). Below he describes how he has prepared for various screenings over the past couple decades.
So, if you were an accompanist in the silent era, did theater owners just expect you to have this book?
- The Big Parade
When you improvise alongside a movie, I imagine you have work within a particular musical vocabulary. Like, even if you’re not drawing on these cue sheets or Motion Picture Moods, you still have to sound like you are, or else the music will sound anachronistic.
Wings (1927), The Big Parade, and Underworld are the first that come to mind.
- The Passion of Joan of Arc
One film you’re actually not allowed to play for is [Abel Gance’s] Napoleon (1927). If it’s shown, the venue is legally bound to play the [1980] Carmine Coppola score with it. You’re not allowed to accompany Charlie Chaplin’s [silent] films from after Mutual [Film Corporation, where Chaplin worked until 1917] either. The Chaplin estate is rigorous about stopping people from attempting to play for those, though you can play for The Gold Rush (1925) if it’s a print that doesn’t have a soundtrack.
Now, the Russian silents often establish a really intense rhythm—for instance, [Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s] Arsenal (1929) and [Vladimir Pudovkin’s] Storm Over Asia (1928). I’ve read one book that argues that Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and the others were the true successors to Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky, even though they weren’t musicians. That means you have quite a task when you have to improvise over their movies.
