My academic background is in film music: its history, styles, and effects. In film, music is often pointed to as something that unifies an otherwise choppy and incongruous artform, one that cuts visually and narratively between points of view, locations, even times. During the Silent Era, this unification was often accomplished by just one person: an organist or pianist who would either play from a pre-written score, or flip through a a handy compendium like Ernö Rapée’s Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures, going through the pages to locate appropriate cues for particular moods or types of action and using those as a starting point for largely improvised musical accompaniment.
In the silent film / live scoring context, the organ can be seen as unifying the images via the uniformity of timbre, rather than any kind of western understanding of thematic unity or development. Think of it, as Bernard Herrmann did when choosing to score the Hitchcock classic, Psycho, with strings only. He wanted a “black and white sound,” the starkness of the performing forces adding power to the images, while unifying them.
Of course a large part of the appeal of the organ accompanist for movie house operators in the early 20th century was that you could pay one person for the job–efficient and cost-effective–and that person would have the freedom to do what they wanted musically, working with the film (which was static and predictable) as opposed to musical human co-creators (who are decidedly…not).
Obviously a choir is not the same in this regard: there are lots of people doing unpredictable things and unless you are highly practiced at group improvisation, the model of “flip to the section of the encyclopedia for ‘Chase’ cues or ‘Rain’ cues and play that” would have been pretty unwieldy in a group setting (although it’s fun to imagine the chaos that would ensue if every singer got to pick the cue THEY felt was right for the action and just went for it). But I’ve always felt like the choir could provide that same kind of timbral unification to a silent film that the organ provided, as well as a similar sonic flexibility (both organs and the human voice can produce a wide range of sounds) and C3LA was enthusiastic about bringing this vision to life.
Starting in 2017, 12 composers (Saunder Choi, Drew Corey, Allen W. Menton, Morgan Woolsey, Kc Daugirdas, Diana Woolner, Molly Pease, David Harris, Nilo Alcala, Joseph Thel, Matthew Brown, and David Conley) got together to watch Jean Epstein’s silent surrealist 1928 Poe adaptation, The Fall of the House of Usher, and start thinking about how we could work together to score it. We decided to break the film up into 13 segments, with each of the 12 composers filling out a request sheet detailing which cues they would be most interested in writing. We brainstormed the best way to collaborate and ultimately settled on a process that afforded the most compositional freedom and the fewest guidelines. Composers would work with a collectively-determined collection of notes (something of an “Usher” leitmotif) but aside from that, they could do what they wanted. Words or no words, extended techniques or traditional choral singing, any kind of harmonic language, solos, small ensembles, clapping, whistling, groaning: whatever suited the scene.
Composition unfolded somewhat like a round of cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), a (fittingly) Surrealist part game in which participants take turns drawing sections of a body on a sheet of paper. Each section is concealed so that the artists cannot see what the whole will look like until the paper is unfolded. Free play, collaboration, chance, moving beyond the real and the expected fuel the creative process.
Throughout our creative process we checked in with the folks composing the cue before or after us, to smooth out the transitions, but that was about it, not knowing what the end result would sound like until our first read-through. Finally, to tie it all together, we decided that the last segment would be a structured group improvisation incorporating themes from the previous cues. Our final score conveys both the feeling of improvisation and newness one would have felt seeing a live accompanist back in the 20s, as well as the timbral unity of the organ, but it unfolds more like a choral concert in many ways. It was a blast to put together and we can’t wait for other groups to take a crack at it!
- Morgan Woolsey
