Making the music that sets the scene
Donald Sosin has a nifty little exercise he uses to demonstrate the power of music to shape the expressive impact of a silent movie scene. It doesn’t even involve film — all it takes is one person pretending to swim back and forth.
“You can pick any stroke you want,” the veteran composer and silent film accompanist told a game volunteer during a recent master class on this demanding and distinctive art form. “Just keep it up no matter what I do. This is our movie.”
Then Sosin stepped to the piano and played a bouncy version of “By the Beautiful Sea,” turning the swimmer into a joyful vacationer. A few seconds later, the music turned into John Williams’ famous “Jaws” theme, and the onlookers could tell that that swimmer, still making the identical actions, was about to become shark bait.
The moral was perfectly clear: “The action stays the same, but it’s the music that tells us how to feel about it.”
Sosin, 66, has an enormous array of musical resources at hand to make those feelings come through. When he’s accompanying a film, he draws on a wide and eclectic range of music, everything from classical standards to ragtime to theater music to free jazz.
Everything, he says, depends on what is happening on the screen — not just the
“You don’t want to get into the habit of matching every damn action to the music.” Donald Sosin
action itself, but the style and genre of the film in question. Slapstick comedy requires one set of signifiers, sentimental romance another.
“There are many genres of film, and an improvising musician needs to be familiar with as many as possible. I’ve played now for literally thousands of films, and I have a lot of different ways to get into the style of the film.”
In addition to performing live — Sosin’s appearances have been a regular highlight at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival — and composing sound tracks for the flood of silent movies that keep being released in digital form, Sosin is an avid trainer of a new generation of silent movie accompanists. He leads an annual master class at a festival in Pordenone, Italy, where Russell Merritt and Linda Williams of the UC Berkeley film department saw him in action and decided to replicate the experience in the Bay Area.
That was how some 50 musicians and observers came to be packed into the auditorium of Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies on Monday, June 4. The event, co-sponsored with the Silent Film Festival and BAMPFA, was an opportunity to hear Sosin — a garrulous and ingratiating figure with thoughts on a thousand different subjects — explain and demonstrate the ins and outs of his craft.
That entailed both arcana of film history (one of the first composers to write a score expressly for film, it turns out, was Saint-Saëns, for a 1908 historical flick about the assassination of the Duc de Guise) and matters of hands-on practicality.
“You don’t want to get into the habit of matching every damn action to the music,” he warned a participant. “That’s what’s called Mickey-Mousing, and it tends to wear on our sensibility. But you also don’t want to leave the audience feeling like the music has no connection to what they see onscreen.”
Among the participants was Will Lewis, an astonishingly gifted 14-year-old pianist from Oakland. He’s been taking piano lessons for about four years, and playing along with silent films at home for almost as long. Last year, he buttonholed Sosin at the San Francisco festival, and since then he’s been getting lessons by Skype.
For a sequence from “The Finishing Touch,” which features Laurel and Hardy as a pair of hapless house-builders, Will put together a jaunty series of rag-tinged chords that caught the spirit and pacing of the scene. He also reflected the pratfalls without telegraphing the gags — not always an easy line to tread. (He said he’d watched the movie before, but had never accompanied it.)
Also on hand was Wayne Barker, the Tony-nominated composer for the play “Peter and the Starcatcher.” He had never accompanied a silent film before, but the inventive, engrossing improvisations he came up with for a scene from a strange-looking theatrical romance from 1926 showed how far compositional technique can take you.
Sosin himself was a budding composer, a student at the University of Michigan, when he first took an interest in silent film music. He got hired to play the organ during screenings, and found it was a perfect outlet for a lot of musical impulses. Now, he says, he’s happy to watch that enthusiasm spread.
“When I started out, I was the only guy in Michigan doing this. But now, as I travel around, I see young musicians wanting to try their hand at it more and more.”