NACO plays the music of the great Charlie Chaplin
NACO plays the music of the Little Tramp, Peter Robb writes.
The man best known as the Little Tramp, the tragicomic icon of the silent film era, was a multi-talented artist whose skill as a writer, actor and film director are legendary. Slightly less well known, though, is his musical side.
Chaplin wrote the scores for several of his films, including some of his greatest, such as City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), both silent films, The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Limelight (1952), A King In New York (1957) and A Countess From Hong Kong (1967). From Limelight came Smile, the song that he wrote with John Turner and Geoffrey Brooks, and from A Countess From Hong Kong came This Is My Song, written with Pierre Delanoë, which became a No. 1 in the U.K. for Petula Clark. He even won an Oscar for the score to Limelight.
It is said that Chaplin could not read or write music, that he would whistle or hum bits of tunes out of which others would develop a finished work.
Biographer Theodore Huff devoted a chapter to music in his book Charlie Chaplin (Henry Schuman Inc., New York 1951).
“The credit title on City Lights, Music composed by Charles Chaplin, brought a surprised and indulgent raising of eyebrows. Because of the occurrence of phrases, here and there, from some familiar melodies, inserted, in most cases, for comic effect, and the use of “La Violetera” (Who’ll Buy My Violets ) as a theme for the blind flower girl, Chaplin was assumed, by some, to be stretching his claim to everything in the film,” Huff wrote.
He concluded that, for Chaplin, music was integral to his films. “Perhaps of no other one man can it be said that he wrote, directed, acted, and scored a motion picture.” Chaplin even conducted, Huff says.
Chaplin’s father was a singer and as a young man he dabbled with the cello and the violin over the years, Huff says. And when success came his way, he apparently installed a pipe organ in his Beverly Hills mansion that he would noodle on. Realizing the importance of musical accompaniment to the silent film, Chaplin even supervised the cue sheets that were sent to theatres accompanying the silent films for the accompanists, usually an organist or a three piece ensemble, Huff says
The movie City Lights, which will be performed by the National Arts Centre Orchestra on Oct. 14, was arranged by Arthur Johnston and Alfred Newman, but, Huff says, Chaplin “composed” all the melodies. The resulting work is highly regarded. There are about 20 “numbers in the score” that could stand alone and there were about 95 separate cues.
“The haunting and pleasant Chaplin melodies in City Lights are pleasing in themselves, but the picture is one of the few extant examples of the silent medium’s power when wedded to a musical score which properly interprets the action and heightens the emotion,” Huff wrote.
The respected music critic of the New Yorker magazine, Alex Ross, says Chaplin was an important figure in music.
“He had limited abilities as a composer but he knew what sound he wanted and he knew exactly what kind of sound would work with his filmmaking vision, which was sophisticated in a lot of ways.
In Ross’s assessment there is “a personality to his music” that “matches the personality that you see on screen and the personality that comes into being in how he puts one image in front of another.”
Music in film added complexity to composed music in the 20th century.
It came along as young composers were developing new musical languages, Ross says.
“This kind of music really got attached to Hollywood movies in the 1930s and ’40s. There is more tolerance for experimental/avantgarde music in a movie because of the visual and narrative context of the film. That music standing alone no longer makes sense.”
This is a mixed blessing, he added.
“Nothing is more exciting than to hear the tunes one has composed played for the first time by a 50-piece orchestra.”
— Charlie Chaplin.
“Something unfortunate happens, images are very powerful and they can stamp music forever after. People think of Bette Davis coming down a staircase, more modernistic sounds get applied to suspense movies, to horror movies and sci-fi movies. Those sounds get stamped with the images that people saw when they first heard them.”
Still, Ross says, “people have discovered music through movies.”
Film composers have been inventive and directors have been imaginative with how they use music in movies. For example, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 resurrected the music of Richard Strauss and Johann Strauss, and introduced people to the enigmatic sounds created by the Hungarian György Ligeti, considered one of the most important avant-garde composers of the 20th century.
The National Arts Centre Orchestra’s music director, Alexander Shelley, is the one who programmed City Lights. “We’ll show the film, and we’ll play the score live, which I’ve never done before. I’ve very excited to see how it works.
“Charlie Chaplin was an incredible character. When he was born, people were still driving around in carriages, when he died we had landed a man on the moon. It’s really quite incredible.
“It’s a great score, fantastic music and before that in the first half we’ll look at a composer who’s sound I’m sure was influential on Chaplin, which is Kurt Weill (The Threepenny Opera).”
Shelley is also chuffed about the music of the ‘20s.
“It’s all music that I find beautiful, it’s all music which is accessible, but it’s also music which is very meaningful. And it celebrates a period in our human history of creation which is really quite extraordinary.
“(It) opens doors to a lot of very interesting conversations. What role does nationalism have in the arts, in politics, in identity? And how much are we the product of a very international world?”
Shelley is also a firm believer in the quality of music for film.
“I think it is a mistake to confuse or compare film music to concert music. Composing for film is an extraordinary and very precise craft. The mood, undertone, effect and even meaning of screen images can be drastically and fundamentally altered by the music accompanying them.
“I believe that the skills required to be a good film composer should be rated very highly and respected by all. I believe Chaplin’s music to be excellent. He uses leitmotifs very effectively and manages to give emotional undercurrents and direction to scenes that would otherwise be more two-dimensional.”