How live music gave the movies their voice
Picture a silent film. You’re probably seeing flickering black and white, actors emoting at a volume that could reach the back row of a stadium, and a lot of text cards. What you probably aren’t picturing is a room full of sound. That’s the funny thing about “silent” movies: they almost never were. From the earliest public screenings, there was a pianist, an organist, or a full orchestra in the room, and audiences experienced the film and the music as one thing.
Why bother with music at all?
The first reason was practical. Early projectors were loud, and a hall of strangers sitting in silence next to a rattling machine is awkward for everyone. Music covered the noise.
It quickly became much more than that. With no spoken dialogue, the music told the audience how to feel. It made the chase frantic, the romance swell, and the villain’s entrance feel like a cold draft under the door. The actors had faces, and the musicians had everything else.
How did it work?
In a small neighborhood theater, a pianist might improvise along with a film they had barely seen, reacting in real time. Larger theaters installed grand organs that could imitate an orchestra and add sound effects like galloping horses, bells, and birdsong. It was essentially a one-person band with a foot pedal for thunder.
Some theaters leaned on published collections of ready-made mood music. Erno Rapée’s Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (1924) is a famous example, with short pieces sorted by feeling so a musician could grab the right one for the scene at hand. Think of it as the first stock music library.
Original scores were on the rise too. In 1908, Camille Saint-Saëns wrote music for the French film L’Assassinat du duc de Guise, and it’s often called the first major original film score. By the 1920s, big productions like Metropolis were premiering with full scores written just for them.
And then there’s Nosferatu
When F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu premiered in Berlin on March 4, 1922, it had an original score by Hans Erdmann. The film’s story afterward was nearly as dramatic as the film itself. The studio went bankrupt, Bram Stoker’s widow sued over the unauthorized Dracula adaptation, and a court ordered every copy destroyed. Some copies survived, fortunately for film history.
Erdmann’s original score wasn’t so lucky. It was long considered lost, and it was probably performed only a handful of times. Part of it survives because he published a suite in 1926, and musicians have reconstructed and reimagined the rest.
That may be why Nosferatu has been scored so many times. Each generation of musicians gets to answer the same question: what does this film sound like to us?
My turn
Next month, I’ll be answering that question live. On Friday, October 23rd at Resonance School of Music, I’ll be performing an original score for Nosferatu (1922) as the film plays. It’s a different kind of performance from a recital. The film never changes, but the music can. Tempo, silence, and a single held note all get to decide how a scene lands, and there’s no dialogue to hide behind.
Try this at home
Pick a favorite movie scene and watch it on mute. Then play a few very different pieces of music over it, something gentle, then something tense, then something completely ridiculous. Notice how the same footage changes. You’ve just done what silent film musicians did every night.
If this sounds like your kind of fun, it’s exactly what our Film and Video Game Music summer camp is about. Students learn the history of scoring and then score a short movie of their own. And if you’d like to build the skills behind it, our private lessons are a great place to start.
