Despite the fact that it would seem that the moving picture drama had opened up new worlds to the modern musician, no important composer, so far as I am aware, has as yet turned his attention to the writing of music for the films. If the cinema drama is in its infancy, as some would have us believe, then we may be sure that the time is not far distant when moving picture scores will take their places on the musicians’ book-shelves alongside those of operas, symphonies, masses, and string quartets. In the meantime, entirely ignorant of the truth (or oblivious to it, or merely helpless, as the case may be) that writing music for moving pictures is a new art, which demands a new point of view, the directors of the picture theatres are struggling with the situation as best they may. Under the circumstances it is remarkable, on the whole, how swiftly and how well the demand for music with the silent drama has been met. Certainly the music is usually on a level with (or of a better quality than) the type of entertainment offered. But the directors have not definitely tackled the problem; they still continue to try to force old wine into new bottles, arranging and re-arranging melody and harmony which was contrived for quite other occasions and purposes. Even when scores have been written for pictures the result has not shown any imaginative advance over the arranged score. It is strange, but it has occurred to no one that the moving picture demands a new kind of music.

The composers, I should imagine, are only waiting to be asked to write it. Certainly none of them has ever shown any hesitancy about composing incidental music for the spoken drama. Mendelssohn wrote strains for A Midsummer Night’s Dream which seemed pledged to immortality until Granville Barker ignored them; the Wedding March is still in favour in Kankakee and Keokuk. Beethoven illustrated Goethe’s Egmont; Sir Arthur Sullivan penned a score for The Tempest; Schubert was inspired to put down some of his most ravishing notes for a stupid play called Rosamunde; Grieg’s Peer Gynt music is more often performed than the play. More recent instances of incidental music for dramas are Saint-Saëns’s score for Brieux’s La Foi, Mascagni’s for The Eternal City, and Richard Strauss’s for Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Is it necessary to continue the list? I have only, after all, put down a few of the obvious examples (passing by the thousands upon thousands of scores devised by lesser composers for lesser plays) that would spring at once to any musician’s mind. Of course it has usually been the poetic drama (do we ever hear Shakespeare or Rostand without it?) which has seemed to call for incidental music but it has accompanied (with more or less disastrous consequences, to be sure) the unfolding of many a “drawing-room” play; especially during the eighties.

When the first moving picture was exposed on the screen it seems to have occurred to its projector at once that some kind of music must accompany its unreeling. The silence evidently appalled him. A moving picture is not unlike a ballet in that it depends entirely upon action (it differs from a ballet in that the action is not necessarily rhythmic)—and whoever heard of a ballet performed without music? Sound certainly has its value in creating an atmosphere and in emphasizing the “thrill” of the moving picture, especially when the sound is selected and co-ordinated. It may also divert the attention. On the whole, more photographed plays follow the general lines of Lady Windemere’s Fan or Peg o’ My Heart than of poetic dramas such as Cymbeline or La Samaritaine. The problem here, however, is not the same as in the spoken drama. For in motion pictures a poetic play sheds its poetry and becomes, like its neighbour, a skeleton of action. There is no conceivable distinction in the “movies” (beyond one created by preference, or taste, or the quality of the performance and the photography) between Dante’s Inferno and a picture in which the beloved Charles Chaplin looms large. The directors of the moving picture companies have tried to meet this problem; that they have not wholly succeeded so far is not entirely their fault.

It is no easy matter, for example, in a theatre in which the films are changed daily (this is the general rule even in the larger houses), for the musicians (or musician) to arrange a satisfactory accompaniment for 5,000 feet of action which includes everything from an earthquake in Cuba to a dinner in Park Lane, and it is scarcely possible, even if the distributors be so inclined (as they frequently are nowadays) to furnish a music score which will answer the purposes of the different sized bands, ranging from a full orchestra to an upright piano, solo. As for the pictures without pre-arranged scores, the orchestra leaders and pianists must do the best they can with them.

In some houses there is an attitude of total disrespect paid towards the picture by the chef d’orchestre. He arranges his musical programme as if he were giving a concert, not at all with a view to effectively accompanying the picture. In a theatre on Second Avenue in New York, for example, I have heard an orchestra play the whole of Beethoven’s First Symphony as an accompaniment to Irene Fenwick’s performance of The Woman Next Door. As the symphony came to an end before the picture it was supplemented by a Waldteufel waltz, Les Patineurs. The result, in this instance, was not altogether incongruous or even particularly displeasing, and it occurred to me that if one had to listen to music while the third act of Hedda Gabler were being enacted one would prefer to hear something like Boccherini’s celebrated minuet or a light Mozart dance rather than anything ostensibly contrived to fit the situation. In the latter instance the result would be sure to be unbearable bathos.

On the other hand there are certain players for pictures who remind one by their methods of the anxiety of Richard Strauss to describe every peacock and bean mentioned in any of his opera-books. If a garden is exposed on the screen one hears The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring; a love scene is the signal for Un Peu d’Amour; a cross or any religious episode suggests The Rosary to these ingenuous musicians; Japan brings a touch of Madame Butterfly; a proposal of marriage, O Promise Me; and a farewell, Tosti’s Good-bye! This expedient of appealing through the intellect to the emotions, it may be admitted, has the stamp of approval of no less a composer than Richard Wagner.

Lacking the authority of real moving picture music (which a new composer must rise to invent) the safest way (not necessarily the best way) is the middle course—one method for this, another for that. One of the difficulties is to arrange a music score for a theatre with a large orchestra, where the leader must plan his score—or have it planned for him—for an entire picture before his orchestra can play a note. Music cues must be definite: twenty bars of Alexander’s Ragtime Band, seventeen of The Ride of the Valkyries, ten of Vissi d’Arte, etc. An ingenious young man has discovered a way by which music and action may be exactly synchronized. I feel the impulse to quote extensively from the somewhat vivid report of his achievement, published in one of the motion picture weekly journals: “Here was a man-sized job—how to measure the action of the picture to the musical score, so that they would both come out equal at every part of the picture, and would be so exact that any orchestra might take the score and follow the movement of the play with absolute correctness. It was a question primarily of mathematics, but even so it was some time before a system of computation was devised before the undertaking was gotten down to a certainty. As an illustration, on the opening night of one of the most notable photoplay productions now before the public, the orchestra, notwithstanding a three weeks’ rehearsal, found at the conclusion of the picture that it was a page and a half behind the play’s action in the musical setting.” Then we learn that Frank Stadler of New York “provided the remedy for this condition of affairs.” It is impossible to resist the temptation to quote further from this extremely racy account. “He remembered that Beethoven had overcome the difficulty of proper timing for his sonatas by a mechanical arrangement known as the metronome, invented by a friend of his. This is an arrangement with a little bell attached which may be set for the movement of the music and used as an exact guide to the right measure, the bell giving warning at the expiration of each period so that the leader knows whether he is in time or not.” Mr. Stadler then began the measurement of a film with a metronome, a stenographer, and a watch. He found that the film ran ten feet to every eight seconds and he set the metronome for eight second periods accordingly. “The stenographer made a note of the action of the picture each time the bell rang, with the result that when the entire picture had been run Mr. Stadler had a complete record of the production. All that was necessary then was to select from the classics and the popular melodies the music which would give a suitable atmosphere and a harmonious accompaniment to the theme of the play, so synchronizing the music with the eight second periods that every bar of it fitted the spirit of the many score of scenes of the production.”

The single man orchestra, the player of the upright piano, need not make so many preparatory gestures. He may with impunity, if he be of an inventive turn of mind, or if his memory be good, improvise his score as the picture unreels itself for the first time before what may very well be his astonished vision; and, after that, he may vary his accompaniment, as the shows of the day progress, improving it here or there, or not, as the case may be, keeping generally as near to his original performance as possible. Of course he puts a good deal of reliance on rum-ti-tum shivery passages (known to orchestra leaders as “agits”—an abbreviation of agitato; a page or two of them is distributed to every member of a moving picture band) to accompany moments of excitement. This music you will remember if you have ever attended a performance of a Lincoln J. Carter melodrama in which a train was wrecked, or a hero rescued from the teeth of a saw, or a heroine pursued by bloodhounds. (Those were the good old days!) Recently I heard a pianist in a moving picture house on Fourteenth Street in New York eke out a half-hour with similar poundings on two or three well used chords (well used even in the time of Hadyn). The scenes represented the whole of a two-act opera, and the ambitious pianist was trying to give his audience the effect of singers (principals and chorus) and orchestra with his three chords. (Shades of Arnold Schoenberg!)

A certain periodical devoted to the interests of the moving picture trade, conducts a department as first aid to the musical conductors and pianists who figure at these shows. In a recent number the editor of this department gives it as his solemn opinion that musicians who read fiction are the best equipped for picture playing. Then, with an almost tragic parenthesis, he continues, “Reading fiction is the last diversion that the average musician will follow. He feels that all the necessary romance is to be found in his music.” Facts are dead, says this editor in substance, but fiction is living and should make you weep. When you cry, all that remains for you to do is to think of a tune which will synchronize with the cause of your tears; this will serve you later when a similar scene occurs in a film drama.

There is one tune which any capable moving picture pianist has found will synchronize with any Keystone picture (for the benefit of the uninitiated I may state that in the Keystone farces some one gets kicked or knocked down or spat upon several times in almost every scene). I do not know what the tune is, but wherever Keystone pictures are shown, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Chicago, and even New York, I have heard it. When a character falls into the water (and at least ten of them invariably do) the pianist may vary the tune by sitting on the piano or by upsetting a chair. In one theatre I have known him to cause glass to be shattered behind the screen at a moment when the picture exposed a similar scene. How Marinetti would like that!

However, the day of this sort of thing is rapidly approaching its close, I venture to say. Some of the firms are already issuing arranged music scores for their productions (one may note in passing the score which accompanied Geraldine Farrar’s screen performance of Carmen, largely selected from the music of Bizet’s opera, and Victor Herbert’s original score for The Fall of a Nation, a score which does not take full advantage of the new technique of the cinema drama). It will not be long before an enterprising director engages an enterprising musician to compose music for a picture. For the same reason that d’Annunzio, very early in the career of the moving picture, wrote a scenario for a film, I should not be surprised to learn that Richard Strauss was under contract to construct an accompaniment to a screened drama. It will be very loud music and it will require an orchestra of 143 men to interpret it and probably the composer himself will conduct the first performance, and, later, excerpts will be given by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the critics will say, in spite of Philip Hale’s diverting programme notes, that this music should never be played except in conjunction with the picture for which it was written. Mascagni is another composer who should find an excellent field for his talent in writing tone-poems for pictures, although he would contrive nothing more daring than a well-arranged series of illustrative melodies.

But put Igor Strawinsky, or some other modern genius, to work on this problem and see what happens! The musician of the future should revel in the opportunity the moving picture gives him to create a new form. This form differs from that of the incidental music for a play in that the flow of tone may be continuous and because one never needs to soften the accompaniment so that the voices may be heard; it differs from the music for a ballet in that the scene shifts constantly, and consequently the time signatures and the mood and the key must be as constantly shifting. The swift flash from scene to scene, the “cut-back,” the necessary rapidity of the action, all are adapted to inspire the futurist composer to brilliant effort; a tinkle of this and a smash of that, without “working-out” or development; illustration, comment, piquant or serious, that’s what the new film music should be. The ultimate moving picture score will be something more than sentimental accompaniment.

New York, November 10, 1915.