7 - Film: Animated Scores and Biedermeier Dreams

Summary

The Animated Score

As we have seen, the Marche militaire found a home as part of the menu of entertainment on offer at theaters that screened early silent cinema. This practice was international, as indicated by an Australian newspaper item from 1911, which reported that, in between presentations of Empire Pictures at the Perth Town Hall, the audience “vigorously applauded” the score's performance by an “enchanting mandoliniste” from Sydney. In providing an accompaniment to the films themselves, each venue offered its own performers who were responsible for selecting music that was appropriate to each scene. An advertisement for movie music in 1919 includes the march in a band arrangement by R. E. Hildreth. In the next decade, the work was listed in two publications cataloguing well-known compositions to play with motion pictures, matching the scores to the appropriate mood or action on the screen. One further piece of evidence regarding the use of Schubert's march as an accompaniment to silent films comes from a profile of the Czech diplomat Jan Masaryk, who had studied piano as a youth in Prague. On his first visit to the United States in 1906, Masaryk took several odd jobs in New York, one of which drew upon his early training: “To augment his income, he played the piano evenings in the local movie houses, usually Mendelssohn's Spring Song during love scenes and Schubert's Marche Militaire when the hero came galloping to the rescue.”

The advent of recorded sound in the cinema rendered live performances redundant. Nonetheless, there remained one type of motion picture that continued to rely heavily on the adaptation and manipulation of well-known music rather than the crafting of an original score: animated films. The innovator of this trend was Walt Disney, who created a series distributed under the title Silly Symphonies. Beginning with The Skeleton Dance in 1929 and proceeding over the next decade, these seventy-five short films integrated visual and sound elements in what was at the time a novel combination.