Sky Arts have followed their series on film directors with a series of documentaries looking at film music and it's creators. The same team of contributors (Ian Nathan, Bonnie Greer, Stephen Armstrong and Neil Norman) are supported by director Ryan Mandrake and the 3DD Entertainment team. Episode 1 looks at the birth of silent movies when the score was played live in the cinema.
Erno Rapee was the trailblazer for movie music when he published Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists. The 700 pages set out 52 moods and situations for those playing to the film on the screen.
The first original score for a film was that for D W Griffith's Birth of a Nation in 1915 composed by Joseph Carl Briel, For Battleship Potemkin, the music was composed in 1925 by Edmund Meisel , one of the pioneering composers of film music from Vienna. Soon after, and for the 1927 film Metropolis, the composer of the music was Gottfried Huppertz who collaborated with director Fritz Lang on this and subsequent German silent movies.
The first movie with synchronised sound was 1927's The Jazz Singer. Silent movies didn't disappear overnight. They were still being made in Germany and Charlie Chaplin's last silent picture was City Lights in 1928 and later movies only had music and sound effects. Other films had dialogue but no music.
The programme finished with a mention of Max Steiner, a composer who heralded in huge advances in movie music with his 1933 King Kong. He composed over 300 film scores, was nominated for an Academy Award twenty four times and won three. More about him in the next episode.
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