The University’s School of Music is making some noise over silent films.
Five silent films of the early 19th century will be screened tonight, accompanied by live music performances from University students and faculty.
The event, called Music for Silents: Film Scores and Improvisations, is free to the public and will be held in the Bo Campbell Auditorium of the Cox Communications Academic Center for Student-Athletes starting at 7:30 p.m.
Visiting assistant professor of music Blake Howe said this is his first time directing an event like this. He said he believed this is also the first time the School of Music has hosted this type of event.
Howe said films from the 1910s did not have recorded soundtracks but always had musicians to accompany the film when screened for audiences. Scores were sometimes improvised, and other times they were composed.
“Our goal in this concert is to try to recreate that practice,” Howe said.
The musicians will try to play the music the audience would have heard years ago at original screening of the films. In some cases, the musicians are using historica
l concepts to attempt to recreate the sound, Howe said.
Howe taught a class this semester called Introduction to Film Music — the first time the University has offered it. His class studied some of the films being screened.
The list of films includes “The Assassination of Duke Guise” (1908), “Frankenstein” (1910), “The Land Beyond the Sunset” (1912), “The Cameraman’s Revenge” (1911) and “Entr’acte” (1924). Howe said one musician will perform per film.
Howe said each of the films is shorter than 15 minutes because films were typically only as long as the length of the reel permitted.
Along with scores written by renowned composers Erik Satie and Camille Saint-Saëns, the night’s performance will include original arrangements by two of Howe’s students, Amanda Yan and Greg De Iulio, as well as music theory graduate student Jonathan Mitchell and professor of piano Michael Gurt.
Howe said his students compiled a film score of their own that attempts to imitate music of the respective century. Yan, piano performance and pedagogy senior, created her own arrangement of the score for the first existing film version of “Frankenstein,” and De Iulio, piano performance senior, composed his own arrangement for “The Land Beyond the track.”
He said most of tonight’s film scores will be performed on a piano, but the score for “The Cameraman’s Revenge” will be performed by a musical ensemble.
The film, which Howe described as a Russian stop-animation film featuring a love affair of insects, will be performed by the Incense Merchants, a group of local improvisational musicians. Howe said the group’s performance will be a completely modern take on film music.
He said the Incense Merchants, who have been accompanying silent film for a while, have a unique style that is a combination of minimalism, jazz and experimentalism.
 
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Contact Haylie Navarre at [email protected]