music

Upcoming silent film: D. W. Griffith’s America   Recently updated !

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged history music New Hampshire silent movies on by

On June 23, I’ll be back at the Plaistow Library to accompany the silent film America, made by D. W. Griffith. It will start at 6 PM and run about 2 hours and 20 minutes. Reservations are encouraged so the library knows how many people to expect.

The show is part of the events observing the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. There will also be a presentation on the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 9, held by the Plaistow Historical Society. As I’m writing, not much information is available on it, but it should be interesting.

Griffith is famous (or infamous) for his 1915 film Birth of a Nation, which presents the Civil War and glorifies the KKK. America, released in 1924, is about the American Revolution. Both films have spectacular battle scenes and stories focusing on individuals. Both have a mix of accurate history and made-up stuff. America culminates in a made-up battle at a made-up place, but the early parts of the Revolution (Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill) are presented fairly accurately. The film doesn’t have the same level of racial problems as the earlier film. There is a black servant, but he isn’t mocked or caricatured (though I’m pretty sure a while actor played him). Natives who fight for the British are called “savages.” Things like that happen in century-old movies.

Poster for the film "America" (1924)The chief villain is a Tory rather than anyone from Britain. Lionel Barrymore portrays Walter Butler, a real-life Loyalist officer, as a sadistic schemer with an evil grin, which he wasn’t in reality. The British regulars are generally shown as brave soldiers. I wonder if Griffith remembered that the maker of the 1917 Spirit of ’76 got a long prison sentence for making an “anti-British” movie when Britain was our ally in World War I. It may have seemed safer to show Tories doing nasty things. Even as it was, the British Board of Film Censors banned the film.

The story of the war is intertwined with a love story; a Patriot is in love with the daughter of a man who remains loyal to Britain. Both of them prove honorable in the end.

As usual, I’ll provide original, live music for the film.

Book discussion: Toscanini: Musician of Conscience

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Toscanini: Musician of Conscience was a huge reading project but worth it. It covers the long career of one of the most important orchestra conductors, the man who conducted the premiere of Pagliacci in 1892 and lived long enough to make long-playing records. He was a celebrity in Europe and the Americas and courageously stood up to Mussolini in his home country.

I must admit to skimming through parts of the book. His role in music and politics is most important to me, and I went quickly over parts dealing with his personal relations.

Toscanini was a top-rank conductor with an incredible memory, but I wouldn’t want to be a musician under him. He demanded the best from his musicians, and sometimes he could be extremely rude and unfair with them. On one occasion, he broke a violinist’s bow with his baton. At the same time, he recognized excellence.

In politics, if not at the podium, he was an enemy of tyranny. After a brief period of admiring Mussolini, he recognized that the would-be Duce was a brutal power-luster. In 1924 he refused an order to display Mussolini’s picture. On one occasion, when he refused to perform the Fascist anthem, a gang of Blackshirts beat him up as the police passively watched. In 1938 he left Italy and didn’t return until after World War II.

Sachs discusses his relationships with musicians who remained in Germany and Italy during the dictatorships. Withdrawing from the Bayreuth Festival was a painful decision for him. He condemned Wilhelm Furtwängler for continuing to lend his prestige to the Nazi government.

Sachs writes about an incredible number of affairs Toscanini had with women. He lets Toscanini look honorable for the most part, but I have to wonder. I didn’t see any mention of whether he ever got anyone pregnant; while he wasn’t an observant Catholic, he lived in a culture that was strongly hostile to abortion and even birth control. But as I said, I skimmed over those parts of the book, so I may have missed something.

My main complaint about the book is that its mentions of years are thin. I often had trouble figuring out in which year an event took place. That can be especially annoying if you’re using the book for reference.

This book isn’t a light weekend read, but it’s a fascinating look at an important musician and a courageous person. If you’re willing to commit the time, it’s an excellent book.

Credit the songwriter!

This entry was posted in Music Writing and tagged music writing on by

The idea for this post started when I tried to find out if the resemblance of the 1979 song “Gloria” to the “Gloria” of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis was intentional. (It was.) While doing the usual Internet searches, I found it repeatedly referred to as Laura Branigan’s song, even on lyrics sites, although she didn’t write it. Not to take away from her excellent performance, but she wrote neither the music, the original lyrics, nor the English-language version. Wikipedia credits Giancarlo Bigazzi and Umberto Tozzi as the creators of the original song and Jonathan King as the author of the English-language lyrics. Tozzi performed the Italian song before Branigan. Yet somehow Branigan gets all the credit.

(I’m not counting Beethoven as a creator. The song uses only nine notes of his. They give the song its backbone but not its content.)

I cited another example of failure to credit the song writer in a book discussion a couple of months ago.

It’s routine to give performers the credit for songs they didn’t write. The reason is laziness. People hear someone perform a song and assume that person must have written it. If you believe the lyrics sites, Frank Sinatra wrote over a hundred songs, but Wikipedia lists him as the creator or co-creator of only a handful. An exceptional performance makes the difference between a hit and a flop, but the performance wouldn’t exist if no one had written the song. Before recordings became the most common way to hear music, writers got more attention. William Billings, Stephen Foster, George Root, and Irving Berlin were famous names in their time. Today, it’s rare for songwriters to be well known unless they write musicals or perform their own songs.

When you’re writing about a song, especially if the lyrics or the musical content is important, please mention the writer’s or writers’ names.

This post was partially inspired by Debbie Ridpath Ohi’s campaign to get acknowledgement for the illustrators of children’s books. That’s important, too.

Three silent shorts, April 7   Recently updated !

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My next silent film show at the Plaistow Library will be on Tuesday, April 7. This time I’ll accompany three short comedies:

  • The Immigrant with Charlie Chaplin
  • Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde with Stan Laurel
  • His Royal Slyness with Harold Lloyd

Chaplin, Laurel, and Lloyd were major comedy stars in their time. I shouldn’t have to say much about Chaplin. Stan Laurel’s career peaked after he joined with Oliver Hardy, but before that he had some excellent films on his own. Harold Lloyd’s “glasses” persona was a middle-class character, best known for his image hanging from a clock tower in Safety Last.

The Immigrant isn’t very controversial, in spite of its title. It has two distinct parts. The first shows Chaplin coming to America on a crowded boat from an unspecified country and helping a young woman whose money has been stolen. In the second part, he goes into a restaurant with a silver dollar he has found and encounters the young lady again. He discovers that the coin has fallen through a hole in his pocket and he has nothing to pay with. All turns out well, though.

I love mad scientists, Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde is a great parody of John Barrymore’s 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In this version, the doctor turns into not a murderous fiend but a silly prankster. The ending is lost, and what we have ends on a cliffhanger as a crowd breaks into the lab to save Pyckle’s assistant from Pryde. I’ll handle it by continuing to play, accompanying the way I think the film would have ended.

Finally, His Royal Slyness has a book salesman, played by Harold Lloyd, impersonate a prince and compete for a princess’s hand. The salesman looks just like the real prince, and you see them together on screen. No trick photography was used. Harold’s brother Gaylord looked a lot like him, and with glasses and makeup, they were nearly impossible to tell apart. Gaylord plays the real prince, who changes his mind about the deal and tries to claim the princess.

It’s a change of pace for me. The three movies together don’t run much over an hour, but they provide some of the best laughs of the period. They’re still fun today, and I aim to make them more fun with my accompaniment. Each one his its own keyboard setup, with a couple of surprises programmed in. If you’re in the area and it sounds interesting, drop by the Plaistow Library on April 7 at 6:00 PM.

This summer, the library will have some special events for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. On of them will be D. W. Griffith’s America, an epic presentation of the American Revolution. The date hasn’t been set yet.

“The Hunchback of Notre Dame” at Boskone

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At Boskone 63 in Boston, I stepped in twice as a movie accompanist. The first was a ten-minute film (and I mean film, the 16 millimeter kind) of scenes from the Seattle Worldcon. Then I noticed that on Sunday morning, the 1923 Hunchback of Notre Dame was scheduled, apparently with just whatever music came with the video. I made last-minute arrangements to accompany it. Zero practice, and I hadn’t brought my best keyboard, but I know the movie well.

We’re talking about my accompanying a properly scheduled silent feature film next year.