music

The General on YouTube

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After figuring out (I hope) what was wrong with the music I provided for Buster Keaton’s 1926 film The General at the Plaistow Library, I did the music over and recorded a new version for YouTube. That means there are no audience sounds, but in this case that’s an advantage. Besides, the music was recorded directly to a computer, so it has better sound quality than the recording I made at the library.

I’ve already discussed the movie here and my approach to accompanying it here, so I’ll just say that I hope you enjoy it.
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A silent movie failure

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I failed terribly last night when showing The General. I don’t know what I did wrong.

As I’ve said before and told the audience before the showing, The General is a complex movie. It’s a comedy, but it’s also a war movie. A train collapses into a gorge. Soldiers die on screen. I expect people to laugh at the funny parts. I don’t expect them to laugh at the deaths. I tried to underscore the mood of each scene, as I always do. It didn’t work.
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Coming to Plaistow July 22: The General

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It’s just two weeks till my next live silent movie show at the Plaistow Library: The General, made by and starring Buster Keaton. I know most of you aren’t local, but if you can spread the word among silent movie fans, it will help. This is the first time I’ll be presenting an evening show, and getting eight sign-ups so early is encouraging.
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Yearning to Breathe Free

This entry was posted in History Music and tagged history immigration music YouTube on by

In my latest YouTube video, Yearning to Breathe Free, I try something new. Rather than accompanying an existing silent film, I’ve created a ten-minute history of immigration to the US in still images and added my improvised accompaniment. It’s been a learning experience in a lot of ways. First was the selection of images to combine into a coherent story. It consists of several sequences, each covering a different historical period from 1607 to the present. The first version didn’t make the structure nearly clear enough. Thanks to Virginia Taylor for catching this problem. I thought about inserting a summary before each segment and adding captions and ended up doing both. Then there was the timing. Before adding the music, the pacing felt slow, yet some images hold a lot of text, and test viewers didn’t always spot the important parts in time. I lengthened the time for some images and drew visual attention to the important text in one image.
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Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon

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The 1929 film, Frau im Mond or Woman in the Moon, was the first feature film to present space travel realistically. I’m amazed at how much it got right, considering Fritz Lang released it 40 years before the first human stepped on the Moon. Of course, it has some errors that are obvious today, but a lot of modern space movies don’t do as well.

The best part is the trip to the Moon, which occupies about 40 minutes of a film which is 2 3/4 hours long. Once the hatch opens and the travelers step out onto the Moon, the science goes bonkers. So I’ve created a video with my accompaniment of that sequence. It starts with the call to stations 50 minutes before launch and ends when the hatch is opened on the lunar surface. The video contains German intertitles with English translations below them.
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