Electroacoustic Composition and Silent Film

In their recent volume, Today’s Sounds for Yesterday’s Films, K.J. Donnelly and Ann-Kristin Wallengren address the ‘burgeoning’ culture of live music for silent films. ¹ ‘Music’, they write, ‘has become a means for both musicians and audiences to understand this bygone film art anew.’ ² Yet the nature of that ‘means’ can be a tendentious matter. Non-traditional approaches to new soundtracks – electronic sounds in particular – may prompt what Blair Davis calls ‘a preservationist instinct’ among ‘film critics, scholars and fans who “froth with rage” at the thought of altering the original exhibition context of silent cinema’. ³ In this chapter, I focus on recent electroacoustic scores for silent films that could be described as ‘“novel”, radical’, following Donnelly’s schema of polar approaches to silent film scoring. ⁴ I use the term ‘electroacoustic’ to refer to compositional practice that uses a set of electronics-based tools for composition, which includes, but is not limited to, computer technology. ⁵ Such a set of tools may be used exclusively or in combination with acoustic instruments. ⁶ I investigate how artist-composers use these tools to create sound-image relations that cannot be created by traditional acoustic means. I address a range of techniques, including the possibility of expanded and ‘fixed’ musical temporalities, the function of automated, repeated musical events, and techniques of stereophonic arrangement. If the medium of composition is electroacoustic sound, then the soundtrack will inevitably be at odds with the film’s historical context. Yet I suggest that it is precisely the ahistorical way in which such technologically mediated methods of musical expression are utilised that allows these scores to furnish new insight into their respective silent films.