How Far Can Too Far Go? Radical Approaches to Silent Film Music

Abstract

Currently, silent cinema has become more prominent than at any time since the end of the 1920s, when it was ousted by the cinema of recorded sound. Apart from festivals and special screenings, silent films are a part of education and art.1 Where there are silent films, there are almost always musical accompaniments. Many DVD and BluRay releases of silent films have new specially-written music for the films while others go out of their way to have ‘authentic’ scores constructed to be as similar as possible to what accompanied the film at the time of its initial release. There is a profound difference between scores that are founded on such historical principles and those that aim at furnishing something new for the film. While the former offer the museum and history as guarantor of pedigree, the latter offer a potentially new culture although this can mean breathtaking novelty or a crude hybrid.