Musicians preserve history of live music accompaniment for silent films

Denver Film is hosting its annual Denver Silent Film Festival on September 27-29, 2024. The festival serves to honor the masterpieces made during the silent era. Many of these movies have been restored, so they are more vibrant than ever on the big screen.
Part of the fun of seeing a silent film is the live music performance that goes along with it. The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra will perform for two of the films at this year’s festival. The orchestra is a five-piece ensemble including Dawn Kramer playing trumpet, Brian Collins playing clarinet, David Short playing cello, Britt Swenson playing violin, and Rodney Sauer playing piano.
“I love the fact that we’re playing in a little five-piece group. We don’t have a conductor. We’re all listening to each other. We’re all playing this totally unknown music,” said Sauer.
While the action plays out on the screen, these musicians provide the feeling. One film they’ll be accompanying during the festival is “The Seahawk,” a 1924 movie directed by Frank Loyd.
“This is actually only the second time we’ve done the score for ‘The Seahawk,'” Sauer explained. “A five-piece orchestra turns out to be very convenient. We geta little bit of the brass, a little bit of the woodwinds, the sound of an orchestra.”
It’s an art form that could have died as the movie business changed.
“I think, when the talkies came in most of this music was thrown away,” he said.
Preserving this piece of history has become a passion for Sauer. He’s built a library of scores from as much of this kind of music as he can.
“It’s very well written. It’s well thought out. It’s emotional,” he said.
It was also considered commercial at the time; and there was not a lot of structure to how it was produced.
“Every theater was in charge of its own music, so there wouldn’t really be a score that went with the film,” Sauer told CBS News Colorado.
For a movie like “The Seahawk,” Sauer compiled the score from the existing music in his library. He carefully chose pieces that match the mood and tenor of the movie, so that in this swashbuckler when the treachery builds, audiences feel it in every note.
“The audiences really like it. It turns moviegoing into a concert.”
Playing such dramatic music over the course of a two-hour movie takes stamina, but these musicians call it a labor of love.
LINK: Denver Silent Film Festival
The Denver Silent Film Festival runs September 27-29, 2024 at the Sie FilmCenter.