State Theatre Collection During COVID part 9 Music and Film

I am now very close to the end of the Silent era. The sumptuous State Theatre formally opened playing The Patriot in 1929.  the first Oscar winner of the best film of 1927, Wings was also shown in The State Theatre in 1929. Wings had a full score composed for it, not bits and pieces put together from cues, all were composed by our favourite silent film composer, Zamecnik. In the best practice of the era he, of course, stole from his works previously published.Below is a piece Zamecnik used in WingsThen came the talkies with the Jazz Singer 1927 but all the hard work the creators did of adding music to technology had been done and the template they set up is still used today.Cementing the whole score to fit a movie, did take away some of the artistry of creating cue sheets plus it meant that the orchestra had to be much more standardized, but it was the end of the whole beginning development of what school pupils know as “music and the media”  It started from glass slide showings and song and developed gradually melding screen and sound to the talkies, A fascinating patch of history. It would continue to the modern works of John Williams and in Japan, Jo Hisaishi. Best film music is now an important part of modern music with pieces like Gabriel’s Oboe from The Mission or Moon River from Breakfast at Tiffanies.The State Theatre was to go into liquidation in 1931.This in many ways is a very difficult subject. As Rick Altman comments in his book Silent Sound,“As anyone who has ever attempted research on the subject will readily attest, silent film sound is a maddening topic. Not only are the performances themselves forever lost, but even their traces have systematically fallen prey to the low esteem accorded ephemeral and tributary phenomena like silent film sound. Many original performances were improvised and thus from the start lacked a written record. Where sheet music was used, it has by and large gone the way of other cheaply produced century-old paper documents. Even when the printed music remains, we rarely know when it was used, how it was performed, and what its relationship was to which film(s).”I have set myself the task of examining the State Theatre Collection of Music and I have used Rick Altman’s work as a template for how the music was used in the era, (he found it amusing that someone in Sydney would be using his work at all) The difficulties he writes about is exactly the reason I would hate to do serious academic research in this topic, but, I have found an enormous amount of information purely examining this amazing collection, although hardly peer-reviewed. I have also had help from Trove, searching out reviews and advertising for these shows. Maybe there is an advantage of a small city like Sydney in the twenties, I am aware of the problems the  American researchers have of dealing with the enormous number of shows in New York and the variety of approaches they took. I have music that has been collected in the time of these theatres by a very astute librarian and has not been tampered with. The only problem is its age. It has been marked by the 20s musicians who used it and from that alone, I have an idea of their performances. I am a Sydneysider plus musician and known people who played for the silents or who knew Sydney in those days. One of my old fans used to play the piano for silents on the Manly Ferry for an ice cream cone. Another had an aunt who was an usherette and was driven up and down George Street in an open-top Model T Ford, dressed up as the girl from The Sheik for the opening of that show. One of my pianists made replacement rolls for Mastertouch, it is all very alive.It became very obvious early on that the collector of this collection knew what he was doing. I have been creating films from original collections for 10 years and have learned about the pitfalls so when I had this time to be serious, I became a miner searching for gold, and I found it. What a collection!“The extraordinary Balaban and Katz library” as Altmann calls the Chicago collection, has 26 thousand scores of theatrical and dance music. Sydney’s Collection is 12.5 thousand scores. It is a little deceptive as far as comparisons go for if little Sydney owned 3 copies of Sam Fox Photoplay vol 4, Balaban and Katz would have owned double or treble of that number to serve the larger area of Chicago. A third of the collection of Balaban and Katz was also dance tunes. The Sydney collection appears to have been purely collected for the silent film, therefore, has much less. The Chicago collection very heavily relied on classical numbers followed by the Photoplay type of collections- as does Sydney. The Chicago collection has a large number of popular numbers and that is what I have from the Bradford collection. The Sydney collection has much less, it was not used I suspect, as a dance library It only has 58 numbers by Irving Berlin, 20 by Ray Henderson, 70 by Walter Donaldson. Knowing the enormous amount of music these people composed plus the number of duplicates needed in a library, I suspect only enough popular copies were bought to serve for the comedy part of the silent films.  The Sydney Collection appears to be just a smaller version of the  Balaban and Katz library with the whole history of the beginning of music and the media unblemished and locked in it.I have included a large number of clips playing music from The State Theatre Collection, listen and watch them. I wanted to show not dusty worn-out pages of music, often with interesting portraits drawn by bored musicians on the back pages, but sound that is vital, exciting, and alive. Music that is deserving to be performed today and often is… just, no one was aware of its existence.In the whole collection, I have only found a very few scores which did not belong such as a Roger and Hammerstein vocal copy of their operetta, State Fair. It was published in 1995 so it is a misfit. Most of the music looks as if it was locked up when the theatrical company went into liquidation. Of course, anything of this size will have glitches. Poor people, it really should have been done by musicians. I found The Lost Chord composed by Kuhl?????  Could only have been composed the Arthur Sullivan, surely Kuhl was the arranger. There is The Light Cavalry Overture composed by Mayhew, not Suppe. Czardas by Donati, not Monti. Crazy. I came to assume titles of well-known pieces were composed by the composers I knew. The   “composers” listed were probably the arrangers. One also could not expect non-musicians to understand the vagaries of transposing instruments, particularly the weird and wonderful ones that turn up on early twentieth-century music, or the fact that a chart would include parts in all sorts of keys and it was necessary to keep an eye out for mixed arrangements in other keys added to the music of a chart. I have learned to keep an eye out and tell the lady at the desk of any problems if I was in the library. Luckily, Petrucci does not seem to have this problem. but it has been set up by musicians.This is not the end for me.