State Theatre Collection during Covid Part 2 The Early Days

Cosens Spencer and T.J. West. Spencer opened the Great American Theatrescope in Sydney in 1905 and started gathering music at that time. If the collection is complete, I would expect some music of that age, the difficulty is that it tends to disintegrate if it has been heavily used and is very old. The Gilbert and Sullivan numbers which would have been performed then, obviously have been replaced over the time of the collection. They are eternal and still popular today. I  expected to find an occasional Music Hall song, which was popular in this time and Sydney was a British colony with deeply British roots.  I know many of them well, my grandmother loved going to a music hall near Paddington and sang them to my mother who then sang them to me. I thought they were nursery rhymes. I expected  to find “My old man said follow the van” or “Waiting at the Church” in the collection. Our current pianist for The Silent Picture Show runs a series of concerts based on the Music Hall idea called The Good Old Days, thus keeping up the tradition.None in the State Theatre Collection but they are all there in the normal part of the NLA.Parlour music was a different tale. With the publication of music  amateur performance exploded. A piano was in every house, if you could not play, you bought a pianola.  The song Just a Song at Twilight is found in the State Theatre Collection…. I could sing all of that song at about four years old  as it was an enormous favourite with my family.  This music might be aimed basically for amateurs, but there they all are in the State Collection.  The Lost Chord, The Rosary, I Love You Truly, plus many more. The Bradford collection, although I only own hundreds of charts, not thousands, were surprisingly different and they did have some Music Hall ones like Maggie, Two Little Girls in Blue  although maybe they more belong to the parlour  Here is Vesta Victoria performing Waiting at the Church at the beginning of the Silent Film era. According to Rick Altman’s book “Silent Film Sound”, the visuals variously accompanied a vocal performance or singalong according to the exhibitor. The film contains a pause, curtain call and encore of the chorus, with an extra visual gag coming at the end. The song “Waiting at the Church” was the basis for a comedy narrative film in 1906. Vesta Victoria was a very successful Music Hall performer at the turn of the century. This film was probably used as part of a Vaudeville Show, the real beginning of the silent era.In some ways analogous to music hall from Victorian Britain, was The Vaudeville. A typical North American vaudeville performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill. Types of acts have included popular and classical musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians, ventriloquists, strongmen, female and male impersonators, acrobats, clowns, illustrated songs etc. This was where many Silent Screen Actors began their careers.  Buster Keaton began as a baby and was named Buster by the stage magician Harry Houdini.    After the Ball became the most successful song of its era, which at that time was gauged by the sales of sheet music. In 1892, it sold over two million copies of sheet music. Its total sheet music sales exceed five million copies, making it the best seller in Tin Pan Alley’s history. NLA has a copy but not State Theatre  Collection. This song was the birth of popular music. From then all popular songs were published, recorded, put onto player piano rolls and sung. My Bradford Collection has an enormous number of these, British, American and even some French popular songs from this era all arranged for theatre orchestra as foxtrots. The State theatre tends to have just the songs composed by well known composers such as Gershwin, Berlin, Donaldson, Woods etc. To my surprise, it did not even contain Alexander’s Rag by Berlin and published in 1911. This was the time of the early silent films in Australia which often used popular tunes like this to accompany them. Possibly at this time the people were not yet forming a serious collection.Below is a Magic Lantern Slide illustrated song that belonged to the Marnan collection of slides. This was a way for music publishers to introduce their newest songs to the public. Each slide was individually hand coloured. The singer would sing the two verses and choruses and then the lyrics were  projected on the screen and the audience would join in with the last chorus. Short silent films produced  would be screened between the illustrated songs, to create an Electric Nickelodeon. I own copies of a number of these owned by the  Paramount Theatre South Hurstville. This combination of film and sing a long became  America’s Nickelodeon and part of our vaudeville shows. The beginning of the moving picture shows. As I said, The State Theatre Collection has very few of these popular early songs.  This has posed a problem on occasions. We are showing Speedy shortly with Harold Lloyd next year and features a baseball game starring Babe Ruth. Of course as a signature theme we would like to play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” the State collection does not have it although it does appear in the main NLA. There is missing  some very American pieces such as all compositions by Stephen Foster  – the father of American music. On second thought, maybe the absence of Stephen Foster was because his music was linked with the blackface minstrel shows  in burlesque and therefore not appropriate as part of this collection. Still the company that owned it was called the Great American Theatrescope, and music published in America fills out the bulk of it. There is enormous collections of American music including a large number of Sousa Marches with The Stars and Stripes and all the major jazz composers. Most major classical composers are also represented with their work edited and published in America. However, all though it has Stars and Stripes, it is totally missing the British equivalent, Pomp and Circumstance. A lot of American libraries miss this one, which makes sense, but in Australia?At this time rags were very popular so as you expect there are large numbers in the collection.  At least with my shows, all of these pieces are represented by early ads I show accompanied by the player piano playing from the enormous collection created by the Mastertouch Pianola Roll company in Petersham Sydney. We have been very lucky to have Glen Amer as one of our pianists as another of his tasks was to play for Mastertouch to create replacement rolls. Both my pianists are not only brilliant performers but expert in the music of this era.Before the time when the Theatre Orchestra took over, here is a pianola playing the Black and White Rag with all the sound effects loved by Vaudeville audiences Another rag on an even more elaborate machine.