State Theatre Collection During COVID part 4. Difficulties

Like opera pieces, popular classics were arranged in segments each segment marked by a double bar. The orchestra was told to repeat until title appears then segue. One notable reduction instead of just having the title of the work, labelled itself as pot pourri. Appropriate. Once a famous NY theatre was accused of repeating one section 25 times before moving on. No, Bernard, we have not quite done that. It was possible to segue from any marked section in a piece to any other section so action on the screen could easily be followed by the music.This was the time of reducing a classical piece of music to a recognizable melody, reducing the difficulty level of composition, and putting all music in related keys so the music can move smoothly from section to section. To produce saleable music, the music should produce crystal clear communication between the film and the audience.   One well-known person of this time Erno Rapee, collected music that could be used for various moods and eventually in the late twenties, published it as An Encyclopaedia of Music for Pictures. Yes, a version is at the NLA but not in the State Collection. This was the beginning of music we now call hackneyed. See the next section. One has to remember that a lot of music we feel now is rather tired, was exciting and new one hundred years ago. The Nutcracker Ballet was debuted in 1892 Wagner operas up to 1880s  Debussy’s Clair de Lune 1905. Then this was all fresh, exciting, and new, maybe not now.With the reduction of scores so melodies that are known can be used, comes real problems. Wagner used immense orchestras Here is the Ride of the Valkyries played at a  British Prom Concert. Just look at the line of trombones. It loses a tremendous amount by being squeezed into a theatre orchestra as the State Theatre had. Musicians were asked to sight-read ridiculously difficult music. Like my show, they seemed to work on one rehearsal before a show. It was up to the conductor to get the show all together. It was an impossibility despite one arranger stating  “You will find our arrangements simple and offer no difficulties to your pianists”  No. I have gone through many of the arrangements in the State Theatre Collection, particularly compositions by Liszt. He writes notoriously difficult piano music how much could it be simplified? Not much looking at his Hungarian Rhapsody No2.  which I know is fiendish. Despite its difficulty, it has gone into the general culture in part through the cartoons. An early musician who created music for silents was Carl Stallin who was a silent film musician who brought his skills to cartoons, in particular Bugs Bunny. Who can forget Rhapsody Rabbit playing the Hungarian Rhapsody or Tom and Jerry or Micky Mouse? Yes, it is fiendishly difficult and a theatre orchestra version is owned by The State Theatre Collection. I copied it just to look at it. Performed after one rehearsal?  No, as brilliant as our pianists tend to be, I will not produce it.it is too cruel.  Its popularity started in the silents, look at the clip below shows how far it went, all the way to The Simpsons and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The theatres were trying to increase the prestige of the silent film shows away from the music hall and vaudeville. It had to be classy so no longer for a while, was the popular used. Orchestras became bigger to the point where they were taking all the professional musicians who played for classical concerts. A quiet almost reverential audience was looked for, so large classical pieces of music were used where possible. Problems arose like one I found in the State Theatre Collection where to facilitate the movement of the music to the next selection, the very well-known Rachmaninov Prelude in C# Minor was transposed to C Minor. It would have made an easier transposition to the next piece of music but my pianist just laughed.Ridiculous choices of music were made to show off the orchestra. Long overtures and full movements of symphonies, they no longer were trying to fit the music to the screen. I was intrigued by the inclusion of The Overture to Undine, all the Wagnerian overtures to his operas, and one called Brittania,  A Nautical Overture all of which I would have thought to be too dense as “background” music to a film. Performing a thirty to forty-minute musical work unedited cannot do much for the mood of the audience. There are large numbers of this type of full orchestral works in the library even including Scheherezade. I foolishly thought the opening of this might be a good idea for a show but did not warn my violinist at the time about the solo introduction. I imagined she knew it and it was the early days of The Moving Picture Show  The score was cut down but certainly not simplified. I learned.  The music had to change and with this enormous learning curve in action, the shows changed.