Play­ing with ghosts: live scor­ing silent cinema

The lights go down and the audi­ence suc­cumbs to the auditorium’s qui­et. Activ­i­ty set­tles in antic­i­pa­tion as the famil­iar title card ​‘Our Fea­ture Pre­sen­ta­tion’ appears onscreen. I am used to nestling back in my cen­tre-mid­dle seat but on this occa­sion, I am stand­ing at the front of the cin­e­ma, stage right of the screen beside an upright piano which is gut­ted to reveal its insides. I lift my vio­la, touch­ing the bow down on the strings as the film begins.

For the last year, I have been impro­vis­ing scores for silent films on vio­la at London’s Prince Charles Cin­e­ma. My first per­for­mance took place in Oxford on Hal­loween 2022. I had not seen F. W. Murnau’s Nos­fer­atu for over ten years and was aston­ished to dis­cov­er in this intense view­ing sce­nario how vivid­ly I remem­bered the com­po­si­tion of every frame, the way in which each sequence unrav­els towards the film’s trag­ic res­o­lu­tion. Murnau’s vir­tu­os­i­ty as a film­mak­er might be more appar­ent in lat­er works such as Der Let­zte Mann, Faust or Sun­rise, but there is some­thing sin­gu­lar­ly unnerv­ing about the ear­li­er film’s doomed atmos­phere and Max Schreck’s per­for­mance as Count Orlock, inspired by Bram Stoker’s ​‘Drac­u­la’.

With their nefar­i­ous cus­toms and absence of a reflec­tion, vam­pires have become sym­bols of oth­er­ness, crea­tures onto which any­thing can be paint­ed. It is dif­fi­cult to ignore the anti­se­mit­ic stereo­types present in Schreck’s por­tray­al drawn from Stoker’s source nov­el, whether intend­ed as being iron­ic or gen­uine­ly hor­rif­ic. When con­tem­plat­ing the film now, I won­der how much Mur­nau, a gay man whose Jew­ish part­ner Hans Ehren­baum-Degele was killed on the East­ern Front in 1915, appro­pri­ates these stereo­types through hor­ror and humour (“Your wife has a love­ly neck”) in light of pre­vail­ing anti­semitism and homo­pho­bia. Musi­cal impro­vi­sa­tion has become a pro­duc­tive method to explore this fur­ther, think­ing through making.

Impro­vi­sa­tion has always allowed me to ger­mi­nate ideas across dif­fer­ent medi­ums, inves­ti­gate sound pro­duc­tion on my instru­ment and hone my craft with­out ten­sion or fear in per­for­mance. Any expres­sive ges­ture can be embell­ished into a motivic device for the­mat­ic devel­op­ment: in the case of sound­track­ing silent films, these are ​‘leit­mo­tifs’ or character’s themes which evolve with them on their jour­ney, inspired by the cue sheets once dis­trib­uted with film prints.

This craft resem­bles the­atri­cal per­for­mance as I attempt to embody the expe­ri­ence of each char­ac­ter, respond­ing to the events of an unveil­ing nar­ra­tive in their man­ner­isms. Every time I sound­track a film I won­der if the char­ac­ters onscreen might react spon­ta­neous­ly, alter­ing their fate. It is a deeply per­son­al process, phys­i­cal­ly demand­ing over the course of a fea­ture film’s dura­tion and a pro­duc­tive method of sus­tain­ing cre­ative inten­tion. It also requires a sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty akin to adher­ing to the desires of a com­pos­er, in this case being in ser­vice of a film and the lives of its characters.

Impro­vis­ing to Nos­fer­atu inspired me to devel­op a musi­cal lan­guage that enters into a con­ver­sa­tion with films from this era. The dis­tinc­tive char­ac­ter and yearn­ing melod­ic tone of the vio­la embody the height­ened lives of char­ac­ters in the Ger­man Expres­sion­ist silent films on which I have been focussing. The fragili­ty of this instru­ment, a cof­fin-like box with attached strings held in per­pet­u­al ten­sion, promis­es a mate­r­i­al encounter akin to that of cel­lu­loid pass­ing through the gate of a pro­jec­tor. Adding a score to these works mate­ri­alis­es the action of a scene, draw­ing it into the present for con­tem­po­rary audi­ences and embell­ish­ing the pure­ly abstract nature of these sound­less films.

Klezmer music has influ­enced my approach to impro­visato­ry play, employ­ing folk tech­niques to draw out the dance-like qual­i­ty of motion onscreen, and my expe­ri­ences as a cham­ber musi­cian have also impact­ed my atti­tude towards musi­cal inter­pre­ta­tion. Nos­fer­atu is a sym­bol­ic mate­ri­al­i­sa­tion of the ​‘ene­my alien’, a term which was used to label my great-grand­par­ents when interned in pris­on­er-of-war camps in the Unit­ed King­dom after flee­ing anti-Jew­ish vio­lence in Vien­na in 1938. Arnold Schoen­berg, the found­ing mem­ber of the Sec­ond Vien­nese School of Com­posers, fled to the Unit­ed States from Berlin for sim­i­lar rea­sons in 1933.

Writ­ten between 1897 and 1936, the angu­lar har­mon­ic lan­guage of Schoenberg’s String Quar­tets, at once aggres­sive, intense­ly pas­sion­ate and ten­der, seem to evoke the paint­ed shad­ows that pen­e­trate the sets of Robert Wiene’s The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari. Musi­cal com­po­si­tion­al tech­niques derived from these quar­tets inform my struc­tur­al approach to devel­op­ing motivic mate­r­i­al over the course of a fea­ture film from the same era. Whilst per­form­ing, I am always excit­ed to uncov­er details of a film through the unex­pect­ed inter­play of per­son­al ref­er­ences, recon­sid­ered for each film I accompany.

It is thrilling to con­nect with peo­ple of all ages who have jour­neyed to watch these hun­dred-year-old works pro­ject­ed on the big screen. When chat­ting with audi­ence mem­bers after a screen­ing I always won­der about the dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ments in which they might have first encoun­tered these films accom­pa­nied by a diverse range of musi­cal inter­pre­ta­tions. With ori­gins in lit­er­a­ture, poet­ry, the­atre and sym­phon­ic forms, silent film gen­er­ous­ly extends beyond the realm of the cin­e­ma audi­to­ri­um. I feel that it is nec­es­sary to blend con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal music per­for­mance with mov­ing images at a time when the live expe­ri­ence of both medi­ums has been chal­lenged. Great efforts have been made to broad­en the demo­graph­ic of clas­si­cal music con­cert­go­ers to lit­tle avail and online stream­ing has impact­ed the ded­i­ca­tion of cin­e­ma atten­dees. It is fan­tas­tic that film has become more acces­si­ble but it would be a great loss if such col­lec­tive cul­tur­al expe­ri­ences dis­ap­peared alto­geth­er. The ​‘event’ screen­ing has gar­nered refreshed inter­est post-pan­dem­ic with the suc­cess of films shown on cel­lu­loid and var­ied pro­grammes curat­ed by reper­to­ry cin­e­mas engage with film’s youth­ful his­to­ry and ques­tion its future.

Watch­ing silent films over and over in prepa­ra­tion for upcom­ing shows, I notice the sub­tle behav­iours of actors onscreen beyond the main direc­tion of a scene: details which might reveal some­thing of their inner life. As no one on screen is still alive, I feel it is appro­pri­ate to accom­pa­ny their actions with an instru­ment made in their life­time. Live impro­vi­sa­tion pro­vides those onscreen with a voice and new life which is extin­guished almost as soon as it is realised, reveal­ing the beau­ti­ful neces­si­ty and des­per­ate futil­i­ty of play­ing with ghosts.