“People ask me if I look at the screen,” remarks Dennis Scott. “I say, I always look at the screen, that’s more or less my sheet music.” Reader Contributor Kathleen Sachs talks with Chicago’s silent film accompanists, a tradition lost to its heyday.
Several decades after the metamorphic transition from silent to sound, a 1981 article in theobserved that “a live musician is rarely seen at a movie except as a member of the audience.”
Scott is one of several musicians in and around Chicago for whom live silent film accompaniment is a regular gig. Another in this cadre is Dave Drazin, who accompanies on the piano and has done so at the Gene Siskel Film Center for nearly 40 years, a job he landed quite fortuitously. Warren relies on themes for different parts of the film, a tactic imparted by his “unofficial mentor” Gaylord Carter, a renowned organist, film accompanist, and composer who is credited with having helped revive public interest in silent cinema, leading to its initial renaissance.
“In this part of the country, [we do] the most authentic presentation of silent films, because we can do 35-millimeter. We can also do variable-speed 35-millimeter, which very, very few places can do. If a film is shot at 20 frames per second, we can show it at that speed.” For example, Chicago-based musician Maxx McGathey has recently composed and performed original live scores for Robert Wiene’s 1924 filmA few weekends ago, internationally celebrated musicians Min Xiao-Fen and Rez Abbasi accompanied the 1934 Chinese silent featurefor an event copresented by the Silent Film Society of Chicago at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.
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