The movie-going experience was very different in 1925 than it is today. Film conventions grew out of the theater, and early film-makers tried to recreate the theater experience on celluloid. Movies then were far more operatic in their design, featuring lavish costumes, enormous sets, and highly dramatic performances.

They also depended on music. Music allows film makers to create subtle nuances of feeling, to reinforce a scene’s emotional impact, to reveal a character’s internal conflicts, and simply to convey ideas that would be far too awkward to write as dialogue. In a world where films were silent, music — performed live — was an integral part of the experience for decades before a voice was heard from the silver screen. After all, going to the movies wouldn’t be very entertaining if the audience sat in the dark surrounded by what would be a deafening silence.

Live musical accompaniment was also a convention adopted from theaters, which for centuries had used incidental music to heighten (or lighten) the mood of their productions. The “modern” tradition of incidental music goes back at least to the 1600s with Rameau and Purcell. Many famous composers found writing theater music quite profitable, and stage producers benefited from the cachet of a big name supplying music. Over the next centuries, such composers as Beethoven, Schubert, Grieg, Faure, and Sibelius all contributed scores to plays; in many cases, their music is all that survives of a play that fell into obscurity.

To showcase their films, then, Hollywood’s studios, which at the time owned their own cinema chains, tried to outshine each other with ever more luxurious movie “palaces,” particularly in larger cities. These theaters accommodated full orchestras that accompanied films from full written scores. 

There was a problem with live accompaniment, though. While projection technology allowed nearly any place, from a barn to a gymnasium to an existing theater, to serve as a cinema, such facilities obviously offered vastly different musical resources. Specifying instrumentation was not practical. 

Also, silent films require nearly constant underscoring, which requires an almost operatic scale of work. As production ramped up, more theaters were built, and films became longer, producers would have had to distribute more and more sets of performance materials across the world, a daunting and expensive proposition.

In lesser theaters and smaller cities, a lone pianist or organist played, often improvising the score according to the plot’s situations. The keyboard player assembled movie scores on the fly from a set book of musical cues that were quickly built up and became somewhat standard. Even today, audiences immediately respond to the archetypal snippets used to underscore a kiss, a lurking villain, and, most famously, a chase.

Sound solved these problems by allowing a single studio orchestra to provide as elaborate a score as was desired. The result was a golden age of film scores written by the likes of Korngold, Rozsa, and Tiomkin.

Though early Hollywood produced its share of epics, like the 1925 version of Ben-Hur, many of the studios’ biggest successes, like today, were comedies. Though the stars often got their starts in Vaudeville, the cream of this crop — Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton — soon discovered and exploited the unique possibilities of film.

When the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, was released in 1927, it featured music: Al Jolson, America’s greatest entertainer of the day, sang. Nevertheless, many contemporary critics considered sound a fad that would never be popular. While sound films could be shown in smaller venues, i.e. without facilities for an orchestra, the critics pointed out that the performance experience for the audience was actually worse — much the way a party with an iPod for music might be worse than one with a live band.

Chaplin was both skeptical and nervous. He wasn’t sure his brand of physical humor would survive the switch to sound. His first two films of the talking era, City Lights and Modern Times, still included no dialogue. Perfectionist that he was, though, he came to use sound as effectively as any film maker. In the 1960s, he even returned to his earlier silent works – including The Circus – and wrote soundtrack scores. He also reworked the opening credits to include a song, “Swing Little Girl,” sung by him. It’s this score that accompanies tonight’s screening.