courtesy photo by Lorenzo Burlando
by Chance Solem-Pfeifer
Donald Sosin has already written a theme song to Alfred Hitchcock’s Champagne (1926), one of the pair of silent films he will live-score tonight at Film Streams.
But he can’t find the lyrics anywhere. He remembers they say something about champagne, and they’re floating somewhere around his Connecticut home. And yet it doesn’t seem to matter. Via phone Wednesday morning, he doesn’t sound worried or particularly interested in scouring his house for them.
Across a four-decade career scoring silent film, it’s a safe bet Sosin has played a given film before and a safe bet he won’t do it exactly the same way twice. Working in a culture of century-old films that are damaged, repurposed and sometimes misplaced forever, loss and reimagining is the lay of the territory.
“I might just let it go and play without annoying people with my singing,” Sosin jokes about accompanying Champagne in Omaha tonight.
When the professional composer and pianist scores a double feature of Champagne and Pleasure Garden (1926) tonight at 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. as part of Film Streams’ The Hitchcock 9 series, he estimates fluidity and being in the moment will be crucial to the experience. Previously, Sosin has been known to improvise entire scores, working on the tone of the movie as it comes at him. And while he says he also hasn’t revisited the recording of his Pleasure Garden score, that he performed at Harvard last year, there will be something of a plan for tonight’s work. Nothing too binding though.
“I tend not to repeat myself. When I’m recording a score for a DVD, I have things down to the frame. I just made the decision early on that since I’m a composer I was going to compose.”
Watching the film and being engaged with it is the baseline for Sosin’s job, sometimes with his wife, Joanna Seaton, who provides vocal accompaniment to his piano playing. He says that what they do is “part detective work and part invention.” They’ve gone so far as to hire professional lip readers if an actor is singing on screen and they want to be able to perform that vocal number. In the past, when lip readers have come up empty, they perform their best guesswork.
But even the most rigid details and investigations can be wholly undone by the variance in these films. If he were to tap into original scores for pieces, what happens if the print for a given screening is slightly different than the one to which he wrote? Or what if the score was written for a different frame rate? It’s like shifting puzzle pieces across an artistic landscape that has corroded and been rebuilt over a hundred years.
Sosin describes a particularly nightmarish experience when he and a full band had arranged recorded musical cues for a film in which a gramophone appeared on screen five times. But when the film continually froze, their cues became useless, even a hindrance to staying with the flow of the piece.
“Those things cause a great deal of problems for musicians who aren’t playing on the fly,” he says. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to throw out what’s in front of me and just play to what’s on the screen.”
Looking down The Hitchcock 9 roster, Sosin is almost certainly the most accomplished composer at the specific task at hand, having performed silent film scores since accompanying The Phantom of the Opera on a lark during his college years. He has lived by the artistic virtues that people like Ben Brodin and Dan McCarthy have articulated relatively recently about their Hitchcock 9 experience, namely that Alfred Hitchcock is the star of the Thursday night series, not Donald Sosin.
“When you watch contemporary films,” Sosin asks, “how often do you notice the music? When you’re watching the film cold, you’re so immersed in that story that you don't really pay attention to the music. I think music works best when it doesn’t deliberately call attention to itself. Music should support the action and thruline of the film to guide the audience and tell them, ‘This is how we’d like you to be feeling at this moment.’”
He might be considered a classicist for expressing it, but Sosin also finds a musical faithfulness to the context of the film important. With the uptake of series like The Hitchcock 9 nationally with the inclusion of non-classical musicians, he says he’s wary of artists who prioritize themselves out front of what’s on the screen.
“I’ll be really honest and say we are not fans of ambient scores and people [who] write music that is so out of the period of the film. Probably not in Omaha, but there are rock groups that find a silent film and put on music they’re writing and turn the film into a music video. There are a lot of people doing that these days. Most of the audiences we talk to don’t like that. It doesn’t haven’t anything to do with the film except that the two things are happening simultaneously.”
More broadly, Sosin is enthused by the proliferation of silent film and live-scoring opportunities around the world. He says there are more people studying work from the 1910s and 1920s academically and the distribution of higher quality prints have aided a comeback in recent years. As for whether the survival of these films makes sense in the context of the spaces directors were working in 100 years ago, prognostications about the legacy of these pieces come off as both quaint and hardy.
“[D.W.] Griffith predicted — he had no idea sound film was going to happen — that in 100 years the greatest composers would be writing silent film music,” Sosin says. “When I started in the early ‘70s almost nobody was doing this outside of retrospectives in major cities on the coast. But film has that ability to transcend its era. We may find these films survive and when the human race is disappeared from Earth that they’re still being beamed to the Andromeda Galaxy once we’ve all moved there.”
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s managing editor. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.