Abstract
In November 1928, as synchronized sound film was establishing itself, renowned London cinema musical director (MD) Louis Levy proclaimed in a film trade paper:
It would not be toomuch to say that three-quarters of a musical director’s best work is done in the library. Fifty per cent of his work is in the organizing of his library, and twenty-five in fitting the picture there.1
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Notes
Altman writes about the Balaban and Katz library, which served that company’s many Chicago theaters and comprises about 26,000 items (according to the Chicago Public Library catalogue), and the smaller library of violinist and itinerant small band leader Alvin G. Layton of about 2,000 pieces: Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004): 354–357. Tobias Plebuch mentions Hugo Riesenfeld’s and Ernö Rapée’s from two New York Picture Palaces, but depends mainly on treatises and the marketing categories of publishing companies: in ‘Mysteriosos Demystified: Topical Strategies within and beyond the Silent Cinema’, Journal of Film Music 5/1–2 (2012): 77–92.
Tootell, How to Play the Cinema Organ: A Practical Book by a Practical Player (London: Paxton, [1927]): 71.
Plebuch (‘Mysteriosos Demystified’, 87) describes Ernö Rapée’s cataloguing arrangement for Agitatos in his Encyclopaedia of Music for Pictures (New York: Belwin, 1925) as a three-tiered, mono-hierarchical model of classification, however the ‘third level’ refers to one musical piece listed within what is actually a two-level system; it is a piece of photoplay music by Carl Breil, such as is often divided into several sections. Likewise the four-level system attributed to Edith Lang and George West in their Musical Accompaniment of Moving Pictures: A Practical Manual for Pianists and Organists and an Exposition of the Principles Underlying the Musical Interpretation of Moving Pictures (Boston: Boston Music, 1920) refers to a short list of pieces for suggested purchasing, not a proposal for a cataloguing system (Plebuch, ‘Mysteriosos Demystified’, 86).
George Beynon, Musical Presentation of Motion Pictures (New York: Schirmer, 1921); Lang and West, Musical Accompaniment of Moving Pictures.
T. Scott Buhrman, ‘Photoplays Deluxe’, The American Organist 3/5 (1920): 171–173, quoted in
Gillian Anderson, Music for Silent Films, 1894–1929: A Guide (Washington: Library of Congress, 1988), xxiii.
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© 2014 Julie Brown
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Brown, J. (2014). Organizing a Music Library for Playing to Pictures: Theory vs. Practice in Britain. In: Tieber, C., Windisch, A.K. (eds) The Sounds of Silent Films. Palgrave Studies in Audio-Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410726_2
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