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johnboles wrote:Make the comparison for yourself. Here is a clip from "Cobra" 1925. The first time the clip is played
you will be hearing an excerpt from the soundtrack recorded in 1928 for "A Woman Of Affairs".
The second time the clip is played you will hear the "Mont Alto Orchestra" with a single off key violin playing as issued on DVD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns7Uy7kmlio
Donald Binks wrote:johnboles wrote:Make the comparison for yourself. Here is a clip from "Cobra" 1925. The first time the clip is played
you will be hearing an excerpt from the soundtrack recorded in 1928 for "A Woman Of Affairs".
The second time the clip is played you will hear the "Mont Alto Orchestra" with a single off key violin playing as issued on DVD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns7Uy7kmlio
Rodney, I would be speaking to my solicitor with a view to pressing a suit for libel - or at the very least, an infringement of copyright.
As a violin solo piece by a violin soloist, thank goodness we didn't use a whole string section. It would have been syrupy as hell.
Rodney wrote:And as I suspected, your orchestra is not an authentic silent film orchestra at all. It's a 1928 recording studio orchestra playing music that was never played live in a movie theater. It's a fine sound, but it was never part of the repertoire of silent film orchestras (it was arranged for this orchestra specifically, as you can tell by the harp; custom arrangements were a luxury that few actual silent film orchestras would have had time for). Combined with the very tinny mono recording (as opposed to the rich live sound you'd get with live musicians, which we attempt to recreate with modern stereo recording) that is not an accurate sound for anything prior to the invention of sound tracks in 1928. Woman of Affairs Is really an early talkie score, it's just on a film that was made using silent techniques.
Your titles complain about the presence of a trumpet in the Mont Alto section, but that's just another joke at your expense: Cobra was a fairly low budget project, so I didn't use trumpet at all. A trumpet is accidentally listed in the credits, but that was an error on the part of the DVD producers, who used the credits for Destiny by mistake. So, on the other thread, when I suspected that you couldn't distinguish a cornet from a trumpet, I was seriously overestimating your abilities: you can't even tell a trumpet from no trumpet at all. You might update your title cards.
The musical selections played by Mont Alto is not "modern music garbage," but starts with the "Raindrop" Prelude written by Chopin in 1838. It's often considered a masterpiece of composition. Originally composed for piano, various orchestrations were available to silent film orchestras, but this one I arranged from the partial piano transcription in Erno Rapée's 1925 book "Motion Picture Moods." Which was written, of course, as a repertoire for silent film musicians. It was a popular book, so this piece (unlike the Woman of Affairs excerpt) was used in actual silent film theaters for actual silent film scores.
The second piece is nice -- thanks for reminding me of it. It's called "Thoughts, No. 35," the number because it was the 35th piece in Berg's Incidental Series, a set of pieces written specifically for silent film orchestras, as you can tell by the picture of the movie projector at the top of the page. Composed by the concert violinist Valentina Crespi and published in 1918, it was available to all theater orchestras when Cobra was being shown, and was doubtless heard in many actual silent movie theaters. As a violin solo piece by a violin soloist, thank goodness we didn't use a whole string section. It would have been syrupy as hell.
I have no big problem with using the 1928 score to A Woman of Affairs for Cobra, but I also like Carl Davis' work, and Stephen Horne's work, and many other out-of-the-decade-the-film-was-made musicians too. And I realize that you despise everything we've done because it doesn't sound like a 1928 goat-gland picture. But to label a 1928 non-silent film score as "authentic," and the Mont Alto's actual silent film music "Modern Music Garbage" is just plain ignorant.
Oh, and there's a clarinet in The Woman of Affairs sound track, so that one is not even authentic by the criteria of your title cards. And a lot of that audio sample is actually a violin solo, not a whole string section. You might want to update the cards. And then listen to a scene that actually calls for trumpet, for instance any of the battles in Wings, or a chase scene, or a fire, or a flood, or the score to a comedy like Spite Marriage, and you'll hear plenty of trumpets, even in your authentic (though non-silent film) orchestra sound tracks.
johnboles wrote:Your quote about string sections being "syrupy as hell" says everything. Silent movie music is supposed to be romantic, elegant and "syrupy" The fact that you try to avoid that and think that sentimental music is bad shows how out of touch you are with the decade. Have you tried listening to recorded music from the period.
Everyone in the 1920's was listening to the Charleston, in your world, and the men all wore raccoon coats and the women had those funny head bands.![]()
Rodney wrote:johnboles wrote:Your quote about string sections being "syrupy as hell" says everything. Silent movie music is supposed to be romantic, elegant and "syrupy" The fact that you try to avoid that and think that sentimental music is bad shows how out of touch you are with the decade. Have you tried listening to recorded music from the period.
Of course, I said nothing of the kind. We use sentimental music in every single score. I said that the piece Thoughts, by Valentina Crespi, would be syrupy as hell with full strings, and I stand by that statement. I also say that I love the piece, and it is plenty emotional enough for that scene the way we played it. We are not trying to be the Victor Orchestra, nor would I want to be. We are recreating one relatively common version of the myriads of small ensembles, playing chamber style with no conductor, that played a vast repertoire that is to this date largely unrecorded. There are virtually no historic audio recordings of the kind of ensembles we are reviving (though there's plenty of documentation that they existed and were almost ubiquitous), but they certainly would have sounded nothing like the Victor Orchestra.
It's clear now that your claim of our "inauthenticity" was just a way to say you don't care for the way we play this music, though it appeared to be a mistaken belief that we don't actually use authentic source music. I can assure you, you wouldn't have liked the music in an actual 1920s movie theater either.
As for this:Everyone in the 1920's was listening to the Charleston, in your world, and the men all wore raccoon coats and the women had those funny head bands.![]()
To paraphrase Woody Allen, "You know nothing of my work."
It's clear that you are not learning anything from the useful information that is being posted in response to your bizarre and fact-free tirades. (Can you at least admit now that many silent film orchestras used clarinets and trumpets, having seen ample photos and historical documentation? Or is this a climate-change-denial, no-amount-of-evidence-will-ever-shift-my-rock-of-faith sort of deal for you?)
It is also clear that although you love the sound of large orchestras of the early talkie era, you have nothing useful or informed to teach anyone here about silent film music as played in movie theaters. And on top of it, you've been unnecessarily dickish in every single post. Good day. I'm done.
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