1896 – 1926
The Musicin the Dark
Silent film was never silent.
Almost no silent picture had a score of its own. The studio sent out a cue sheet naming pieces by mood, and the pit orchestra or the house organist pulled them from a published photoplay library — Rapée’s Motion Picture Moods, the Sam Fox and Schirmer series, Zamecnik’s cues to order. So the music survives on shellac under its own title, filed by feeling: a hurry, a misterioso, a love theme, a storm. This room puts it back in the order a leader would have kept it, so you can hear the film music of the period as it was actually played rather than as it is re-scored today.
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Pit & cue sides held
12
Shelves in the library
Period pressings
Original discs only, public domain
Call for a cue
Music sold expressly for the picture house
The Photoplay Library
The trade published music that existed only to be played under film. Erno Rapée's Motion Picture Moods indexed pieces by feeling; Sam Fox and Schirmer issued whole graded series; J.S. Zamecnik wrote cues to order. A pit leader bought the library, not the score.
How the music got into the theatre
The cue sheet
Shipped with the reels: a timed list of scenes with a suggested piece for each, down to the bar. The music itself was the theatre’s problem.
The library
A house bought a graded photoplay set and filed it by mood. Hurries were numbered so a leader could call one over the noise of the projector.
The player
A full pit in a palace, a single organist on a Wurlitzer Unit Orchestra in a neighbourhood house, a pianist improvising in a small town.
A note on rights: the compositions here are public domain, but a modern performance of a 1915 score is not. Everything on these shelves is a genuine period pressing from the 1896–1926 window — no recent re-recordings.