105 Years of Film Music: Part One - The Silent Era
The first part in an ongoing special series on the history of film music
Saturday, January 25, 2014
For over a century, music and movies have been making magic together. Music composed for films grew out of a rich and varied classical tradition, while taking on special attributes of its own. David Garland presents a series of programs on the history of film music. Heard on Movies on the Radio on the last Saturday of each month for the next ten months, the series will cover the styles and innovations in the soundtrack field, decade by decade.
This first program is the one exception to that chronological rhythm, in that it features music from the Silent Era, which spanned from the Lumière Brothers first public film showing in 1895, to the introduction of the "talkies" in 1927. Garland shows that right from the start, movies were inspiring resourceful composers to create music of depth and power.
Featured are the original scores for silent film classics such as "Metropolis," "Nosferatu," "The Birth of a Nation," "Battleship Potemkin," and "The Gold Rush," written by composers such as Camille Saint-Saens, Dimitri Shostakovich, Charlie Chaplin, and others.