|
Article published Sunday, March 21, 2004 |
The sounds of silence
An
assortment of musical groups provides live accompaniment to silent films
|
The Kalamazoo group Blue Dahlia
will perform a live soundtrack to The General Saturday at the
Collingwood Arts Center. |
Attention
future college and high school graduates. What color is your parachute? This
spring, have you considered playing a bed pan in front of 85-year-old images of
a dead comedian? Picking a banjo in front of obscure westerns? Whisking a
mixing bowl in time with the churning of a passenger train?
Don't scoff. It's a living.
Before Ken Winokur and his
Alloy Orchestra became pioneers of an odd musical niche, he had to learn the
value of novelty. Years before he met the other members of this Cambridge,
Mass.-based trio, he was living in Paris. He'd played drums but had given it up
for the idea of being a professor. One day a friend asked if he wanted to meet
in the subway and play music for spare change. He told Winokur to bring an
instrument. But all Winokur owned was a frying pan.
It had this great sound,
this ping. He's since lost that pan; he says he tried every frying pan on Earth
looking for a replacement. None has ever sounded quite so sweet. It kills him.
He made a lot of money with that frying pan.
"I made enough to buy
this Moroccan clay drum, in fact. Then I brought it down to the subway and
played it, and guess what? Nobody noticed me. It was the gimmick of a frying
pan that had been useful. Ever since, I've collected found objects and
immediately built them into this huge overhead percussion rack."
The Rack of Junk, he calls
it.
You could call it a gimmick
in the service of another gimmick.
One that comes in handy when
you're imitating the sound of a Civil War engine in Buster Keaton's The
General. Or evoking the clanging of the robots and workers in revolt in
Metropolis, Fritz Lang's 1926 sci-fi classic.
Winokur and his Alloy trio,
for a dozen years now, have been the most sought-after practitioners of a lost
art: They play live accompaniment to silent films, from sound effects to
minimalist Philip Glass-like soundscapes to hurtling French cabaret music.
They've been around long
enough to have influenced the entire genre. They play in Detroit early next
month. But that's not all. By some weird convergence, two additional silent
film bands play Toledo over the next couple of weeks: Blue Dahlia, from
Kalamazoo, Mich., and the Devil Music Ensemble, from Boston (with one member
from Toledo).
We'll get to them in a
minute.
The idea behind each is
about the same: The Alloy set up to one side of a movie screen. Winokur plays
the Rack of Junk; Terry Donohue takes up the accordion and any additional
percussion; Roger Miller, who doubles as leader of the seminal punk legends
Mission of Burma, is on keyboards. They write their own soundtracks, improvise
lightly (or not at all); and largely stay respectful of the film, though not
necessarily tied to the original music of its time.
An Alloy show, particularly
if they're accompanying a fast film like the chugging General, can be a rowdy,
clamorous affair, with Winokur often stealing the show, as he flails away at
box springs and xylophones and, yes, bed pans - sometimes to the chagrin of
silent film purists, who say Alloy overwhelms the movies the group is meant to
accompany.
"Over the last 10 years
it's become very faddy for contemporary music bands to accompany silent
films," said Russ Collins, director of the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor.
On occasion, but not this year because of budget cuts, he hires a symphony to
perform before silent films. "The only downside is when the group is more
concerned with what they do than with serving the film. Symphonies make this
mistake too, by having a big orchestra and a tiny movie screen."
What he likes is that the
Alloy and the bands that have started in their wake are bringing audiences to
silent films that would have otherwise never turn out for a black-and-white
movie, let alone one without a soundtrack.
"Here's how I like to
see it," said Elliot Wilhelm, director of the Detroit Film Theatre at the
Detroit Institute of Arts, which books the Alloy every year. "Part of the
appeal is the film. Part of the appeal is the Alloy. The greater appeal is both
together. They get into the spirit of the film and deliver an experience that
feels new and ahead of its time, even when the film is 80 years old."
Paulo Cherchi Usai, curator
of motion pictures at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., often hires
the Alloy to play Italy's Pordenone Silent Film Festival, where he is
co-director.
He said the audience is
overly familiar with the romantic orchestral scores associated with old movies.
"They feel it's always the same and they're right: it often is. But the
Alloy has brought fresh air to a world thought left to nostalgics. They've done
more than anyone lately to bring an audience to silent films. They've attracted
rock audiences to them. They've drawn the avant garde. The mainstream. Parents
and kids. They give voice to the soul of their machines, and by doing that,
they've given voice to no less than the soul of cinema."
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Silent movie people talk like
that. Which is why some of these modern silent film bands are so perfect for
the job of accompanying silent films: They don't talk like that. They don't
regard silent film as a museum piece or even speak with particular reverence.
Each is more of a cultural
Dr. Frankenstein of sorts, digging up a past long since buried and assembling
something new: the only difference between them, you could say, is how much
voltage they use to wake the dead.
"You can't say there's
ripping off going on with any these bands," Winokur said. "Certainly
there was a time our weird little niche was a lot less crowded than it is now.
That's not the case anymore, and yet what's really incredible is how all these
bands have developed their own style."
The music they play is hard
to define. There's no singular tradition to draw from and only the broadest of
similarities to link them. Some use the dying whine of a doggy chew toy. Others
have no problem tossing in a riff of the Violent Femmes. Blue Dahlia is unique
in that they include vocals, sometimes tangos. Other groups prefer accordions,
or the classical strings of the proper period from which the film comes.
Electric guitar, bedpan,
flute, doorbell, synthesizer, turntable, violin, saxophone, kettle drum,
vibraphone, banjo, lap steel guitar, trumpet, tape loop, gong, mandolin,
hubcap, typewriter.
If it makes noise, it's in.
"I'm pretty sure
everything we're doing is a no-no to silent movie purists," said Leslie
Boughton of Blue Dahlia, performing Saturday at the Collingwood Art Center.
"These people do not think there should be electric guitars playing with
Buster Keaton. They'd have a problem with my playing the typewriter, too. If
you want to be old school about it, they're right. But we're from the new
school."
Even within that new school,
there are divisions. Boughton says the Alloy scoff at their use of vocals. She
thinks they're sort of old school. Meanwhile the Alloy see their highly
percussive soundtracks as completely modern. "You could say we distract
from the image on the screen," Winokur said. "I wouldn't even
disagree. If you see film as a sacred trust, what we do could bug you. I see it
as entertainment."
Jonah Rapino, of the Devil
Music Ensemble, grew up in the Old West End in Toledo. He studied classical
music at Boston University, plays electric violin and vibraphone, and remembers
seeing the Alloy perform Metropolis at the Coolidge Corner Theater in
Brookline, Mass, where the group got its start.
"It blew me away,"
he said. "When the Devil Music Ensemble first played in front of a film it
was definitely an inspiration. We just improvised. I can't remember a note of
what we played."
Devil Music play modern
classical. Sort of. They've performed pieces by composers like John Adams and
Elliot Schwartz, written and performed original works for 125-piece orchestras.
They also play techno, avant garde rock, a little bit of European folk music.
"One day we just decided to try country music." So they found an
obscure 1922 western called The Big Stakes. "Today's audience factors in a
lot. We needed a movie that moved, that was fast paced enough. When you're
scoring a silent film live in front of an audience, the less dialogue there is,
the fewer close-ups on facial expressions there are, the better."
The Devil Music Ensemble
accompany Big Stakes at the Cla-Zel Theater in Bowling Green on April 5; two
days earlier, at the Ohio Theater in Toledo, they go avant garde for the 1919
German expressionistic horror classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
"There is still a
perception silent film music is ragtime or played on an organ or played by an
orchestra," Boughton said.
"We want to bust
through. Even the Alloy have this score for [the 1928 Harold Lloyd comedy]
Speedy that sounds very 'Rhapsody in Blue.' We're far more likely to reference
in Gang of Four or some Japanese song."
Makes sense: The first time
she heard contemporary music accompany a silent film it was on her first date
with her husband, who plays guitar in Blue Dahlia. "We watched a Buster
Keaton movie and he turned the sound off and put on a U2 record and it just
worked amazingly."
As for the true old school,
it does exist: The Club Foot Orchestra of San Francisco, who were performing in
front of silent films a decade before Alloy, have a cabaret-ish, turn-of-the-century
show more typical of music from the silent era (though not movie theater
orchestras of the era). Gillian Anderson, a music scholar formerly of the
Library of Congress, reconstructs the original scores of Charlie Chaplin and
Lillian Gish films and hires orchestras to perform them.
Then there's the U.K.-based
Cinematic Orchestra. They're not old school. They see groups like the Alloy and
Club Foot as hopelessly mired in the past - they opt for electronic scores,
full of trance beats, turntable mixing, scratching, sound loops.
The catch is, silent movies
were never really silent. Before 1927, before Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer,
the first talking film, brought a halt to the silent era, the movie theater was
"more like a collaboration of theater people," said Martin Marks,
author of a number of books about silent film music and professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Scores circulated around to
different movie houses, and the big movies would tour with their own
orchestras."
Huge theaters in large
cities had 50-piece symphonies. Smaller theaters had five to 10-piece
orchestras. Sometimes trios. Even the smallest movie house had a piano player;
and the largest, because of union rules, would cut back to an organ or a piano
for a couple hours a day.
Rapino still feels that
tradition, in a perverse way. "There are those places that are surprised
by us. They think we're supposed to be playing an organ. But I think we've
found this really unique way for our music to reach a larger audience. How many
people would go to an ambient music concert if there wasn't a visual aspect? We
can be very avant garde this way and it still gets appreciated. Our Toledo show
is kind of funny: When we talked to the Ohio Theater, they were really nice and
responsive, and yet I know if I were suggesting we play our music without a
movie screen behind us, we'd most definitely be shot down."
The Devil Music Ensemble
performs three area shows: Saturday, April 3: "The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari" at 8 p.m. at the Ohio Theatre, 3114 Lagrange St. Tickets are
$8-$10. Information: 419-241-6785; Sunday, April 4: "The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari" at 4 p.m. at the Madstone Theater at the Briarwood Mall, on
State Street in Ann Arbor. Tickets are $10. Information: 734-994-1000; Monday, April
5: "The Big Stakes" at 7 p.m. at the Cla-Zel Theater, 127 N. Main
Street, Bowling Green. Tickets are $8.
Blue Dahlia perform its live
soundtrack to "The General" on Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Collingwood
Arts Center, 2413 Collingwood Blvd. Tickets are $7. Information: 419-244-2787.
The Alloy Orchestra play
four shows at the Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200
Woodward Ave., April 9-11. April 9, 7:30 p.m.: "The General." April
10, 7:30 p.m.: "Dans La Nuit." April 11: "The General" at 3
p.m., "Speedy" at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10. Information: 313-833-3237
or www.dia.org/dft.
Contact Christopher
Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com or 419-724-6117