I’m delighted to announce that SFSMA will be working with the American Music Research Center (AMRC) at the University of Colorado Boulder and the CU Libraries to digitize the Grauman Theatre Scores Collection and its 3,854 scores available online. This work is supported by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. As the AMRC digitizes and uploads pieces, SFSMA will create links to those works, thus helping SFSMA users find items in the CU online collection. I’ll post more details about this partnership as the project gets underway.

CU’s Press release (read original here):

AMRC to Preserve Grauman Film Score Collection
by Charles Wofford

Between 1900 and 1929, when Sid Grauman ran silent films with live orchestral accompaniment in his Hollywood “movie palaces,” he probably never imagined that the thousands of orchestral scores used by his musicians would be recognized as important Americana in their own right. A century later—with a $116,916 grant from the  (NHPRC)—the University of Colorado Boulder’s American Music Research Center (AMRC) is creating a comprehensive digital archive of the Grauman Theatre Scores Collection.

In collaboration with CU Libraries and the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive, the 3,854 scores of the collection will be digitized in multiple high-resolution, full-color formats and made available online at no charge to the public. An additional 192,700 preservation images will help preserve the particularities of the scores, such as handwritten markings from musicians and conductors. “[The Grauman Silent Film Scores Collection] is one of the most important collections anywhere,” says AMRC Director and Professor of Musicology Susan Thomas. “Because of the Grauman Theatre’s centrality in Los Angeles and U.S. film history, these scores can be considered foundational documents—not only for the cultural history of the United States, but also for the sonic construction of U.S. identity in the 20th century.”

The musical representations found in the Grauman collection inspired film composers of the following generation, such as Max Steiner and Alfred Newman; they, in turn, influenced famous film composers from Jerry Goldsmith and Henry Mancini to today’s superstars, including John Williams, Hans Zimmer and others. The collection was donated to the AMRC in 2019 by Rodney Sauer. A pianist, accordionist and director of the Monto Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, Sauer drove the roughly 5,000 pounds of sheet music from Los Angeles to his Louisville, Colorado, home in 2013, narrowly averting catastrophe in the 2013 Boulder County floods. “I want to use this music, I don’t necessarily want to own it,” Sauer previously stated in theColoradan Alumni Magazine.

The AMRC is partnering with Sauer to produce video tutorials to guide performance-oriented musicians on everything from genre selection to timing and period aesthetics. The AMRC is also working to produce music packets for K-12 musicians, especially high school orchestras, who will be able to create their own scores for specific films. “This project is not about moving the music from one dusty attic to another,” says AMRC Assistant Director and Archivist Jessie de la Cruz. “This archive will be a living part of the community.”

I’m delighted to announce that SFSMA has received a grant from the Victor Herbert Foundation to assist with the transcribing, cataloguing, and uploading of the Carl Braun Collection. We’re grateful for this assistance, which will enable us to have the Braun Collection fully posted to the Archive by the end of Summer 2021.

Countless individual pieces by and excerpts from larger works by Victor Herbert were published as music for silent film. Works by Herbert are also heavily referenced in cue sheets, in which arrangers would list each scene of the film and make a corresponding recommendation for a piece to play with it, providing the title, composer, and melody line. Herbert works like “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life,” “Punch and Judy,” and the “Habanera” and “Vaquero’s Song” from Natoma are already part of SFSMA’s collection; and works by Herbert appear on several cue sheets already in the Archive. The Braun collection contains numerous works by Herbert—so far we’ve located more than 40 individual pieces referenced in the Collection’s cue sheets. Many of these are used more than once in the same film, functioning as a film’s major themes.

I am delighted to announce that at last we have a beautiful and clean scan of Erno Rapee’s Motion Picture Moods. This was scanned by Rodney Sauer of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, who generously donated his scan to SFSMA. You can now find the complete contents of this landmark reference for silent film accompaniment here. Because of the size of the book, we’ve had to break it into smaller components for downloading. If you want to combine these files into one large PDF, we recommend EasyPDF, a free resource.