For over a year film historian Richard Bossons has been collaborating with the composer Leo Geyer on a project to recreate the only known score for Dziga Vertov’s film Man with a Movie Camera. In 1995, film scholar Yuri Tsivian published his translation of a set of hand-written notes by Vertov detailing the accompaniment he wanted for his film. Tsivian also translated typewritten cue sheets, thought to have been based on Vertov’s notes, created by three composers–A Grin, N Vaisbain, and V. Jenczijevsky–commissioned by the state cinema organisation Sovkino to create a Conspectus–or cue sheet–for the 1929 premiere. Like cue sheets used in the West, this one contained small snippets of music from the ballet, symphonic, and opera repertoire, and it differs from Vertov’s notes considerably. Nonetheless, the cue sheets offer an important glimpse into Soviet silent film scoring practices, and Bossons’ and Geyer’s score will be a great contribution to the scholarship of silent film music.

Bossons and I have corresponded quite a bit about his project, and has given me permission to share what what he and Geyer have done so far. Bossons writes:

In 1995, Yuri Tsivian published his translation of two documents discovered in the Dziga Vertov archive in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow, in Griffithiana No. 54 (October). Document 1 consists of hand- written notes by Vertov of a ‘Music Scenario’ for the accompaniment of his film.

Document 1 by Yuri Tsivian, showing Vertov’s intentions for music accompanying Man with a Movie Camera

The second document comprises typewritten cue sheets by three composers seemingly based on Vertov’s notes. Sovkino approved this ‘Musical Conspectus’ a week before the first screening of the film in Moscow so it was presumably intended for the orchestras in the two cinemas used for the premiere on April 9, 1929.

There have been many attempts to provide a score for Man with a Movie Camera, but this is the only documented accompaniment to the film. Surprisingly, it has not been recreated before now. Composer Leo Geyer and film historian Richard Bossons have collaborated to turn the cue sheets into a score to mark the 95^th anniversary of the premiere in 2024.

Document 2 by Yuri Tsivian showing the music arranged by other composers for Man with a Movie Camera’s Moscow premiere

Bossons wrote a comparison between the musical cues suggested by the official composers and what Vertov wanted. One example:

SEQUENCE 2.

SEQUENCE DIGEST

Silent orchestra, the booth, the projectionist is ready, the film starts running.

SEQUENCE LENGTH: 35s

MUSICAL CHARACTER (movement, dynamics)

Silence, pause for the piano player, who must depict rhythmically the striking of a clock.

INDICATED PIECE

Complete pause.

VERTOV’S NOTES FOR SEQUENCE 2 (his Sequence 3)

3. The silent orchestra. No music is heard. Only the tick-tock of a clock.

NOTES

Vertov doesn’t specify what should be used to create the clock sound. The Conspectus calls for a piano, which isn’t a suitable instrument to make this sound. As the Goskino #1 orchestra does not include a piano (not visible in the film) the clock is depicted by the sound of two different size wooden blocks.

 

SEQUENCE 3.

SEQUENCE DIGEST

The conductor waves his baton, the orchestra starts playing.

SEQUENCE LENGTH: 17s

MUSICAL CHARACTER (movement, dynamics)

Bravura.

INDICATED PIECE

Continue the last 6/8 from the Overture to ‘Giralda’.

VERTOV’S NOTES FOR SEQUENCE 3 (his sequence 4)

4. [From the moment] the orchestra starts playing – up to [the end of the shot showing] the figure ‘1’ rising. Cheerful music welcomes the entrance of the figure ‘1’.

NOTES

The Conspectus ends the music before the ‘1’ starts rising. The beginning and end of this excerpt from ‘Giralda’ was arranged to suit the action of the conductor (though the timing is different to the unknown music being played by the orchestra).

Bossons wrote me recently to say that they had “managed to track down all the pieces except the Miceli and an unknown composer Dorsini.” For the missing works, they are using similar materials for the reconstruction.

We are following the Conspectus closely, but inevitably most of the suggested pieces are either too short (needing additional music ‘in the style of’), or too long (needing an appropriate excerpt to suit the film sequence, and a modified beginning and end). Even the Bodleian has been unable to source some of the more obscure pieces so Leo is having to compose music based on other scores by the composer (eg the Miceli at the end of Reel 1). Additionally, the Massenet, for example, had to be re-arranged to suit the action on screen as it was unsuitable otherwise.

“To avoid copyright on recordings,” Bossons writes, “we are scanning sheet music to get the notation electronically which is reflected in the sound quality (best to listen through headphones or via good speakers!). This means that we can readily obtain the scores for live performance and recording, which is our intention.”

We have completed Reel 1 and half of Reel 2 and I thought you might like to hear what we have done so far. Some of the timing needs to be adjusted, and the sound quality is due to the files being compressed for easier uploading. There is a possibility that we can record the score with an live orchestra in due course. So far, to our surprise, this attempt by three official composers (largely ignoring Vertov’s instructions) works quite well, and adds a period charm to the film. I hope you enjoy it, and I would welcome any comments!

You can listen to the reconstructed score here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8Lv4gQWpUM.
Bossons writes, “Please note that This is a ‘working model’ based on the Lobster Films restoration of the film, and is not intended to be released. The score will be recorded by an orchestra and published with a new restoration of the film by Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam.”

I can’t wait to hear it!

SFSMA board member Paul Allen Sommerfeld has been leading this project to digitize the Silent Film Scores and Arrangements Collection at the Library of Congress! It’s a great new resource for silent film music. Here’s what the library writes:

About this Collection

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.