Photoplay music is a body of incidental music published for use in accompanying silent films. Rather than being written for one particular film, most photoplay pieces were short, adaptable compositions or arrangements identified by a mood, dramatic situation, tempo, character, or action—such as agitato, misterioso, “hurry”, “battle”, or “love theme”. A pianist, organist, or orchestra leader could select and combine them while preparing an accompaniment, sometimes with the aid of a cue sheet or a trade-press list of musical suggestions.
The term is sometimes used loosely for silent-film music in general, but historians distinguish photoplay music from several other practices. Silent films could be accompanied by improvisation, popular and classical repertory, a score compiled for an individual film, or an original score. Photoplay music was instead a commercially published repertory designed to be reusable across many films. It flourished from the 1910s through the end of the silent era.
Origins
Film accompaniment inherited practices from nineteenth-century melodrama, pantomime, opera, and popular theater. Early exhibitors drew on music already at hand, and performances varied greatly with the theater, its musicians, and local resources. Pianists, organists, small ensembles, orchestras, mechanical instruments, lecturers, and performers supplying narration or sound effects all formed part of the period's changing soundscape.
Beginning in 1909, the Edison Kinetogram printed “Incidental Music for Edison Pictures”, giving scene-by-scene recommendations such as a brisk march, an Irish jig, a popular air, or plaintive music. Other producers and film-trade journals soon published similar advice. At roughly the same time, publishers began issuing anthologies whose contents were indexed by mood, action, character, tempo, and meter. Gregg A. Frelinger's Motion Picture Piano Music: Descriptive Music to Fit the Action, Character or Scene of Moving Pictures (1909) is the earliest known surviving American example.
These publications emerged amid a campaign in the film trade press to improve theater music. Reports complained of inattentive players, unsuitable selections, poorly maintained instruments, and accompaniments unrelated to the action. Advice columns, musical suggestions, manuals, and specialized repertories attempted both to raise standards and to give isolated musicians a shared practical vocabulary. In 1912, for example, Ernst Luz used his Moving Picture News column to advocate what he called “temperamental musical plots”: selections governed by a film's overall dramatic character rather than by its title or by momentary visual details alone.
The campaign also reveals how uneven actual practice remained. Luz repeatedly criticized extemporaneous playing, stale repertory, excessive percussion, and accompaniments that ignored a film's dramatic construction. Such writing is evidence of reformers' aims rather than proof that their methods were already standard. Even prominent presentations could provoke disagreement: a 1915 criticism of the music used for Peer Gynt was followed in the same trade-paper department by a defense of the presentation.
As the film industry grew during the 1910s, music publishers issued increasing numbers of collections in flexible orchestrations. From the middle of the decade, photoplay music and separately distributed cue sheets became complementary means of organizing accompaniment: cue sheets proposed what to play and when, while publishers supplied music designed for those uses.
Form and classification
Photoplay pieces were usually designed as practical modules rather than self-contained concert works. Publishers labeled and indexed them with functional terms. Surviving theater libraries contain categories including agitato, allegro, andante, “dramatic”, furioso, “hurry”, misterioso, “berceuse”, “romance”, “serenade”, and numerous topical or scenic labels. Such categories did not prescribe a single fixed relationship between music and image. They helped musicians find material quickly and encouraged the reuse of one number in different films. Luz divided his own working repertory into neutral and descriptive numbers, treating the former as connective material between moments selected for emphasis.
The music was built to accommodate scenes of uncertain length. A number might consist of several linked sections that could be repeated, and collections often placed numbers in the same or related keys so that successive pieces could be joined without a conspicuous break. Luz's A.B.C. Dramatic Sets, for example, grouped compatible motifs, agitatos, and hurries that could be combined in varying order. A surviving 1928 cue sheet uses separate sections from his thirteenth set for an agitato-hurry and a plaintive passage of different lengths.
Publishers also had to serve theaters with very different musical forces. Editions were therefore arranged so that a piano or organ part could work alone, while optional string, wind, brass, and percussion parts expanded the same piece for an ensemble. Piano and first violin commonly carried the essential musical material. Larger versions could exploit orchestral color and descriptive effects, including musical representations of storms, trains, battles, horses, or other actions.
The repertory mixed newly composed pieces with older or repurposed material. Publishers recycled earlier American compilations, distributed European collections, and rearranged well-known classical works. Although Giuseppe Becce's German Kinothek (1919) has sometimes been described as the first photoplay collection, American publications such as Frelinger's 1909 anthology preceded it. Erno Rapée's Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (1924) was a substantial later compilation; its edge index organized hundreds of classical extracts, national airs, and photoplay pieces under more than fifty headings for rapid consultation.
Publishers and composers
Specialist composers and arrangers were often attached to particular publishing houses. Major American series included the following:
+ Selected photoplay-music series Series Publisher Principal composer or arranger Dates Loose Leaf Motion Picture Collection Carl Fischer M. L. Lake 1914–1916 A.B.C. Dramatic Set and later A.B.C. series Photo-Play Music Company Ernst Luz 1915–1920 Berg's Incidental Series S. M. Berg S. M. Berg and others 1916–1917 Schirmer's Photoplay Series G. Schirmer Otto Langey and others 1916–1923 Dramatic Music for Motion Picture Plays Chappell Joseph Carl Breil 1917 Sam Fox Photoplay Edition Sam Fox J. S. Zamecnik 1919–1922
The importance of this repertory is visible in surviving music libraries. The Balaban and Katz theater chain's Chicago collection, cataloged by music director H. L. Spitalny, held 141 numbers by Lake and 116 by Zamecnik—more than its holdings for any individual classical or popular composer. A smaller touring library assembled by violinist and orchestra leader Alvin G. Layton contained many of the same publications, separated into functional categories and marked with cues showing how pieces had been adapted to individual films.
Relationship to cue sheets
Photoplay music was repertory; a cue sheet was a plan for applying repertory to a particular film. A sheet typically listed a composition, an entrance cue, and sometimes a duration, tempo, publisher, or dramatic description. A musician could follow it exactly, substitute locally available music of similar character, or use it as the basis for a newly compiled accompaniment.
Contemporary terminology was more precise than later accounts sometimes suggest. Lists printed inside studio bulletins and trade-journal columns were usually called “musical suggestions”, “settings”, “programs”, “plots”, or “music cues”. A cue sheet, in the narrower period sense, was a separately distributed document. Stand-alone sheets emerged during the 1915–1916 season and did not become generally available until the 1920s; the often-repeated claim that Max Winkler invented them in 1912 is contradicted by the chronology of his own account.
Cue sheets were also commercial instruments. A film producer or distributor could promote a more consistent presentation, while a publisher used recommendations to sell its catalog. Some settings drew exclusively on one firm's publications. Luz's trade-journal “music plots”, by contrast, recommended works from multiple publishers as well as his own compositions. By the 1920s independent companies, including Cameo Music Service, sold cue sheets compiled by musicians such as Luz, James C. Bradford, and Edward Kilenyi.
Cue sheets helped circulate photoplay music but did not make performances uniform. Musicians might lack a recommended piece, disagree with a compiler's taste, receive the sheet too late, or find that wear and re-editing had changed a film's timing. They also worked with different personnel, instruments, libraries, rehearsal time, and local expectations. The same film could consequently receive a solo keyboard accompaniment, an orchestral compilation, an original score, or a mixture of these practices.
End of the silent era
Photoplay compositions continued to be published in sheet-music collections and on piano rolls throughout the silent era. Trade-press columnists introduced new series, and cue-sheet compilers combined photoplay numbers with popular songs, national airs, and classical music. Photoplay albums, generic pieces, and cue sheets remained in use until the widespread transition to recorded sound between 1927 and 1929. Surviving scores, parts, and cue sheets preserve only part of this varied performance practice, but their annotations and instrumentation show how musicians adapted published material to local circumstances.
See also
Film score Photoplayer Theatre organ
References