The Sounds of the Silents in Britain ed. by Julie Brown and Annette Davison (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Sounds of the Silents in Britain ed. by Julie Brown and Annette Davison Colin Roust The Sounds of the Silents in Britain. Edited by Julie Brown and Annette Davison. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [xiv, 334 p. ISBN 9780199797615 (hardcover), $105; ISBN 9780199797547 (paperback), $36.95; (e-book), various.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliographic references, index. Over the past several years, the academic study of film music has reached a critical point of maturity. There are now general histories of film music by Mervyn Cooke and James Wierzbicki (published in 2008 and 2009, respectively); source readings anthologies, including Cooke’s The Hollywood Film Music Reader (2010), Julie Hubbert’s Celluloid Symphonies (2011), and the Routledge Film Music Sourcebook (2012); and two landmark state-of-the-field volumes, The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, edited by David Neumeyer (2014), and the Cambridge Companion to Film Music, edited by Robynn Stilwell and Peter Franklin (forthcoming). While these developments have been exciting, they have also largely tended to perpetuate the biases prevalent throughout the field. Mainstream, narrative Hollywood films have been privileged above other cinematic traditions; and sound films have been privileged above the silent era. Many of the limitations of current film music research on music in the silent era are the result of a lack of research opportunities: an incredible diversity of practices varied widely from one location to the next, and the surviving archival documents are limited in both scope and number. With this in mind, it is a particular pleasure to see a book published that so thoroughly explores a wide variety of archival records to reveal the idiosyncrasies of silent film traditions throughout the British Isles. This book is the product of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research network that was organized by Brown and Davison, and that held several conferences and workshops between June 2009 and April 2011. Sponsored under the aegis of the AHRC’s “Beyond Text” initiative, this project is of necessity interdisciplinary, bringing together scholars in musicology, film studies, history, and English literature, alongside archivists and documentary filmmakers. The contributions to the book are drawn largely from the conferences and represent the major themes on the programs: “Speaking to Pictures,” “Accompanying Pictures,” “Performance in [End Page 372] Cinemas,” and “Musicians, Companies, and Institutions.” The first section documents the variety of spoken-word performance traditions that existed in British cinemas in the decades leading up to World War I. Unsurprisingly, these practices are largely extensions of nineteenth-century lecture traditions. Joe Kember focuses on a single cinema in southwestern England, but documents both a variety of types of lecturers and several genres of lecture films. Judith Buchanan focuses on the gap between the ideal lecturer described in trade journals and the actual practices described in eyewitness reports. Of particular interest in both these essays is the question of how lecturers struggled to capture and focus the audience’s attention. Stephen Bottomore’s essay presents a case study of Eric Williams, a noted actor who toured extensively as a film elocutionist. Drawing on articles from two trade journals, Bottomore examines the evolving practices of speaking to films from 1911 to 1918. Trevor Griffiths’s essay is likewise concerned with the evolution of film lecturing, though his angle is to examine the rise and fall of lecturers in Scotland during the heyday of picture palaces (1910–1930). The next set of essays turns to musical accompaniments and follows a similar trajectory to the first. Ian Christie’s essay presents early film music practices in London as a continuation of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century theatrical traditions. Drawing on Rick Altman’s landmark article about American silent film practices, “The Silence of the Silents” (Musical Quarterly 80, no. 4 [Winter 1996]: 648–718), Christie advances his argument based on thorough research into previously untapped archives. The essays by Jon Burrows and Andrew Higson both examine the gap between the idealized use of music advocated in trade journals and the actual practices in London cinemas during the decade before World War I. The last chapter in this section, by James Buhler, presents a case study of how one American trade journal covered British film...