Music is time according to choreographer Georges Balanchine, and the live synchronization of film music is time par excellence.1 It involves stopwatches, duration in seconds, and also tempo labels. Up to now, our literature has given scant attention to synchronization2 or has emphasized the negative or unsuccessful attempts at it during the mute film era or the many seemingly overwhelming difficulties involved in its realization.3 By contrast, I am going to emphasize all the evidence for its existence and practice all over the United States, particularly by the movie industry's star directors, because live synchronization played an important role in the development of the relationship between music and image.By synchronization, I mean “to occur at the same time or coincide or agree in time,” “to match the sound and action in a scene,”4 and there are several kinds. Explicit, percussive synchronization, mickey mousing or synchronization used obviously for a dramatic effect, is merely one kind. There is a much less noticeable form, implicit synchronization, that involves the subtle entrance and exit of music and the capture of the tempo of the actions and sentiments within a scene.Mechanical synchronization of music with image is also only one kind. There is a variety that was accomplished live, that depended on carefully cued scores or cue sheets, stopwatches, speedometers, tempo markings, depth of experience with a standard repertory, large music libraries classified by tempo and mood, muscle memory, and lots of rehearsals. Instead of using a click track, it depended on keeping a selection to a predetermined duration that was controlled first by a clock with a second hand and then by muscle memory. It required of specialized conductors the same skills as those used in the live accompaniment of ballet, pantomime, and tableaux because, strange as it may seem to our talk-centric ears, mute film was a form of pantomime and communicated well without talking.My goal in this paper is to convince you, in spite of the literature to the contrary and all the hype around the introduction of talking pictures, that there were live synchronized scores before 1929. In fact, they were common enough that a contemporary, George Beynon, labeled the 1920s the “Synchrony Era.”5I begin with evidence from a score. Figure 1 shows the finale of D. W. Griffith's 1920 Way Down East. Its format is typical. Every three to seven measures there is a printed cue that refers to the appearance of characters or intertitles on the screen. Six cues occur in a little more than one minute forty seconds of film. Professor, Kate, David, Anna, Martha Perkins, and Seth are all major characters. The interested parties include David's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bartlett. The finale recaps each of their themes, a few of the over forty used in this thematically constructed score, and reflects its combination of 50 percent original compositions by William Frederick Peters and Louis Silvers and 50 percent preexisting pieces, for which Griffith had permission from ASCAP.6 The music under each of the six cues is supposed to begin when the cue appears on the screen and this is the way all the scores of this era were constructed. Clip 1 is a live performance that conforms with that design.The sound is not independent from the film. It is intimately connected to the scene and to the characters; both the image and the accompaniment are in the foreground of our attention because when well chosen, foregrounded music does not distract; it merely enhances. The whole score proceeds in this way for two and a half hours, changing music every twenty to forty seconds, sometimes, as here, even more frequently. A synchronized performance is clearly intended. The careful cueing, thematic construction, and the proportion of original to preexisting music are typical of other published feature film scores of the era.7Lest you think that only Griffith's scores were synchronized, Figure 2 contains the cue sheet for Lubitsch's Rosita (1923). The cue sheet's organization is the same as that for Way Down East. Cues define the place where the music listed is supposed to start. The timings define the durations so synchronization is again called for. In this case, all the music is preexisting. In Clip 2 from Rosita, you will see examples of both explicit and implicit synchronizations as the Queen of Spain deals with her womanizing husband, the King.I followed the cue sheet and it led to the music fitting the film to a tee. Perfectly chosen, none of it written for this film, the music is beautiful and seductive and changes the silent images completely.Of course, in the 1920s, in the over eighteen thousand movie theatres in the United States, musical practices would have varied widely. However, the division of theatres and filmmakers into deluxe and ordinary ones established a hierarchy of ideals that many aspired to. As Alison Robbins has demonstrated in her description of cinema pianist Della Sullivan,8 even many a solo keyboard player depended on studio distributed cue sheets as well as the many publications of incidental music for the movies, so solo accompanists as well as deluxe theatres were influenced by the synchronization ideals.You may still think synchronized scores were not commonly realized. Table 1 contains a list of 1,078 references to live synchronized scores and synchronization (210 for Birth of a Nation alone). The references are from newspaper advertisements, trade journals, and performance manuals.Table 2 provides an alphabetical list of the films advertised as having a synchronized score. Many of the 278 movies were by influential directors, including Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, Cecil B. DeMille, and Rex Ingram. They appear on my list only if their synchronized scores were advertised as synchronized, but many of the New York theatres that we know synchronized their accompaniments did not advertise them as such, so regard my list as merely the tip of the iceberg. While these figures represent a fraction of the moving pictures being circulated, if I were to add the movies that had cue sheets (because they were by definition synchronized), the list would be much, much longer.Table 3 is a list of 232 cities that had references to synchronized scores. The smaller towns may not have had a deluxe cinema with its own musical staff, but if they had a legitimate theatre with an orchestra pit and a train station, they were probably visited by traveling feature film shows with synchronized scores. Clearly, a lot of places had them.One of the most influential figures in the movie-making hierarchy was Thomas Edison. He had always conceived moving pictures as an audiovisual medium, long before technological advances made this union possible. In 1913, he devised and widely circulated his speaking picture shows, which synchronized the motion picture projector with a record player. Even though this union proved unreliable, it immediately established a new ideal.Synchronized sound fortified the illusion of real life immeasurably, and Edison's speaking pictures demonstrated, when they did work, the more effective union between the audio and video media, but it would be another thirteen years before the two were successfully united mechanically. Meanwhile, live synchronization had been developing through the circulation of successful pantomime ballets and Italian pantomime films.9By 1915, The Birth of a Nation toured the US with orchestras varying in size from five to fifty players. It established the live synchronized score as a new standard.10The Birth of a Nation also demonstrated that both original and preexisting popular and classical music could be effective as accompaniment and that popular songs, when well chosen, could enhance the picture rather than distract from it. The originality of the music was not the critical factor; the effective choice and synchronization of appropriate music was what made it successful. It made the music become one with the images. Both were changed and enhanced by the synergy.Perhaps at this point you may have been swayed by the evidence I have presented but still have doubts because you simply cannot believe that live synchronization was actually possible. How could they have done it?In the teens and twenties, composers and compilers followed the same general process. We know because there are a number of accounts which demonstrate that a lot of conductors were synchronizing live.11 I quote an Italian account from 1914: I interviewed the accomplished conductor Maestro Cosa a few nights ago. I caught him fresh from a performance as he left the Cinema Splendor, and I wanted him to tell me something about the system he had used that permitted him with great facility to instantly vary the musical motives as the diverse scenes appeared on the screen and to arrive at the end of every execution exactly in time with the end of every part. . . . “First of all,” Maestro Cosa responded, “It's better if the conductor has a detailed knowledge of musical works, in order to be able to use them in the right place at the right time. Second he has to assist at the projection rehearsals in order to make observations of a general nature, about the various characters and special parts: horses racing, battles, dances, let alone the various pathetic, heroic, sentimental, joyful or sad or painful themes. He has to make note of all of this, measuring them for their approximate duration. Then he chooses the individual pieces. With them it is natural that the number of measures does not coincide with the duration of the scene, which frequently is shorter, so he has to mark the point of attack and make an opportune cut that renders the piece the required duration; regulating [each instance] in case after the first rehearsal the time has to be expanded or contracted. In the final parts you shouldn't be stingy with a few beats more or less, if you want to maintain your image as an artist in front of the public. In the case, however, that a piece, perfectly adapted to a scene, does not allow any modification, simply use the sign for a hold over a resolving beat so the orchestra can observe the fermata and finish with that harmony. No matter how many the difficulties, they are not insurmountable nor are there special secrets. It is merely a question of artistic sensibility.12In this case, the conductor's knowledge and memory of the repertory governed everything. By comparison, Hugo Riesenfeld, the conductor of the Rialto, Rivoli, and Criterion Theatres in New York City, used a team of conductors, a projectionist, a rehearsal pianist and a large cinema music library to make his choices and to prepare his scores: After little snatches of the film are thus projected and music fitted intimately with the moods of each, with proper record made of each separate bit of film and the music corresponding with it, Mr. Riesenfeld takes the music under his wing and spends laborious hours over it, marking, timing, cutting, trimming, fitting and preparing it to time right with the film.”13By comparison, conductor Harry Silverman in Omaha, Nebraska, used cue sheets, his own large music library, a stopwatch, and a speedometer: Synchronizing is one of the phases of the motion picture entertainment that must be done with care, artistry and precision. Harry Silverman, musical conductor at the Strand theater, is one of the best known in the middle west, and he has this department almost mathematically correct. Here's how it is done:When the management of a theater receives the film that is to be the feature of the next week's bill the music has been doped out ahead of time, for with the advance notices sent out by the publicity department is what is called a “cue sheet,” in which is outlined and numbered the music to be used in the piece.These various airs keep running all through the picture, whenever the characters they represent appear. The “theme” is always evident, just as it is in operatic or symphonic productions.If Conductor Silverman thinks the “theme” proper, he lets it stand. If not, he goes through his music and selects something as near like it as possible, but more appropriate. . .Several days before the picture is to be shown, the orchestra leader is given a special screening of the new picture. Armed with a cue sheet and watch he goes into the pit and watches the picture. Every situation is timed to the second. . . As each situation is finished, the time is put down on a record sheet. This continues all through the picture. When it is finished the real work starts.The conductor goes into his library, where catalogued in their proper places are piles of music of all character. Silverman has more than 5,000 numbers to draw from and he knows his library from ‘a” to “z”. . . . He already has his theme picked out and then following the records he has made he goes through his music and selects what he needs. All situations are timed to the second and only strains of music of proper length are used.When he has completed his program, he picks out the parts for the various instruments in the orchestra and the music is ready to start. Just before the picture is shown to the public the orchestra then goes into a rehearsal, if the weather isn't too warm, and the whole program is played.Perhaps you have begun to wonder how the orchestra keeps time with the picture. That's easy.On the conductor's stand is an electric buzzer connecting him with the projecting booth. On the motor operating the picture machine is a speedometer showing just how fast the film is being fed onto the screenShould the picture drag or go too fast it throws the music off and situations and music do not synchronize. Then Conductor Silverman gets busy with his little buzzer and calls the operator to time.”14Most important to remember is that the composers and compilers created their own scores, and for this reason, through muscle memory, they would have remembered what they had decided. The speedometer was an aid when variations in the electricity caused variations in the voltage and thus changed the speed of the projector.The printed scores and cue sheets were often a record of actual performances and the conductors who performed the same piece all over the country or in a New York theatre for a number of days, weeks, or months definitely would have worked out a stable synchronization. For example, for several months, composer Mortimer Wilson conducted his own scores for The Thief of Bagdad (Fairbanks, 1924) and The Black Pirate (Fairbanks, 1926) and would have remembered how fast each cue was supposed to be.Conductors would have performed synchronized scores (in the theatres that had them), twice a day, seven days a week for years. They were used to the process of creating the synchronization. In the US, they had teams to help them; music librarians; huge music libraries categorized by tempo, duration, mood, and location; music copyists; projectionists; rehearsal pianists; and orchestras ranging in size from five to fifty players. However, solo keyboard players would also have been able to synchronize. By improvising accompaniments and using a studio's cue sheet, a solo player would have been able to maintain the synchronization more flexibly than a large ensemble.By not acknowledging the existence of live synchronization during the silent film era, we miss an important characteristic that mute feature films shared with recorded-sound pictures. Appropriate music changing at the same time a new scene appeared created the illusion that the music was an integral part of the work. It moved with the images. It dramatized the mood and illuminated the characters. It caught the way they moved and often the way they were. New tempos intensified the sensation that the music was keeping up with the picture or belonged to it. Its entry and exit required special care (just as it does today). The music defined the structure of the motion picture by raising and lowering the curtain at the beginning and ending of every scene. By catching the implicit tempo within a scene, the accompaniment was also responding to the image, not just the narrative. Expressive features like crescendos, decrescendos, accents, changes of harmony, changes of the orchestral palette, even silences and pregnant pauses all directed the public's attention to elements in the drama. Many developments that have been attributed to later eras actually first developed in the first three decades of the twentieth century.I do not claim that all cinemas had synchronized scores nor that all who did, did it well (although many did), nor that it was easy. I am insisting, however, that the synchronized score existed before the advent of the recorded-sound picture and that synchronization circulated widely in the United States, sometimes in deluxe cinemas, sometimes by traveling feature film shows, sometimes by solo keyboard players. The most influential and successful directors circulated their motion pictures with live, synchronized scores. The pairing of such a score with a motion picture represented an ideal to which even those who couldn't do it aspired. It was practiced, covered in the instruction manuals, and advertised. I do not believe that all these references to it should continue to be ignored.Supported and fertilized by the knowledge and imagination of composer-compilers and immense music libraries, live synchronization enabled the development of a close relationship between music and image. It encouraged the application of what Erwin Panofsky and Aby Warburg called pathos formulae: Not only the structure and movement of the human body, but also the active and passive emotions of the human soul . . . [were] sublimated, in accordance with the precepts of “symmetry” and “harmony”. . . . All these emotional states were reduced to pathos formulae which were to retain their validity for many centuries and appear “natural” to us precisely because they are “idealized” as compared to reality—because a wealth of particular observations had been condensed and sublimated into one universal experience.15Synchronization enabled the flowering of the relationship between the sublimated emotional states (pathos formulae) found in music and in visual stories. Live synchronized musical practices are at the root of the film music tradition. It is way past time to recognize this, to stop relying solely on first person witness accounts, to study and perform the scores and cue sheets with the films and rewrite the histories.