Sounds of silence are no laughing matter
Silent films have provided fertile territory for contemporary composers. Last week, it was the turn of 49-year-old British composer Benedict Mason whose 1988 score for three of Chaplin's most famous comedies, The Charlie Chaplin Operas, was performed at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. Visitors to Taipei may have caught an earlier performance of the work in January at the Chiang-Kai Shek Cultural Centre.
Easy Street and The Immigrant were screened in the first half of the concert, and The Adventurer in the second. Mason describes the scores he wrote for these films, a 'semi-operatic filmspiel', which are for 20 or so players, two singers-speakers, some electronic effects and a lot of percussion. At the South Bank concert, Sound Intermedia were conducted by Franck Ollu, with mezzo-soprano Della Jones and baritone Omar Ebrahim.
Each film lasts for just over 20 minutes, but Mason's music is dense and layered. The score for the first two films shared too many musical elements, and their identities blurred. The complex layering also made it difficult to decipher the words. The Adventurer was the highlight of the evening, showing how Mason's quirky musical dialogue with the film was so much more than a mere illustration of the on-screen mood and narrative action.
Mason has said: 'Film, now, is an entertainment industry, offering the composer little beyond pocket money - usually at a cost to his spirit.'
The job of many film composers has been to play second fiddle to what's happening on screen, using readily interpretable notations such as rolling drums and swelling orchestration for storms at sea, lush strings for romance and short jarring staccato strings to build tension or create fear.
Mason is scathing about this Hollywood approach to music in film. 'There's no point in trying to recreate the comfortable, anaesthetic, trivialising and condescending effect of Hollywood music. Hollywood film music always seeks to rally everyone round one emotive banner, leaving the audience very little space for their own imagination and individual interpretation.'
In recent times, the Pet Shop Boys, Philip Glass and Michael Nyman have composed notable music for the silent screen, but Mason's scoring is the least illustrative. Although he sometimes closely links his music to the screen image, he more often delivers a score that explores the implications of the images rather than merely reproducing them in sound.
Mason best sums up his approach to composing the Chaplin Operas when he says: 'Chaplin's comedy routines are so well known that they have no need of the original type of music his films were used to. I have written a mimetic/frenetic music closer to the general character of the film activity. This is not tame polite background accompaniment that might as well not be there. It is not musical exhibitionism in competition with the film, although the musicians are very vocal, and a good humoured anarchic rumpus is always just around the corner.'
