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Published on 7/25/08
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“I am a missing link into the modern time,” says Dennis James. He isn’t exaggerating: There aren’t many, if any others like James to carry on the obscure tradition of live silent-film accompaniment. This week the world-renowned organist, historian and silent-film accompanist will present Buster Keaton’s 1927 film The General with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
“You’re going to get a historical recreation of The General,” says James, explaining that the film was originally distributed with a compilation cue sheet and its music was preselected.
Fittingly, James calls himself a “presentation preservationist”: “What I do is the professional performance of recreated music, preserved and done with the backing of historic research and the moral intent to bring to the public the nature of putative time travel”—that might sound more like a quote from Back to the Future’s Doc Brown than a description of silent-film accompaniment, but it clearly speaks to James’s ideals.
Those ideals reach back to his teenage years, when a silent film-organist who began in 1916 became James’s teacher. “You have to have a lineage of the direct transfers of those conceptions,” says James, whose speech itself suggests a bygone era. “When sound went to film, my teacher went to radio, which was the exact transfer of dramatic function music,” he says. “I got to study all of his old training manuals and there was even one organ method book I used”—he laughs—“that showed a picture of the pedaling with high-button shoes.”
James’s antique training may have given him the foundation for a career in silent films, but he was actually schooled to become a church musician and a classical concert organist. Based in Tacoma, Washington, James made his orchestral debut with the Chicago Symphony in 1984. Even today he gets sentimental when he returns to Chicago.
The organ and orchestra have long had a working relationship in silent-film presentations. According to James, the organ provided relief for orchestras, which had to digest new works every couple of days. “Scores were done on the fly in the same way television shows are done today,” he says. “So the organ came in for under-rehearsed orchestras and would improvise until the orchestra came in on the next cue.”
The film scores themselves, or what James calls “compilation scores,” liberally quote from a variety of music styles. Old Civil War songs, popular songs of the day and classical hits usually filled out the soundtracks. The demand for musicians in the industry grew considerably and Hollywood orchestra members earned far more than their classical counterparts at the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera orchestra. Even Eugene Ormandy, the longtime face of the Philadelphia Orchestra, once played violin for the pictures at the Capital Theater in New York.
Yet the advent of “synchronized sound” turned the art form into yesterday’s news. The General is one of its last great examples; “talkies” became the rule with the release of the wildly successful The Jazz Singer in 1927. Filmmakers haven’t looked back since: Just try imagining movies today without spoken dialogue. But Buster Keaton’s trademark tomfoolery all awash in James’s organ and the CSO should be a welcome time trip.
James salutes Buster Keaton’s The General Friday 29 at Orchestra Hall.
