Music: Movie Music

Victor Herbert, America’s best known composer of music and the one without doubt best dowered with native talent, is conducting a cinema orchestra in Manhattan, the picture being Little Old New York. Herbert wrote the incidental music for the play. This is something of a novelty. And yet the music that goes with cinemas, frightful as it usually is, has an especial place and rather a distinguished place in esthetics. Nowhere is music so utterly necessary as in cinemas. Plays are set to music, but plays can be given without music. It is a curious thing that some sort of music has become necessary to the cinema. Somehow even at its very beginning the silent drama, in order to please its public (not an esthetic public), had to have sound. That sound was music. It is a common feeling with movie fans that a stretch of picture without music seems unnatural. Few people have witnessed a film exhibition without the accompaniment of at least a piano. A certain dramatic stretch of picture may be given a curious flavor and the emphasis of the unusual by keeping the music silent. Why is this? Is it that the human mind demands sound with action? What follows from it? That in the motion picture is a possibility for powerful and vital musical form? A thing is at a great advantage in being rooted in necessity.