The use of cue sheets in Italian silent cinema: contexts, repertoires, praxis

Musicology has only recently addressed its attention to the study of music in Italian silent cinema, in its multifaceted aspects regarding the praxis, the musical repertoires, the contexts of production, the public. Till now researches on music in silent films have focused their attention on music expressly composed for a specific film, which - it is well-know - represents only a minimal percentage of the music played in cinemas. While we know a great deal about these scores, almost nothing is known about the everyday practice of musical accompaniment for silent movies by little ensembles (so-called “orchestrine”) or solo pianists. Historiographies of Italian silent cinema usually face the lack of documentation borrowing information from North American, English or German literature taking for granted their effectiveness also for the Italian context: a bias that Rick Altman (Altman, 2004) has recently put in evidence as very frequent in silent film sound studies.The aim of my research is to collect information about the Italian context (in particular in Turin and in Florence) trying to find which music was played in cinemas, how it was used to create a musical accompaniment for films and in which context it was played. One of the most important type of music played in cinemas was the so-called “musica per orchestrina”, a sort of Gebrauchmusik, used in many different occasions, in order to create a musical background for different situations: vaudeville, Tabarin, ballroom, Cafè-chantants, beach club, cinemas). This repertoire has been the main source of music for silent cinema for three decades. More than thirty editors in Turin and the nearby area alone were active in publishing music for “orchestrina”. A large scrutiny of articles in newspapers and trade press has given much information about how this music was employed in musical accompaniment for film offering the possibility to draw a historical picture in many respect different from any other geographical context. Nowadays this kind of research can be useful not only for a mere historical purpose but also to promote a more historically documented reconstruction of original musical accompaniment for films, based on original musical repertoires.