Reconstructing the Sound of Italian Silent Cinema: The “Musica per Orchestrina” Repertoires

The project of census, cataloguing and study of manuscript and printed music for the cinema in Piedmont (Progetto Cabiria) of the University of Turin has given us the opportunity to acquire new documentation about the music in early cinema. It is well-know that the musical accompaniment for silent films can be divided into three categories: compilations of pre-existing music by classical composers; original musical pieces written for recurrent dramatic situations in different films and divided into sets based on moods, tempos, exotic character etc.; original scores written for a specific film by a famous composer in order to dignify that particular title (Pizzetti, Mascagni, Mancinelli). While we know a great deal about this last category, which represents only a minimal part of the musical production for cinemas, almost nothing is known about the everyday practice of musical accompaniment for silent movies by little ensembles (so-called “orchestrine”) or solo pianists. The “Cabiria project” has brought to light many collections of musical pieces for cinema edited by minor editors which show how florid the market of Salonmusik was and, in particular, that for the accompaniment of silent movies. More than thirty editors in Turin and the nearby area alone (but the number may be higher) were active in publishing music for cafè-chantant. Moreover, during the Twenties, some of them begun to publish music expressively devoted to cinema. The study of this repertoire shows the diffusion of a particular musical style indebted, on the one hand to the modern rhythms of popular music (for comic and sentimental situations) and on the other to the language of the late romantic music (for dramatic and serious situations). This musical style did not only belong to B-movies, but also to the original scores for the great “colossals” (e.g. the musical accompaniment written by Carlo Graziani-Walter for Caserini and Ridolfi’s Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei, 1913, shows the same stylistic features). The aim of this research is to provide a more historically documented ground for the philological reconstruction of the sound of early cinema, during one of the most important historical periods of Italian production.