The Music for Salon Orchestra and its Use in Silent Films

Recently, the study of music in silent film has brought attention to a musical repertoire that had enormous growth between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century: salon music. This repertoire has not yet been fully investigated, although it has an evident historical importance in the development of cinematographic music and it represents a fundamental link between the nineteenth-century musical tradition of highbrow origin and the explosion of popular music genres at the beginning of the twentieth century. The main core of this repertoire is based on three typologies of pieces: transcriptions from the operatic and symphonic repertoire, original pieces in Romantic style, and dances and songs. The analytical study of this repertoire aims to bring its historical importance back into perspective, transforming it into an object of investigation with its own autonomy, rather than a phenomenon simply derived from the classical repertoire, devoid of its own interest and, therefore, negligible. The clarification of the peculiar characteristics of its musical language is fundamental to begin to outline an aesthetic of musical compilation in the silent film era. Studies of music in silent films has in fact concentrated more on the phenomenon of original scores, quantitatively marginal, while neglecting the study of compiled musical accompaniment, which was the most diffused form of accompaniment. This study, in addition to filling the historiographical gap that still exists, provides information fundamental to understanding the subsequent developments of early sound films.