Modern Times, Live Performance and Film Scoring
A Conversation with Timothy Brock
Timothy Brock is a composer of new orchestral scores for a number of German silent films that have been released on video and DVD. As a conductor he led the Olympia Chamber Orchestra in Washington, and has been touring the world for the past several years conducting live orchestral performances of films by Charles Chaplin with the original music. But the path from film score to live performance is not a simple matter of taking orchestral parts out of an archive and handing them to players. In July 2000, Brock was touring Europe with MODERN TIMES. In Bologna for Cinema Ritrovato, Brock took time for a conversation in between rehearsals for the performance at the sumptuous Teatro Comunale (where Wagner conducted his own epic creations. Over a plate of tagliatelle in a popular Bologna trattoria, Brock spoke with film composer and conductor Donald Sosin, about the monumental task of recreating Chaplin's score.
DS: How did this project come about?
TB: I was commissioned originally by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra to restore the score for their live performance which they do every year. It was their idea to restore the score to MODERN TIMES for live performance. So they made arrangements with the Association Chaplin to bring me to Paris to look at the original documents. I spent three weeks there and essentially made a strong connection with the Chaplins in the family and they bought out my contract with LA Chamber Orchestra, so I'm working directly for the Chaplins.
DS: What had they heard of yours up to that point?
TB: I'm not really sure. There's about ten films on video and DVD at this point and one theatrical release...CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, BERLIN-SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY, STORM OVER ASIA, THE LAST LAUGH, a few others. I'd only done one American film up to that point-THE SHOW-OFF, with Louise Brooks, but it's a compiled score, it's not really my own work. I had restored the music to CARMEN for Boosey and Hawkes and I also restored the music by a composer named Max Butting for Walter Ruebmann's OPUS ONE, which is an animated short. Those are my two restoration credits up to MODERN TIMES.
DS: Were there scores to work from?
TB: The original orchestrated scores, when laid out flat, were about a half a meter in height, about two-thirds of which made it to the film. Yet there were about eight minutes of music completely gone, missing on paper. So I had to take dictation from the 1935 recording.
DS: Do you have perfect pitch?
TB: I have relative pitch. By that I mean, I can listen to a note and tell you what it is, but I can't (clinks a glass), you know.
DS: You knew what the size of the orchestra was?
TB: Lists of personnel. United Artists is rather disciplined in that way. Plus there's photographs. But the orchestration-there were changes made literally up to the last minute before they recorded it. And Alfred Newman, the conductor, made no record of these changes. Instead all the changes existed in the players' parts. And they had enough foresight-I don't know why they would have, frankly-to keep all the parts.
DS: So the eight minutes, do they exist in the parts?
TB: No, they don't exist anywhere.
DS: Is it eight complete minutes, or little bits and pieces?
TB: No, little bits and pieces equaling about eight minutes.
DS: How would they disappear from the parts?
TB: Lot of bridges, you know, a few bars here, a few bars there. The first time "Smile" comes on the screen-it makes an appearance four times-but when "Smile" hits the screen for the first time, that's completely gone.
DS: So you think these were just written as separate little inserts?
TB: Frankly I think that Charlie went and used some of them in other films. For example, I found a bit of MODERN TIMES in the GREAT DICTATOR archives. I found some stuff completely gone. He probably thought that "Smile" would make a great tune just on its own. Probably took it out from MODERN TIMES, had somebody orchestrate it differently, and so forth. And eventually words were put on it.
DS: So did you in fact go sleuthing through all the other score material looking for what was there?
TB: Mm hmm. And I also helped the Chaplins catalogue all the music they have in their archive. So I was able to look through A WOMAN OF PARIS through THE GREAT DICTATOR, which was written by Meredith Wilson.
DS: How long did that take?
TB: Not long, actually. I thought it would take a few days, but it only took a day and a half.
DS: It must have been in pretty good order to begin with.
TB: Fairly good, yeah, although there's a lot of stuff that they didn't know what it was. But I was just able to read it and tell them what it was, cause I knew the music well enough. So I spent fourteen months on it. I went all the way from the piccolo part to the bass part and entered it into the computer and restored the score.
DS: What program do you use?
TB: Sibelius. It was rather-at least in the American market-it was rather new then, and the Finn brothers and those various people were very nice about it and they said, hey, if you want to endorse a product... (laughs)...so I said sure, you know, that's a great situation.
DS: Had you worked with Finale before?
TB: Never worked with a computer before.
DS: Wow! So what was the process like for you to learn to do this?
TB: I was able to learn the program in a day or two. I mean, they boast about that.
DS: Unlike Finale, which..
TB: Yeah, it takes a lifetime or two.
DS: Basically. I guess it's time for me to switch.
TB: It really is geared to writing music, and not writing program, or writing code, or whatever. It's just...I mean I don't know anything about computers and I don't know anything about software, least of all, but I was able to use this program and it was brilliant. You know, if I had done everything by hand, it would have taken fourteen years, as opposed to fourteen months. I was prepared to do it by hand, if it hadn't worked, but it worked beautifully.
DS: So you took all the music and entered it in the computer and created a new score...
TB: Correct. They sent me all the original documents that I needed, that I asked for. They came in four boxes and I just sat in my studio and did it, plus making a few subsequent trips back to Paris to look for material... so, you know, there were sections that were completely written in the margins of parts. It really was a mystery to unravel a great deal of it, and kind of guessing as to what they did, and doing dictation is a lot of presumed guesswork, based on the orchestrations of David Raksin and Edward Powell. Fortunately the orchestration was very consistent throughout the whole film. When I got to the parts that I had to dictate off the screen, they had already established a precedent for how they orchestrated certain sections. And so I could be pretty safe in guessing, that this is how they did it, even though I wasn't able to hear it.
DS: Could you give me an example?
TB: Well, "Smile," for example, was really easy, because it came in four other times, and they orchestrated it the same every time. And so I was able to do it the same way, even though there was a key change.
DS: Were the ranges of any of the instruments affected by that?
TB: No, not at all, it was just a step, not that big a difference. "Smile" always uses five clarinets and strings, and that's it. Until the finale, of course.
DS: So what is the makeup of the orchestra?
TB: Two flutes, both doubling on piccolo, oboe, two clarinets [non-doubling], three reeds, reed one plays clarinet, soprano sax, alto sax; reed two plays clarinet, alto sax; reed three plays clarinet, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet and tenor sax. Bassoon, two horns, three trumpets with nine different mutes, two trombones, three percussion, harp, piano doubling on celesta, optional barbershop quartet, and strings.
DS: How many stands of strings did they use?
TB: It depends. My minimum requirement is 6/4/4/3/1, although we did it in Hanover last weekend and we had just about 70 players-12/10/8, so on. When you play in Europe,though, and there's one oboe part, they don't double, and you often have to add an English horn player.
DS: Can you tell me something about Chaplin's method of working with Raksin.
TB: The only record I have of that is from what David has told me. Remember, he was 23 when he did it. But he remembers it quite vividly. The way that he worked, he would often sit in the piano at the Chaplin studios at Sunset and LaBrea, and hack out tunes with very simple chord structures in the left hand, and David would essentially dictate it, take it.
DS: Transcribe it.
TB: Right. But sometimes it was simpler than that. For they would go to Musso and Frank's restaurant for dinner, and Charlie would say, "I'm thinking of something like this: da da DA, da da DA, da da dA," which is the famous story of course, and David says, "How do you make three notes into eight minutes of music?" Which is a bit of an exaggeration. It's not eight minutes of music
DS: Well, Beethoven made four notes into..
TB: Yeah, right.
DS: Ya got your retrograde, ya got your retrograde inversion.
TB: A C, a C, somebody give me a bouncy C.
DS: What kind of piano player was Chaplin, actually?
TB: Just an improviser, you know, liked to play this pseudo-Puccini kind of thing.
DS: Marco Babic from Belgrade brought this lovely film, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF [9413] A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA [by Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapic] to [the annual silent film festival in] Sacile last October, and said that Chaplin had played "Rhapsody in Blue" at the premiere, at a private screening.
TB: On the piano?
DS: Or played some part of it.
TB: That might be. He was a Gershwin fanatic. He loved Gershwin. I don't know about his abilities, his proficiency at the piano.Charlie, of course, couldn't read music, so, or as he liked to put it, "was not familiar with the traditional Western musical notation," implying that he of course knows the number system of China or something. So that's how he would transcribe the original sketch. And David would play it back for him, and he'd say, "That's what I'm thinking." Then he'd orchestrate it into a smaller sketch, and have Alfred Newman look at it, and he'd say, "This is good; make parts from it so Charlie can hear it." They'd go ahead and make parts, they'd put it in front of the musicians, who they employed for six weeks, full-time, and fed them. He'd hear it and give the yea or nay. And if it was nay, they'd start again and do it differently. Same original sketch, but they'd orchestrate it completely differently, they'd have to make parts again and he'd hear it again. So that's why the score is this thick. And it says on the score, often it'll be in Charlie's hand, it'll say, "OK," or "less flutes here but OK...more brass here...cheerier here," that kind of stuff. And so he would give the... I mean he really did oversee all the orchestration, he would hear it and say, "No, that's not what I had in mind, I need something more here...I mean he was very particular about he wanted it to sound. Cause he had a tremendous ear, he really did. He listened to a great deal of music, and knew what he wanted. That's great in terms of...God forbid it would be a director dictating the orchestration, who didn't know anything about music.. "Well, that's not really what I had in mind."
DS: Right.
TB: So he was a musician and he was a composer and he knew what he wanted. That's the great thing. I mean, he gets a lots of press about people saying, how much of it did he really compose. He really was there, he really did oversee it, if he could have written the notes down, he would have.
DS: And even if he didn't it, it was still his concept and his say-so.
TB: Right.
DS: So how do you as a composer feel about that film, and about THE KID, about the choices that he made? Given the score and given the film, do you think the music serves the film to the utmost?
TB: I don't feel really comfortable talking about THE KID's music, because I didn't have anything to do with that. Just as an outside observer, it's very different [from MODERN TIMES.] MODERN TIMES is really a miracle, because it serves the film so well. I mean he knew exactly what he was doing, both as a director and as a composer. And the music is just so strong. Compared to CITY LIGHTS, where there's great tunes and the music's delightful, but this is the first time he's actually trying to come up with a strong symphonic statement in the music.
DS: So do you think this is a natural progression in his development as a musician?
TB: Oh, absolutely. But interestingly, in the 50's and 60's his style immediately softened...like THE KID.
DS: It's not until 1971 that he did the music for that.
TB: At least late 60's. With Eric James. THE KID, and THE PILGRIM, the first Nationals came all around that time. The style just became kind of sentimental and softened. But MODERN TIMES is really kind of the last film that he wrote music for, that he was trying to create something of an orchestral force, which he hadn't done before. I think the music's brilliant, it's great, it's the best thing he's ever done. But I'm not very impartial.
DS: What kind of things do you encounter in synchronizing the score in a live performance?
TB: It's one of the hardest scores to conduct for silent film that's around.
DS: Are the meters regular?
TB: The meters are regular, but there's tempo changes constantly. It's like conducting, well, I was going to say cartoon music, but I don't want to give that implication.
DS: I understand what you mean. Let's put it this way. How long is the average cue?
TB: Well, that's kind of misleading too. The average cue is anywhere from twenty to thirty seconds to two minutes. But it's not just getting from one point to another. He meant for the music to mirror the action exactly .
DS: Without Mickey-Mousing it?
TB: No, kind of with Mickey-Mousing it.
DS: Well, then, why is not cartoon music?
TB: Cause that implies that the music is light. It's not. It's more...Mickey-Mousing is a Carl Davis term, which I hate, I hate that term, I don't like to use it.
DS: Strike it from the record.
TB: No, you can say that, actually. I hate that term. He was the first one I ever heard say that. I don't know, maybe it's older than that.
DS: I think it's an old Hollywood term.
TB: Is it? Well...it is much more like dance in that way, where the movement is either portrayed or inspired by the music. The cues may be short or long, but within those cues are certain hard hits that need to happen. For instance, at the end of the film, there's a scene where Charlie's running into the factory, cause there's work at last, and he reads it in the paper, and he jumps out of the dream shack, and he runs towards the factory. That sequence is probably two minutes long total, where he wakes up in the morning, he starts eating breakfast, reads the headline-there's a cue for that, the headline cue. There's a cue for when his head gets knocked by the beam from the house. He jumps up in the air, he kisses her, there's specific music for that, which lasts maybe ten seconds. And then where he's running to the factory, the first violins have to play this blazing 16th note passage...and it ends precisely on the moment he just squeaks into the gate with it shut. Blup! It goes from dagadagadagaga-blup! Like that. It's typical. Where I've got within that two minute spot, about nine or ten hard cues to hit.
DS: So you just have to have, even if you don't have perfect pitch, you have to have perfect tempo.
TB: The tempos have to be completely precise.
DS: You had the video of the film to practice with...
TB: Laserdisc.
DS: And this matches exactly, moment-for-moment, the score that we're going to hear Saturday night.
TB: Mm hmm.
DS: So you're able to just get those tempos in your head as you work with the image?
TB: In fact, we had a dress rehearsal in Hanover last weekend. And the film projector was at a fixed speed, slightly, like 24 and a half frames [a second], as opposed to 24. And they didn't tell me that.
DS: That must have driven you crazy.
TB: It was almost unplayable at a half a frame more a second. Maybe a whole frame, maybe 25, but I don't think so. And I said, that was faster, what's going on? And they said, it's 24, it's fixed. And I said, check it. I'm telling you, it's unplayable. I mean, I can feel it. Every cell in my body can tell you, I've worked with this film for 14 months, it's not 24. And it was 24 and a half frames. And I've done it several times before, and I practice it on my own, I just know, I can feel what the tempo is.
DS: So in that particular theater...
TB: The dress rehearsal was not where the performance was, fortunately. I said, I'd like some documentation, showing me that you went in there with a strobe
DS: (laughs)
TB: Seriously, I said, I want somebody to come here and promise me that's 24. I was so angry...it was the European premiere, there were 5,000 people, it was an enormous thing...I want to sleep tonight, you know...But conducting it is a whole 'nother matter. It's very difficult, it's very hard.
DS: Who did you study conducting with?
TB: No one.
DS: How did you learn?
TB: I had a few lessons with Wilhelm Sokol and Milton Katims, who still lives in Seattle. But I never went to school for conducting formally at all, and what they can teach you in terms of conducting can be done in a few lessons, the rest of it is just doing it, that's the difficult part. So then I got the post with the Olympia Chamber Orchestra when I was 24. And it was really there that I blossomed as a conductor, where I was able to do regular subscription series concerts, and felt more comfortable.
DS: Have you composed music for sound films?
TB: It's never really appealed to me. Give me a choice of doing a completely new sound film and a silent film-for the same amount of money-I'd take the silent film in an instant.
DS: Same amount of music?
TB: Two hours worth of music versus forty-five [minutes]? I'd rather do the two hours. Doesn't make any difference.
DS: What have you got cooking after this is all over with MODERN TIMES? The tour goes on for how long?
TB: Two years.
DS: The entire world? Going to South America also?
TB: Going to Brazil, China, South Africa, and so forth.
DS: Will your family get to come with you?
TB: Hope so, if I can afford it. In terms of what's coming down the pike for me, I'm rather leaving it open on purpose for right now. I've never had an opportunity to do this...there's a couple of things that are enticing me and vice versa,but I'm just kind of playing it cool.
[The conversation turned to what style new music for silent films should be written in.]
TB: In terms of film, you can look at the music through the eyes of the year 2000, and try to say something new, or you can serve the role of what the musician would have done in the time period.
DS: But which musician? You know, if you were the the producer or the director of Film X in 1928 and you have your choice of anybody who's in Hollywood, knowing now what you might not have known then, who would you choose to score? Or if you could call up Stravinsky and say come do this this thing..
TB: Which they tried to do...
TB: That's what I mean by getting into the director's head...what kind of composer would the director have chosen. For example, in SUNRISE, which I got a lot of flack for, forwriting that score-Murnau had nothing to do with the music for SUNRISE. It was all Riesenfeld, and he made no choice about it, made no input, it was just done by somebody else.
DS: There are things I like about that score, but there are things that just utterly drive me up the wall.
TB: It's OK. You know, for a compiled score, it's not so bad. And the fact that they recorded it over a phone line...but my stipulation with doing that score was that they keep the original on there for the Laserdisc release so that people could have a choice. What I didn't want to do was suppress Hugo's score in place of mine. So it was important to me that it was on there. And not many people know that.
DS: Why did people give you flack?
TB: Because it wasn't the original.
DS: Well, too bad.
TB: And Carl [Davis] got flack, too, because he rerecorded the original compilation score. He found the original materials, and then suppressed the other one.
DS: But putting the Chopin 2nd prelude in there-you know, for an audience of that time, and I feel that this is true of all scores that are using existing source material-at that time maybe the audience didn't know a lot of this material, but eighty years later we know much of this stuff and it has completely extramusical associations.. It's like putting the William Tell overture in now-you just can't put that music in without having another visual image in its place. So either it's just for comic effect, or...
TB: Well, there is a reason, though, for it being historically accurate. Like, this is what he did. It doesn't matter how bad it is, this is what he did. However, what I wanted to do was to try to experience the film in perhaps a different way, which would give it more meaning that an old recording [can make] people from this age sometimes draw away from. That's not necessarily a really poor reason to to do it. Especially with the fact that silent film appreciation has [been growing lately].
DS: I was also going to say that their notion of what is sentiment and our notion of what is sentiment is radically different, and that very often I feel that there's much more depth in the visual image to be extracted by looking at the film through contemporary musical ears than they were able to do at that time, because either they were working under such pressure to get the product out as always, or simply because they heard music with ears that had eighty less years of music-not even eighty, because in that time we've had a thousand years of music at our disposal and everybody knows it, so it's like the field of possibilities has expanded greatly, and a couple of notes of something can hit you in a way which would have been meaningless to them then.
TB: Right. I agree. So the point was, in terms of the director choosing his composer...directors at that time period didn't think that much about the music, as you know. Some did, but some didn't. In terms of what I know now, I would say that I try to be the composer that the director would have wanted, which is not easy to do. When I did THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, for example, I knew the director asked would it be at all possible to play [Richard] Strauss or Schoenberg. So you have to think about when the time period was.
DS: CALIGARI is 1919...
TB: But he started to make the film in '18. Thinking about what Strauss operas were there, I'm sure he was probably thinking about something [like] Elektra or Salome, before Rosenkavalier. And in terms of Schoenberg, I'm sure he's thinking of Transfigured Night, and not Pierrot Lunaire...taking what Strauss was doing and pushing it a little. And then of course Strauss withdrew, by doing The Rosebearer, said, Oh that's too much for me, this is what I really want to do. And other people took it.
DS: But if you could propel him into the future and give him a choice of musicians from the last century instead of what was available at that time.
TB: But I wouldn't do that, though. I would say, only what was available up to 1918. Cause we can't predict what a director...
DS: But for those that...
TB: You wouldn't do that-I've never heard you step over the year at all, as far as I can tell. All of your stuff, even your dance numbers, were strictly...
DS: No, the dance numbers, I feel very...I'm not an expert on dance music of the 20's, by any means...
TB: Well, the Dipsy Doodle and the Charlseton and all that stuff, I can hear all of those, they were all pre-'25. That's why I'm an admirer of yours, because I think your sensibility about that is terrific.
DS: Well, somebody like Dick Hyman would be much more honed into...
TB: Well, Dick, yeah. Do you know him?
DS: Yeah.
TB: I met him once.
DS: He's wonderful... I'm trying to think of an example of whether I've done things that were just completely out of style. Well, I mean the Chinese films I've played for, they told me very specifically, we want Western music for these Chinese dramas, even if they're set in the...
TB: That makes sense, actually. So pseudo-Chinese.
DS: No, I heard very strange things on the original tracks of some of them, even 78's played at the wrong speed.
TB: They didn't say, we want no pentatonic...
DS: They weren't specific about that. They said, they would have played Beethoven, real traditional Western orchestral music-Rossini-because they wanted to be Westernized.
TB: They were Chinese films, though.
DS: Chinese films.
TB: That makes sense.
DS: They were shown in the big cities in '29, '30. There were scenes, of course, that took place in urban venues that had dance bands, and people are dressing in Western fashion. But out in the sticks...unless there was a folk song that somebody was singing, and I could lift that off the track...I heard supposedly original synchronized scores that had Rossini arias played at twice the speed.
TB: Like Chinese opera.
DS: It sounded like that [does imitation]. Really bizarrre.
TB: (laughs) That's really funny...well, I wouldn't presume what a director would have liked if the film was made twenty years later.
DS: Have you scored METROPOLIS?
TB: No. There's a great score to that already, as far as I know. I've never heard it.
DS: The Huppertz score, the original?
TB: I've never heard it.
DS: "Finlandia" is a big part of that score.
TB: Is it?
DS: The whole sequence where [Maria] is addressing the workers in the Tower of Babel scene...it's "Finlandia." [sings] And there's Schubert and Debussy and all kinds of things. Tempowise it's OK, but today it sounds cliched.
Timothy Brock is conducting music to several short Chaplin films in the 2002 edition of Cinema Ritrovato.
Donald Sosin and his wife, singer Joanna Seaton will perform for various films in the 2002 Cinema Ritrovato, including three Mary Pickford films. Sosin's scores for NOSFERATU and THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI are available on DVD through Kino International.
Recordings and Live Performances
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