I believe there is an earlier recording of the same work, at least I seem to recall some LP that included a performance of it (though I never saw or owned it).

Also, speaking of early cinema, I just spent a week attending a ton of papers/lectures and screenings at the Domitor conference held this year in Ann Arbor, MI (check out their website for more details).

Domitor is a society of academics devoted to the first 20 years of early cinema (imagine, 1915 is already too recent for these guys!) and the conference was attended by people such as Ian Christie, Tom Gunning, and Richard Abel.

And if Sean thinks I'm a jerk for name-dropping and quoting sources all over the map, he should attend a conference of academics some time where every paper is a living bibliography with quotes and references to every film scholar who ever held a pen in his/her hand!

One of the many highlights of the conference was a magic lantern show using a tri-unial lantern (they used one actually built in the 1890s and showed existing slides from that period as well!).

The lantern show made it clear that there was a complex & impressive projected visual media set to music even before the first film projection in 1895. In other words there was a pre-film film music! And even if the Saint-Saens score is considered the first original score, it's also obvious that original cues, musical phrases, and even songs for piano or orchestra that were specifically written to accompany specific films must have appeared right at the beginning. So too were cribs from classical works. Hornerisms were there from the get-go.

This idea that movie music emerged to drown out the sound of the projector is bunk. There's too much history of theatrical presentations set to music prior to 1895 for this to be the reason film music developed. Rather, the new film worked its way into an already existing form of public theatrical media presentation that included slides, songs, music, speakers, and vaudeville-type music hall numbers & skits. And multi-media events that encorporated both slides, songs, and short films were common, so that going to the movies in 1900 wasn't just going to a night of only films in some places but a night of many different kinds of performance.

There were also screenings of films from 1898-1915 that were accompanied by original cues for films written around that time. The films were shown at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor which was built in 1928 and the cues were played on the theater's piano and theater organ during the week of screenings. Some of the cues published at the time to accompany films and their creative use by performers (notably both Gershwin & Shostakovich worked jobs where they played piano during film screenings) are very inventive.

By the time 1908 and the DUKE OF GUISE comes along, the cinema is already 13 years old and already situated in theaters around the globe. So I wouldn't be surprised to discover that full or partial scores were written specifically for films at least a few years before the Saint-Saens score. Of course, Saint-Saens published his as an opus number and so it survives. Also, the majority of early scores were for the most part indeed library cues, that is generic cues written to accompany all sorts of different films. A cue that was written to play in a specific film probably had an extended life in other films after that and so following the geneaology and provenance of these things is probably pointless if not impossible.

In that game Saint-Saens and the DUKE OF GUISE win out.

BTW, if Newman, Steiner, and Korngold scores come from the Golden Age, what age do we call scores from 1908? The Stone Age?

In any case, according to the liner notes for the Harmonia Mundi album, Saint-Saens was 73 years old when he wrote this, the "very first" score. The notes hint at why Saint-Saens was approached to do the score (the producers were trying to create films at an artistic level above popular entertainment and hired many actors and writers from the Comedie Francaise) but don't explain the details of the commission or why he agreed to do it.

The film runs 18 minutes and this recording of the music runs 19:39. Re-records, geesh, can't people ever get them right?

The music runs wall to wall throughout five scenes. There are somewhat abrupt shifts and breaks in the music that we can associate with on-screen action and changes of setting or scene. However, the changes don't differ too much from the natural changes that occur in regular concert works.

Very shortly after an introductory passage the score moves to a passage dominated by flutes. So already in the first score we have a kind of main title and change in the music to indicate a change from the title into the film proper. So the score uses a theatrical/film scoring technique right from the start rather than employing mere concert form. However, the style & form of the score overall sounds much more like a Mozart concerto than it sounds anything like a film score in the sense we would be familiar with. The score's most interesting feature is furioso passages that Saint-Saens uses twice (!), first for what I presume is the assassination in the middle of the film and then second for the funeral pyre at the very end.

The music was ok, not great--and as I said, even with more touches of dramatic intensity than usual, it sounded more like concert music than film music (and I suppose that only makes sense, that the first film score by a 73-year-old Saint-Saens would sound more like 19th Century concert music than 20th Century Jerry Goldsmith--or should I say 20th Century-Fox Jerry Goldsmith?).

Ironically, the album moves from the DUKE OF GUISE score to Saint-Saens's most popular work, CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS, written in 1886. CARNIVAL is a series of short pieces representing different animals with different motifs that sounds much more like later film scoring technique than the approach he used on the very first film score!

In any case, there is a history of media music that goes back before the first films and an evolution of the film score that begins in early cinema years before Steiner's KING KONG and long before JNH's KING KONG. Perhaps this is a realm more for scholars than film music enthusiasts but perhaps too there is some music here that needs to be reclaimed, re-recorded, and "re-"listened to. Even if DUKE OF GUISE isn't anything special to me, it may be to others, and there may be other works from early cinema, buried in the rubble of a music library somewhere, that would astonish us if they were heard again or heard more often.

Domitor:
http://www.domitor.uni-trier.de/

Magic Lanterns:
http://www.magiclantern.org.uk
http://www.magiclanternsociety.org

The UK site has a lot of history and links to other sites about pre-cinema visual media. One interesting fact is that most of the magic lantern slide shows were set to what seems to be in part original music. One description I read of an early Phantasmagoria (a kind of haunted house presentation with illusions involving "smoke and mirrors") says it included weird, eerie music! I haven't been able to confirm that with other texts and it seems difficult to see how musicians could play in the dark. However, many effects at these shows came from behind walls and below the stage and there were indeed sound effects so it's likely there was also music. So imagine it, there was a kind of proto-Herrmann out there scoring slide shows with horror music around the 1790s!!

If true, that's a total mind-boggler! It basically adds 100 years to what we think of as the film music form. Instead of film music emerging after the creation of cinema we can see it as the continuation of a music used to accompany pre-cinema visuals that worked its way through the birth canal of the dramatic uses of music and media until it arrived step by step to piano playing at pre-1900 screenings, the DUKE OF GUISE, the Griffith films, the original scores to the 1922 NOSFERATU, the 1924 THIEF OF BAGDAD, the 1925 POTEMKIN, the 1926 HOLY MOUNTAIN, the 1927 WINGS, the first scores of the sound era, all up through music to films, games, and TV issued just this week. Indeed the term film music may be too narrow. Perhaps we should speak of media or entertainment music (music for televison, theater, opera, magic lanterns, phantasmagories, arcade machines, Royal Fireworks, ice cream trucks, and computerized video games, etc., etc.) of which film music is just a mere subset.

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
generally considered the first score specifically composed to accompany a film.

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I think it's generally considered the first score specifically composed to accompany a film, by an established composer.

I'm pretty sure you're right later on when you say that there were probably other specifically written scores that simply didn't survive.

I'm sure there has been some scholarly research on cue sheets from this period and I'm sure more will follow. Some day we may be able to say that Joe Schmoe composed a competely original score for the 3 minute 1899 film Eat My Shorts and here is the sheet music. But given the nature of such a find, I suppose we'd all rather say a more towering figure like Saint-Saens was the one to break the barrier. Also, while it's one thing for some cinema pianist to noodle an original score for piano for 3 minutes, what was the first originally-composed orchestral music for film?? The Saint-Saens or something else? At least with the Saint-Saens we know he was hired to write a score and that score supposedly played with all showings of the film wherever the film was presented.

An earlier Domitor conference that was devoted to sound in silent films actually had someone play original US film scores written for features from 1912 as one of its events.

But pre-GUISE scores from the very earliest days of cinema projection (1895-1908) are a mystery. It's just so hard to know today what the procedures were from theater to theater across the globe. For example, one theater in Italy or Germany may have had a staff pianist who wrote original scores for the films that played there, but then when the same film played in another theater, that composer's music didn't follow along with it. Then in Denmark, a film's producer may have paid a composer to write cues or songs and this sheet music was sent with the film to all its venues except that maybe some places didn't play the music or the music didn't travel across borders when the film played in other countries. Not every country had established movie theaters in their cities right away. In some cases, travelling showmen arrived in town with a projector and film reels, set up shop in a beer hall, church, fairground tent, or auditorium of some kind and showed films that way. Often, but not always there was a pianist and music (not always because you couldn't lug a piano around if you are travelling by train and not every venue had one available), but just what this music was and who it was written by again are mysteries. So, many of the details about how film music worked in early cinema are just lost to time (as indeed so many of the films from this period are lost themselves). We have some reliable information in the form of published sheet music, trade journals, distribution records, and even personal diaries of people's experiences at movie theaters, but our overall picture is still very sketchy because the early cinema was not a monolithic whole but a chameleon which changed from year to year, country to country, city to city, and even theater to theater.

As to early film music recordings....A German museum issued a nicely packaged set of music from German Cinema that included some recordings of very early silent film music. There were even some recordings where Franz Waxman was one of the performers (from the 1920s or 1930s).

The "early" music was pretty basic stuff. When I played it for a Music appreciation class they were able to identify the emotion or possible scene it could fit. Interestingly, the music tends to sound a bit like a cross between Beethoven and Mendelssohn.

Perhaps we should call this the "Clay Era" and the stuff we get now "The Copper" or "Tin" age?

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And even if the Saint-Saens score is considered the first original score, it's also obvious that original cues, musical phrases, and even songs for piano or orchestra that were specifically written to accompany specific films must have appeared right at the beginning. So too were cribs from classical works. Hornerisms were there from the get-go.

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Yes. Max Winkler was one of those who prepared existing pieces for cinema, and he later reflected on the insufficiencies of this system (as excerpted in the Limbacher book just mentioned):

"Every scene, situation, character, action, emotion, every nationality, emergency, wind storm, rain storm and brain storm, every dancer, vamp, cowboy, thief and gigolo, eskimo and zulu, emperor and streetwalker, colibri and elephant – plus every printed title that flickered in the faces of the five-cent to twenty-five-cent audiences – had to be expressed in music, and we soon realized that our catalog of so-called Dramatic and Incidental Music was quite insufficient to furnish the simply colossal amounts of music needed by an ever-expanding industry" (Winkler [1951] in Limbacher 1974: 21)

By the way, I've always been intrigued by Tom Gunning's "Cinema of Attractions" idea as it relates to early cinema. In my own master thesis, I tried to apply this thought to contemporary, neo-classical films.

It makes some sense that the first people who went to see movies went to see the apparatus itself as a novelty, something which isn't isolated to early cinema as movies introduced sound, widescreen, 3-D, Cinerama, and Imax. A large part of the appeal here isn't the narrative content by itself. I'm sure early filmgoers were just fascinated to see motion on a screen.

The idea that early cinema represents an alternative space in which to experience the world differently is a bit harder to jump to. In a way all cinema space is alternative space even the most classical Hollywood narrative. So while Gunning points to pre-narrative cinema as a kind of special realm, I'm not so sure all cinema doesn't apply in the same way.

I mean Gunning is right that the cinema is a cinema of attractions because it is still a cinema of attractions. People go to movies to see things move be it their favorite stars, be it humping or car chases. They also go to follow a story but film stories are just not as advanced or detailed as what you'll find in literature, so I feel narrative is only one half of the form & content blend that people attend movies for. But even if narrative is weak, to seperate a cinema of attractions out from a cinema of narratives even in early cinema seems a lot harder to do than Gunning suggests.

As for modernity, the cinema is only one factor in a world that changed radically between the later 19th & 20th Centuries (electric lights, the bicycle, automobile, telephone, cinema, airplane, and WWI) all of which pretty much destroyed how people lived in the world previously.

And at the start, cinema is a product of the change rather than a commentary on it.

As I'm suggesting, I'm not sure cinema needed narrative to be an attraction in the early days. In some respects, it doesn't even need it now. Cinema is still imagery. The story just fills things between images of sex or violence. In 1903, you went to the movies to see things move or shots of distant places and that was it, no story would have been fine if the images were stimulating enough on their own. But even here there were tasks being followed, a stage and musical past being adapted to the cinema. And this kind of shoots down the cinema of attractions idea. Because when you crank a camera and film something, be it 1906 or 2006, a static image unless quickly cut against another static image, defeats the whole idea of motion in motion pictures. You want to film a person or a donkey cart or a boat moving across the screen and the minute you do that narrative emerges because the questions come up, who are these people, where are they going, why are they going there, where were they before, etc. etc. Cinema is narrative cinema, even at one shot 30 seconds in length.

I saw a film of Annie Oakley from 1894, this is a kinetoscope film, this comes a year before projection, you looked into a nickelodeon box with a viewfinder and saw the image. And even here, plates are being thrown up before Oakley and she shoots them and they break up. This isn't a big involved narrative but it does show that the cinema was approached as detailing action over time right from the very start. Edison's first filmed image of a man sneezing follows suit. It's not a guy just standing there, he does something and that's what makes it cinema.

Since we're talking film theory we can talk of Jean Mitry and his "arrow montage" idea. You have a shot of a cowboy standing by a tree. Into the shot comes an arrow that sticks in the tree above his head. Even though the image doesn't have a physical cut, Mitry sees this as a form of montage because situation A is altered by event B. So a guy getting up from bed, filling a flask with water, taking the flask to a table, etc. etc. can be seen as a narrative expressed through the montage of changes over time which is a good description of early cinema.

One thing I noticed spending a week with academics is that they can be pretty insular and miss the point. And if you come from another discipline and don't speak the academese they don't think you're qualified to offer opinions or put things together into patterns. Some were great people but the academic approach can be a trap if you're not careful.

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First off, I'm not sure Gunning can really take whole credit for the "cinema of attractions" idea. I wish I could point to some authors that pre-date him on this, but it seems that almost every historian that discussed the emergence of cinema in the books I read growing up talks about early cinema being like a sideshow attraction. Indeed, a lot of early film presenters and producers are called showmen in the trade literature of the time.

Of course, my point is that people went to see the cinema as the novelty of watching people move and seeing the world re-produced (and Edison for one thought the novelty would wear of--and it might have had projection not been introduced) but once there found visual spectacle (and then narrative). But, even though people eventually went to movies for their stories, stories still ride hand in hand with the visual splendor/attraction aspect that has never left.

Of course, people don't say they go to the movies to see cars move on a large screen with stadium seating. But complaints about smaller cine-plex screens and their replacement with larger stadium seating style large screens people prefer created changes in theaters nationwide.

I'm not sure I completely understand Gunning when he sees early cinema as pre-narrative or as a special realm. It's true that classical Hollywood continuity rules standardize how people understand visuals (a fade out usually means a scene ends and the next will take place elsewhere at a later time--we rarely expect the scene to fad in 3 seconds later from where we just were; a lap dissolve usually means an advance in time in the same locale or a concurrent event in a different locale, etc.). And there may have been some room for play in the period when these devices were picking up their initial meanings. But in the end, I think the metaphors that could be easily understood were the ones that took root and the ones which took some intellectual stretching were marginalized. And this is not some great loss.

I don't have all the examples of early films under my belt that Gunning may have seen. I got the impression from a few of his statements that he'd seen just about every Biography film in existance. But even so, my guess is, you may find alternative ways of presenting things in early cinema than we are used to now now that Hollywood has codified film grammar, but that these things present the trial and error of treading new ground rather than a paving of new roads that Griffith then cut off.

In a way, if you think there is something radical to Griffith's use of cross-cutting, then Eisenstein and the Russians seem to be writing their own film language all over again as Griffith did.

So, you have Gunning's idea of a pre-Griffith cinema with its potential to be a unique language, then you have Griffith and codification of standard Hollywood continuity which becomes the basic "English" of world cinema, and then you have the Russians whose approach to montage is another way to assemble film to create meaning.

It's not the be-all, end-all categorization of film history and is certainly open to debate, but it's a good point-of-departure.

In any case, you'll see that Bazin separated between the image fixation of the pionéer period with the image fixation of later stylized film directions.

Just finished reading through a new book on film music by Ian Johnson, "William Alwyn: The Art of Film Music." This is worth a look if you are interested primarily in British film, especially wartime documentaries, and William Alwyn's contiribution to film.

Some of what you are seeing in this discussion of academic approach can be discovered in this book.

Scarecrow Press is releasing various books on film music and they have been hit or miss. It is beginning to look like the academic approach from Europe or America influences how the music and film structure is discussed. It does not always work well on the European side when discussing an American film. There has not been a reverse opportunity to compare this yet.

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Originally posted by sakman:
I think Lou and I had a similar interchange about this elsewhere. But there is a distinct difference in approach to spotting of music in film in Europe. The understanding of music as a more integral part of the film, a disdain for the "tunesmiths of Hollywood", and less concern about the music on its own apart from the film. However there are plenty of examples (Vaughan Williams "Sinfonia Antarctica" for one) where themes/ideas were reshaped for an integral or organic piece of concert music.

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Well, we're going off-topic here, but I don't really understand this paragraph. First of all, it's almost impossible to make a distinction between "USA" and "Europe". Not only because Europe consists of so many different countries, but because geography is not the dividing line here. Film styles and directions is.

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Originally posted by sakman:
Just finished reading through a new book on film music by Ian Johnson, "William Alwyn: The Art of Film Music." This is worth a look if you are interested primarily in British film, especially wartime documentaries, and William Alwyn's contiribution to film.

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Basically, I was taught that the cinema follows two strains as you mentioned: one that tries for "realism" and the other which abandons it. The Lumiere Bros. were cited as the pioneers of the realist strain and Melies as the pioneer of the un-realist strain. However, in more recent years, our take on these things has broken down somewhat. Lumiere films are seen today as having been directed rather than merely shot. There are certain ways of shooting that will make a film shot resemble how an individual experiences reality (long takes, use of lenses that match the human eye, directly-recorded sound, existing lighting, on-location filmming--no constructed sets or theatrical devices, etc.). But even that doesn't mean a film shot is reality or that reality is something we should even aim for.

While one thing I like about Renoir and the neo-realists is the look created by their on-location filming (imagine A Day in the Country shot in a studio?!), the idea of film "realism" is a construction, a code, as artificial as say the Dogme 95 rules. The result may appear to be more realistic, closer to how we experience every-day reality, and I'm not against it, but real life is one thing and a movie that resembles real life is still another and that other is a false re-construction no matter how closely it mirrors "the real".

I haven't read Bazin in a while and I don't know if he seperates pioneer early cinema out as something special and distinct or just dismisses it as some kind of pre-natal period before the films that count emerge.

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I'm a little lost about what sakman is trying to say here too so please try to say it again, the more words you put out the better chance I can have of putting it together.

That said, let me add, I'm not against academics per se. I'm just saying that, for civilized intellectuals, some can become quite snotty, snobby, and territorial when it comes to facts and theories.

For example: Not unlike the calcified church that said Aristotle was the be all-end all on science and refused to allow any other kind of new input for 800 years, there are trends of belief in academia. Once accepted, these become the rules, and there is a lot of ridicule should you disagree. Camille Paglia has fought against Foucault and post-structuralism in academia for decades. I'm not entirely sure the p-s guys don't have something to contribute, but I see her points about them, and whatsmore, I see the anger she stirs up in those who can't believe someone would attack their precious viewpoints.

If we are seeking facts, information, the true gen on how things work in the world, there really isn't room for academic stardom and entrenchment. I figure every fact is a falsehood just waiting to be found so by new information we don't have yet.

That's why I like writing here at this forum than coming up with papers for conferences and publication. I figure everything I do is a guess and speculation and what I figure is solid today might have to be completely gutted and thought-a-fresh 3 years from now. Not just in what is said but even in how to communicate it. And perhaps, there is a time to stop, when you've said it all, you have nothing new, and start to repeat yourself.

I absolutely love the Herrmann anecdote about Toscanini. Toscanini was known most of all for conducting Beethoven. After hearing aperformance, Herrmann said to him, you conducted this differently this year than you did last year. Toscanini answered, "Last year I was a fool."

Every house in the US should have this posted on the fridge or above the computer: "Last year I was a fool."

You have to keep trying to understand while presumming that you can never really become educated. Oh, you might find some gimmick you can base a career on and get through your days well fed, but real advancement, the kind that drags the human race along with it, requires openness to new possibilities.

[Does it mean Pirate movies with electric guitars? Maybe yes, probably no. Zimmer isn't just a fool last year. He's a fool this year and next year too.]

I wish I could read the book on Alwyn you mention. There's a documentary on Malcom Arnold that was shown on the South Bank Show in the UK a year or so back that would have been neat to see as well.

As for how academics write about film music and also the differences in European and American academics themselves and the different approaches to film scoring that Europeans and Americans have, that might be left for an entirely new topic.

What I'm considering here is the length of time before films had film music that the form and style had to gestate through similar media, something I'd never really considered before. I never thought that a work composed in 1850 or 1790 could be considered a kind of father or garndfather to film music.

And what I'm considering here is just what early cinema (1893-1915) and early cinema music was/meant to the people of that time (and what there might be in it for us today).

It isn't easy to do. We are not fin-de-siecle folk. We don't think the way they do, dress the way they do, experience life the way they do. The examples of movies and music from the period are few and far between, most lost or fragmented or disconnected. And we can only speculate on what theatrical presentations were like before film. So to get an overall context and view of what the cinema was like in its first two decades requires a ton of archeology that is still being done (albeit too late in the game).

What work has been done has given rise to new theories and speculations, some of which make a good deal of sense. Other work has shattered previous notions but we shouldn't make new stone of it since it too could be shattered next week by some new idea, theory, or find.

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Originally posted by sakman:
There is a problem when talking about larger generalizations. But there is a difference between how the composers think about writing for film in European cinema....again generally speaking. Even so, the results still may appear to be similar.

Not sure if that helped any.

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I'm afraid not. I still maintain that there are differences between the various European countries. Furthermore, there are European filmmakers making films in the style of Classical Hollywood Cinema just as there are alternative modes of expression.

Bazin does indeed separate early "pioneer" cinema from the two strands. It's Griffith which in his opinion is the true point-of-departure. But I agree that it's difficult to maintain a rigid separation between the two. Neo-realist films, for example, also included studio sets once in a while and obviously had those melodramatic scores that were/are typical of the "invisible" Hollywood Cinema.

In many ways, the whole realism debate relates to a previous topic you did about how "speakable" music is (which I never got around to), i.e. the REPRESENTATION of film/music and the entire film semiology direction.

BUT....we're drifting off-topic again (damn that "Cinema of Attractions"! ). Finding out what the first REAL film score was is an archeological activity that requires very specific parameters. An example of what a non-specific retrospective method may result in, can be viewed (ironically) if you click "tutorial" at the following site: http://www.di.fm/edmguide/edmguide.html (the origins of electronic music).

P.S. Academics have an undeserved reputation for being insular and arrogant. Personally, as someone who have been inside academia for more than 10 years, I find that we're really not very different from anyone else. There are some madcap professors around, but they do not represent us all. It's really nothing to be afraid of.

Today, a digital designer is mostly likely to "screen" his work in an installation of some kind, a museum, a store window, video-projected onto the side of a building, etc., not a regular movie theater. Also, the images of Video Art/Digital Media are not typically based in Hollywood narrative. Some even tend towards interactivity. Subsequently, they are similar to the very first movie film images in that the apparatus+image+venue=attraction site. And of course, digital art also means digital art audio.