For Christoph Bull, UCLA organ professor and, this weekend,
accompanist to the films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and
Harold Lloyd, sometimes silent movies are best left silent.
“Last year I was doing the movie “˜The General’
with Buster Keaton, and there was one scene where a train was
crashing down a bridge, and it was such a powerful image that I
decided I wasn’t going to do anything, that I was going to
leave it in silence and let that speak to the audience,” Bull
said. “The silence was better than anything I could have done
with the music.”
Silence may not be a big part of Bull’s work at UCLA
Live’s “Silent Comedy Classics” on March 4, but
the idea of adapting his accompaniment to the films’ demands
remains. Playing along with three comedic film shorts will push
Bull’s accompaniment into lighter territory and leave him
more willing to fill space with sound.
Taking a traditionalist stance is something he believes will
preserve the essence of Chaplin’s, Keaton’s and
Lloyd’s endeavors.
“For this particular show, I’m probably going to
take a more traditionalist view, but I definitely like the idea of
having modernist elements too, but I don’t see myself
straying too far from the tradition. I would do it if the film was
a little bit more abstract or more serious,” Bull said.
Conventionally, silent movies have had improvised accompaniment
by an organ or piano, the musician coordinating his changes in
emotion and intensity with the events on-screen. During the advent
of film, the accompanist often had little more preparation than the
audience.
“I’ve got a friend who is 93 years old and he did it
when silent movies came out in the ’20s,” Bull said.
“Back then, a lot of times the organist would see the movie
for the first time that the first audience would see it, so at that
time it was really made up, and I think he still does it like
that.”
Although much of Bull’s work will likely be improvisation,
he prefers to prepare more than the films’ original musicians
did. Opting to watch the movies before the show allows him to grasp
their thematic architecture. From there, he envisions the sort of
musical ideas to develop, when to restate them, and how these
elements can build to a climax and truly speak the movie’s
essence in the way Chaplin, Keaton or Lloyd intended.
After viewing the film and understanding how its parts make the
whole, Bull researches music of the time and decides how to fit
stylistically appropriate sounds to the framework he uncovered
through viewing. With this background, even his modernist
underpinnings will be grounded in the style of the time.
Interestingly enough, Bull found the resources for this search
right here at UCLA.
“The UCLA music library has a department called Special
Collections, and they’ve actually got sheet music written for
the purpose of accompanying silent movies. What’s funny about
it is that some of it is written for a specific movie, but they
also have music that’s just general emotions,” Bull
said. “There is a sheet of music called “˜love’
and another sheet of music called “˜storms.’ So
I’m researching that, not so much because I want to play
exactly what’s on the sheet, but I want to understand the
style of music.”
Improvising in different styles has always piqued the
organist’s interest, so Bull was understandably eager to take
part in the tradition of silent movie showings accompanied by the
Royce Hall organ. For him, improvisation produces music
unquestionably his, yet molded by its style into a larger
whole.
Making a mantra of seeking new styles within which to improvise,
Bull has also turned to areas more distant than Royce Hall.
“I went to India last December to play with (sitar player)
Nishat Khan, and we performed his original music, which was based
on traditional Indian music, but the way he approached it was
almost like jazz,” Bull said. “The melody is first
introduced, and then all the players get a chance to jam on it and
then improvise on it. I really enjoy the process of making up stuff
that’s based on a tradition but is also original.”
As far as his accompaniment of silent films goes, Bull’s
work to improvise in this language will only be aided by Royce
Hall’s Skinner organ. Built in 1930, it dates back to a time
when live musical accompaniment for movies was common and others
were being constructed across Los Angeles in venues such as
Hollywood’s El Capitan and the San Gabriel Civic
Auditorium.
The Skinner organ was created with more serious, orchestral
purposes in mind, but Bull says this will only make its adaptation
to this role all the more interesting.
“Now our Royce Hall organ has about 100 stops,” said
Bull, describing the control on an organ that selects a particular
sound. “And so each of those generates a different sound and
combining the stops also generates different sounds. The
versatility is very high with this organ. … It’s
well-suited for the style because there are a lot of sound
possibilities.”
Bull will get to apply these possibilities to Charlie
Chaplin’s “The Rink,” about a waiter whose
roller-skating ability woos a socialite; Harold Lloyd’s
“Bumping into Broadway,” about a bespectacled
playwright who spends all of his money to pay a struggling
actress’ rent; and Buster Keaton’s “Cops,”
in which a man unwittingly interrupts a policeman’s parade
and soon finds himself chased around town by the revelers.