NEWS
Rodney Sauer and Denver pianist Hank Troy were honored with the David Shepard Career Achievement Award at the 2023 Denver Silent Film Festival.
The 2024 Silent Film Benefit Calendar is available! Visit the Calendar page to order.
The Grauman's Theatres Silent Film Score Collection has been digitized, and is available online. I acquired the collection in 2013, and donated it to the American Music Research Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. It consists of 3,845 scores, almost 400,000 pages, from a library that was started at Grauman's Million Dollar Theatre and later expanded at Grauman's Metropolitan Theatre in Los Angeles. The library s particularly rich in classical music re-orchestrated for theater orchestras, the Schirmer's Galaxy series, and also contains many of the photoplay works of Arthur Kay and Richard Drigo.
We've finished recording a number of new photoplay music cues for a new restoration of The Johnstown Flood. Here is our version of Irene Varley's Hearts Desire, which we use mostly for Janet Gaynor's scenes.
I've put up some pictures of the 1929 film program at the Chautauqua Auditorium, which is pencilled on the wall of the projection booth.
I have added some recordings to the Photoplay Music Starter Kit page. For musicians interested in trying compilation scoring, this is a collection of over 90 pieces, fully orchestrated, with which you can compile a score for almost any silent film.
KDFC Classical FM in San Francisco chose our album Entreaty as their "Album of the Week" for June 11, 2018!
Our most recent album! Mont Alto presents: Entreaty: Music of the Silent Cinema. Available for purchase(as a CD or a download) through CD Baby. This album features 24 tracks in a "romantic" mood, whether that love is passionate, innocent, desperate, or doomed. These tracks are excerpts from recent silent film scores, including The Blot, Children of Divorce, College, The Coward, Les Deux Timides, The Fall of Babylon, The Flying Ace, Mothers of Men, The Penalty, Ramona, The Silent Enemy, Timothy’s Quest, and People on Sunday.
Most of the music comes from libraries of music owned by silent film theater orchestras, and was published for film use.
Online album notes can be found here.
Beggars of Life Blu-Ray
Mont Alto's score for Beggars of Life was released from Kino-Lorber!
Here's an essay on the compilation score that we assembled for the film.
And here's a discussion of the mysterious lost "Beggars of Life" waltz.
