Skip to main content
With few exceptions, a silent film is only as good as the music that accompanies it.
Composer Mark Orton has spent the better part of his career exploring the ways in which music and images play off of and impact one another. His ensemble Tin Hat previously toured the world playing live music along with a selection of silent films by the Russian stop-motion animation pioneer Ladislas Starewicz, and in 2016, he was commissioned by the Hollywood Theatre to write a new score to accompany The General, the brilliant film made in Cottage Grove by cinema legend Buster Keaton.
“With a silent film,” Orton says, “the music can take on a much stronger role. You have a lot more free rein to step out with melody and lyrical elements that, with a contemporary film, might draw too much attention, might pull focus away from the film. You really get to create the entire soundscape yourself.”
In that spirit, Orton has helped create Sonic Silents. The weekendlong event, which kicks off at the Hollywood on Thursday, Sept. 17, as part of the movie house’s ongoing centennial celebrations, features a selection of silent films all paired with original music to be played live during the screenings.
The concept of this mini-festival is impressive enough, but the array of films chosen for the inaugural Sonic Silents and the talent that Orton has brought in to accompany them is truly remarkable. The opening night event, for example, is a screening of the 1920 German Expressionist classic The Golem with music performed by Los Lobos saxophonist Steve Berlin, drummer Scott Amendola, guitarist Max Knouse, and Adam Dorn, the multi-instrumentalist who makes music under the name Mocean Worker. Also on the bill that night are experimental shorts by directors Walter Ruttmann and Hans Richter accompanied by local avant-jazz artists Mike Gamble and Blue Cranes.
“I chose these great crossover players,” Orton says of the artists he commissioned for Sonic Silents, “who are as comfortable playing against a score piece as they are composing improvisatory passages.”
One such formidable talent is Jenny Conlee, the musician best known as a founding member of The Decemberists. She’s been working off and on as a composer for film and TV projects for a decade. She got to know Orton through one of the classes he teaches on writing soundtracks. Conlee wrote the score for The Beautiful Leukanida, Starewicz’s 1912 film that tells an epic love story made using beetles, which screens at the Hollywood on Sept. 18.
“It’s kind of like Helen of Troy,” Conlee says of the movie, “but there’s no Trojan horse. Leukanida is a beautiful beetle who is taken away by another beetle, and the other beetle that’s in love with her gets his whole army to go after them. It’s all done in 11 minutes.”
Minding the brief run time, Conlee opted to keep her ensemble lean, bringing in former Decemberists drummer Rachel Blumberg and the band’s longtime bassist and cellist Nate Query, as well as Jackstraw guitarist Jon Neufeld.
“Since there’s no dialogue, the music can be the dialogue a little bit,” Conlee says of writing music for a silent film. “More than just setting down a base or an underscore beneath the story, the music becomes more of a part of the story.”
While Conlee and her group will be busy for only a short while at Sonic Silents, Orton will be busy throughout the festival. To close out the weekend on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, he will once again perform along with The General, only this time with an amended score and a larger ensemble that includes his Tin Hat compatriot Carla Kihlstedt and members of the chamber music collective 45th Parallel Universe. And on Friday the 18th, Orton will lead his ensemble through short works by Starewicz, Luis Buñuel, Georges Méliès and Alice Guy-Blaché.
Orton is also already looking to the future of Sonic Silents. There is apparently a lot of interest in bringing some version of this event to other spaces and festivals around the U.S. And Orton still has a backlog of ideas for films and musicians he could feature in subsequent editions.
“I liked the first iteration of it being this Cascadia collection of musicians,” Orton says, “but I could picture some of the folks that came out of the same scene that my band was in, the Knitting Factory, Greenwich Village avant-garde scene or the many crossover players who have worked with silent film or would like to, who would be perfect for this. There are many more ideas than we have time for.”
SEE IT: Sonic Silents at the Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org/series/sonic-silents. 7:30 pm Thursday and Friday, 3 and 7:30 pm Saturday, Sept. 17–19. $35 (performances ticketed separately). All ages.
