5 Questions With: Brendan Cooney of Not So Silent Cinema
5 Questions With is a recurring feature where we sit down with a special guest to get their unique perspective. In this installment we talk with Brendan Cooney, Philadelphia composer and band leader of Not So Silent Cinema. His group composes and performs new scores for classic silent films. This season, Renew Theaters has commissioned a new, original score to be performed alongside our screenings of The Phantom Carriage (1921).
What compelled you to start Not So Silent Cinema?
I started the project almost by accident when a colleague that I was teaching with asked me to take on a gig that she didn’t want to do. She was playing music to Nosferatu (1922) for a concert series that a church in Germantown wanted to do. I’d never even seen the film before but I said “Sure, that sounds like fun, I’ll try it!”. I went and did the gig, improvised a score, and I loved it. I did a couple more gigs just like that, just doing it solo. Somehow I got the idea that I should start writing up scores for ensembles, so I did a few and it sort of just started snowballing and becoming a fun project to do.
It’s a different type of performance experience where I get to do long form composition, and play for audiences that might not necessarily come out to hear new music otherwise. I get to work with and pick different musicians for different films. It’s interesting getting to put little fantasy ensembles together, and to play with different people in different contexts, with different types of challenging music. I also pull from different styles of music so it’s been fun, compositionally, to blend different genres, and to find players that can easily move between reading and improvising. It’s allowed me to do a lot of things musically that I wouldn’t have been able to do in other contexts.
How do you go about putting together an original score?
I think about the particular vibe of the film and try to think about what style of music would be most evocative of it, I think of what instrumentation would work best. I hit play on the DVD, get my piano, and just start writing. There isn’t a ton of revising happening, simply because there’s a lot of music to write, and there isn’t much time to revise when you have to come up with two hours of music.
Over the years I’ve realized that I can employ different techniques for putting together a score for a live performance to a film so that all the cues match up cleanly, the transitions are clean, and the themes don’t go too long. I have various tricks that I’ve developed using vamps and repeats, and little compositional devices so that transitions between scenes are clean and the queues at certain points all work out. I also just make sure to hire really good musicians for the films, so that we’re on point, don’t have to rehearse too much, and can just nail it without a lot of drama or mistakes.
What would you say is the most challenging aspect of these performances?
Keeping everything together; keeping up with the score, keeping musicians together, and keeping the music synched up with the film the way it’s intended to be. It’s challenging and takes a lot of effort when you’re concentrating hard over a long period of time without breaks between movements or sets the way you would in some other contexts. Also, having your eye on the music, the film, and the musicians is part of that. It’s a real challenge, it’s a like a little brain exercise going into these things. You definitely cannot zone out, you have to be on point the entire time.
Where do you draw your musical inspiration from?
There are definitely some film composers that had an impact on me, Bernard Herrmann being probably the most influential. Several years ago, Renew Theaters asked me to write scores for these Hitchcock silents that came out as part of a re-release of his first ten silent films. I wrote scores for the two thrillers, Blackmail (1929), and The Lodger (1927), then premiered them at the Renew theaters. That made me start studying Bernard Herrmann’s scores, and it ended up being really influential in how I thought about constructing themes and harmonic ideas. A lot of that harmonic language, and specific types of harmony he used, I’ve used for The Phantom Carriage score. It doesn’t sound like Herrmann, but there’s a certain musical kinship surrounding this harmonic approach. He was really good at using the ambiguity of harmony in order to bring out the psychological drama in films, thinking about that has helped me think about how to score drama.
What can you tell us about your score for The Phantom Carriage, and what can we listen for as an audience during that performance?
One of the cool things about The Phantom Carriage is that it has this quality of a late romantic novel, where there’s a lot going on in the story, but you don’t really discover it all at the same time. There are some complex relationships between characters, and complex history between people and it’s all revealed slowly over the course of the film. There are some surprises that happen, and it’s not quite what meets the eye at first. The score attempts to do a similar thing and bring out some of that mystery and surprise. It’s sort of fashioned after late romantic tonal harmony. There are a lot of repeating themes and repeating devices that are used in different places in the film, hopefully the repetitions of those themes help underscore the evolving complexity of the film.
The Phantom Carriage with live original score by Not So Silent Cinema:
at the Ambler Theater — Wednesday, October 17th at 7:30pm.
at the Princeton Garden Theatre — Wednesday, October 18th at 7:30pm.
