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We're All Familiar with Charlie Chaplin, One of the Towering Icons

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We're All Familiar with Charlie Chaplin, One of the Towering Icons We’re all familiar with Charlie Chaplin, one of the towering icons of film history, central to the field of film as a producer, director, and actor, instantly recognizable to people around the world for his signature character The Tramp. In 1999 the American Film Institute placed him on its list of the greatest male movie stars of all time (at No.10, if you care about that sort of ranking), and it also acknowledged his film City Lights as one the 100 best American films ever made (at No. 76, just beating out his Modern Times at No. 81). Chaplin’s musical inclinations went back to his earliest years, and as a young man he achieved competence as both a singer and an instrumentalist. In My Autobiography (Simon and Schuster, 1964) he wrote of the vaudeville tour with the Karno Company that first brought him to the United States in 1910. (That troupe also included among its members another young Englishman who was Chaplin’s roommate — Arthur Stanley Jefferson, who later altered his name to Stan Laurel.) Chaplin recalled: “On this tour I carried my violin and my cello. Since the age of sixteen I had practiced from four to six hours a day in my bedroom. Each week I took lessons from the theatre conductor or from someone he recommended. As I played left-handed, my violin was strung left- handed with the bass bar and sounding post reversed. I had great ambitions to be a concert artist, or, failing that, to use it in a vaudeville act, but as time went on I realized that I could never achieve excellence, so I gave it up.” After working his way through mostly forgettable silent films, in 1919 Chaplin co-founded (along with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffiths) the film distribution company United Artists. As he turned to producing his own films, Chaplin enjoyed an unusual degree of artistic independence, which gave rise to the nine films from his years of mastery: A Woman of Paris (1923), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Limelight (1953), and A King in New York (1957). In 1929 he witnessed Hollywood’s introduction of feature-length “talkies” with some regret. He recalled in his autobiography: “M-G-M produced The Broadway Melody, a full-length sound musical, and a cheap dull affair it was, but a stupendous box-office success. That was the twilight of silent films. It was a pity, for they were beginning to improve. … But I was determined to continue making silent films, for I believed there was room for all types of entertainment. Besides, I was a pantomimist, and in that medium I was unique and, without false modesty, a master. So I continued with the production of another silent picture, City Lights.” Of course, silent films were rarely silent when they were screened. Most theaters employed musicians — sometimes only a pianist or organist, but often a fair-sized orchestra — to accompany the films. In some cases music was captured on records that could be more or less coordinated with the film action. Sometimes scores were composed specifically for these films, but far more often the performers filled in a background of all-purpose music that drew on current standards and popular classics, sometimes working their way through anthologies of pieces classified as appropriate for love scenes, slapstick sequences, high-speed chases, and so on. The film’s director almost never had the slightest involvement with the music that would eventually be attached to a screening of his film. Chaplin, however, did what he could to control this aspect of his films’ presentations, even during the silent era, and he did assist in compiling officially authorized scores to accompany a couple of his productions. But City Lights provided a new level of opportunity for his involvement: “I tried to compose elegant and romantic music to frame my comedies in contrast to the tramp character, for elegant music gave my comedies an emotional dimension. Musical arrangers rarely understood this. They wanted the music to be funny. But I would explain that I wanted no competition, I wanted the music to be a counterpoint of grace and charm, to express sentiment, without which, as Hazlitt says, a work of art is incomplete. Sometimes a musician would get pompous with me and talk of the restricted intervals of the chromatic and the diatonic scale, and I would cut him short with a layman’s remark: ‘Whatever the melody is, the rest is just a vamp.’ After putting music to one or two pictures I began to look at a conductor’s score with a professional eye and to know whether a composition was over- orchestrated or not. If I saw a lot of notes in the brass and woodwind section, I would say: ‘That’s too black in the brass,’ or ‘too busy in the woodwinds.’ Nothing is more adventurous and exciting than to hear the tunes one has composed played for the first time by a fifty- piece orchestra.” Instrumentation: flute (doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling English horn), three clarinets (one doubling bass clarinet), three saxophones (one soprano doubling alto and baritone, one soprano doubling alto, one soprano doubling tenor), bassoon, two horns, three trumpets, two trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, drum kit, castanets, orchestra bells, chimes, temple block, tambourine, harp, banjo (doubling guitar), piano (doubling celeste), and strings. Extracted from a note originally written for the San Francisco Symphony and used with permission. © James M. Keller .
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