Silent Orchestra
Encyclopedia
Silent Orchestra was formed in 1998 to bring live music and sound design to classic and contemporary silent films. They have performed their own new compositions for classic silent films at art house theaters, film festivals and art galleries since 1999. They have appeared on DVDs of classic Silent film
s released by Image Entertainment
.
, Germaine Dulac
, Nell Shipman
and Charles Bryant
at the National Museum of Women in the Arts
, Smithsonian American Art Museum
and National Gallery of Art
.
They are best known for their new score for the F.W. Murnau classic, Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1922), which they have performed at the American Film Institute
(AFI) Silver Theater, the Savannah Film Festival, the National Gallery of Art and the Percussive Arts Society
’s International Conference. Their performance of Nosferatu at the 2000 Virginia Film Festival
was followed by a premiere of Shadow of the Vampire
, a fictionalized account of the making of Nosferatu. As festival director, Richard Herskowitz wrote in the festival wrap-up, "The opening night presentation was a double feature of Nosferatu and Shadow of the Vampire, with Silent Orchestra performing its majestic score for Nosferatu. Both the night's standing ovation and the acclaim registered in audience surveys expressed great appreciation for the revelatory effect of juxtaposing the two films and adding a contemporary score." The double feature was introduced by David Shepard (film preservationist), who noted the forthcoming re-release of the Nosferatu, Special Edition DVD. As John Shea, writer for TNMC Movies noted, "We were informed by David Shepard, the archivist who restored the print, that this print along with the new soundtrack, will be released on DVD December 31, not coincidentally two days after the release of Shadow of the Vampire to theaters."
Silent Orchestra employs contemporary and improvisational styles, as opposed to other groups that favor more traditional approaches. Regarding the hybrid composition/improvisation style of the duo, Carlos Garza noted in Desson Thomson
's article in the Washington Post, “We enjoy the excitement of being in front of an audience, the fact that things can go wrong [with the projection]. You have to be on your toes and be able to improvise."
Their Nosferatu score was first released in 2000 in Dolby Surround
by Kino Video. It was then released in Dolby Digital
5.0 on the Nosferatu - Special Edition DVD by Image Entertainment in 2001. In 2003, Image Entertainment released the DVD, Salome, Lot in Sodom with a Dolby Digital 5.0 score by Silent Orchestra and a stereo score by Marc-Olivier Dupin. In 2009, Silent Orchestra released their first CD, the score for Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror.
Carlos Garza is a composer and musician with a career that includes art rock, new wave, pop, country, jazz and film composition. With his group, the young professionals, he was part of the legendary 9:30 Club
scene in the early 1980s. He has also performed with Margot Chapman of the Starland Vocal Band
. He has scored 15 feature films and more than 25 short films and animations. He was awarded best music in the 2009, 48 Hour Film Project
for his score for "Star Pupil."
Rich O’Meara is a percussionist and composer of works for marimba and ensemble that are performed throughout the world. His works for marimba
, vibraphone
and other percussion instruments are published by KPP and have been performed and recorded in Europe, Asia and the Americas. His marimba piece, Restless has several times been performed during encores by Evelyn Glennie
and performed by her on the PBS documentary DVD, "The Music Instinct, Science & Song." He has performed with One Earth Percussion Theatre, the Contemporary Music Forum, the Lenox Ensemble, and the New York based Sky Music. He was featured as marimba soloist with the Women Composers Orchestra and under the direction of Michel Camilo
, was a guest artist at the 1998 Latin-Caribbean Festival at the John F. Kennedy Center. With the new music ensemble Amaranth, he premiered Puzzle Piece for three marimbas. In 2010, Rich O'Meara appeared at the 8th International Patagonia Percussion Festival to present a program of his works for solo and ensemble marimba.
DVD, Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (2001, Image Entertainment)
DVD, Salome/Lot in Sodom (2003, Image Entertainment)
Silent film
A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...
s released by Image Entertainment
Image Entertainment
Image Entertainment, Inc. is an independent licensee, producer and distributor of home entertainment programming and film & television productions in North America, with approximately 3,000 exclusive DVD titles and approximately 250 exclusive CD titles in domestic release, and approximately 450...
.
Biography
Silent Orchestra uses contemporary musical idioms to convey the art of pre-talkie films to modern audiences. The group was formed in 1998 by keyboardist, Carlos Garza and percussionist, Rich O’Meara and made their premiere in 1999. The group has performed new scores for films by F.W. Murnau, Marcel L'HerbierMarcel L'Herbier
Marcel L'Herbier, Légion d'honneur, was a French film-maker, who achieved prominence as an avant-garde theorist and imaginative practitioner with a series of silent films in the 1920s. His career as a director continued until the 1950s and he made more than 40 feature films in total...
, Germaine Dulac
Germaine Dulac
Germaine Dulac was a French filmmaker, film theorist, journalist and critic. She was born in Amiens and moved to Paris in early childhood. A few years after her marriage she embarked on a journalistic career in a feminist magazine, and later became interested in film...
, Nell Shipman
Nell Shipman
Nell Shipman was a Canadian actress, author and screenwriter, producer, director, and animal trainer. She was a Canadian pioneer in early Hollywood. She is best known for her work in James Oliver Curwood stories and for portraying strong, adventurous women...
and Charles Bryant
Charles Bryant
Charles Bryant may refer to:* Charles Bryant , actor* Charles David Jones Bryant , Australian artist* Charles Ernest William Bryant , Australian barrister and ornithologist...
at the National Museum of Women in the Arts
National Museum of Women in the Arts
The National Museum of Women in the Arts , located in Washington, D.C. is the only museum solely dedicated to celebrating women’s achievements in the visual, performing, and literary arts. NMWA was incorporated in 1981 by Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay...
, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is a museum in Washington, D.C. with an extensive collection of American art.Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum has a broad variety of American art that covers all regions and art movements found in the United States...
and National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...
.
They are best known for their new score for the F.W. Murnau classic, Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1922), which they have performed at the American Film Institute
American Film Institute
The American Film Institute is an independent non-profit organization created by the National Endowment for the Arts, which was established in 1967 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act...
(AFI) Silver Theater, the Savannah Film Festival, the National Gallery of Art and the Percussive Arts Society
Percussive Arts Society
The Percussive Arts Society is an international music service organization promoting percussion education, research,performance and appreciation.Established in 1961 as a non-profit, music service organization,...
’s International Conference. Their performance of Nosferatu at the 2000 Virginia Film Festival
Virginia Film Festival
The Virginia Film Festival is hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, held usually in late October/ early November.- Themes :The Virginia Film Festival has historically had a different theme each year...
was followed by a premiere of Shadow of the Vampire
Shadow of the Vampire
Shadow of the Vampire is a 2000 horror film directed by E. Elias Merhige and written by Steven Katz, and starring John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, and Udo Kier. The film is a fictionalized account of the making of the classic vampire film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, directed by F. W....
, a fictionalized account of the making of Nosferatu. As festival director, Richard Herskowitz wrote in the festival wrap-up, "The opening night presentation was a double feature of Nosferatu and Shadow of the Vampire, with Silent Orchestra performing its majestic score for Nosferatu. Both the night's standing ovation and the acclaim registered in audience surveys expressed great appreciation for the revelatory effect of juxtaposing the two films and adding a contemporary score." The double feature was introduced by David Shepard (film preservationist), who noted the forthcoming re-release of the Nosferatu, Special Edition DVD. As John Shea, writer for TNMC Movies noted, "We were informed by David Shepard, the archivist who restored the print, that this print along with the new soundtrack, will be released on DVD December 31, not coincidentally two days after the release of Shadow of the Vampire to theaters."
Silent Orchestra employs contemporary and improvisational styles, as opposed to other groups that favor more traditional approaches. Regarding the hybrid composition/improvisation style of the duo, Carlos Garza noted in Desson Thomson
Desson Thomson
Desson Patrick Thomson is a speechwriter in the Obama Administration and a former movie critic for The Washington Post.-Biography:Thomson attended boarding schools in England from the age of 7 until 17. He went to the Abbey School in East Grinstead, Sussex, and the City of London Freemen's School...
's article in the Washington Post, “We enjoy the excitement of being in front of an audience, the fact that things can go wrong [with the projection]. You have to be on your toes and be able to improvise."
Their Nosferatu score was first released in 2000 in Dolby Surround
Dolby Surround
Dolby Surround was the earliest consumer version of Dolby's multichannel analog film sound decoding format Dolby Stereo introduced to the public in 1982 during the time home video recording formats were introducing Stereo and HiFi capability...
by Kino Video. It was then released in Dolby Digital
Dolby Digital
Dolby Digital is the name for audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. It was originally called Dolby Stereo Digital until 1994. Except for Dolby TrueHD, the audio compression is lossy. The first use of Dolby Digital was to provide digital sound in cinemas from 35mm film prints...
5.0 on the Nosferatu - Special Edition DVD by Image Entertainment in 2001. In 2003, Image Entertainment released the DVD, Salome, Lot in Sodom with a Dolby Digital 5.0 score by Silent Orchestra and a stereo score by Marc-Olivier Dupin. In 2009, Silent Orchestra released their first CD, the score for Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror.
Carlos Garza is a composer and musician with a career that includes art rock, new wave, pop, country, jazz and film composition. With his group, the young professionals, he was part of the legendary 9:30 Club
9:30 Club
Foo Fighters Promise to come back to D.C. and play the 9:30 ClubNightclub 9:30 is a nightclub and concert venue in Washington, D.C. Originally located at 930 F Street, NW, Washington, D.C., in the 1970s it was called the "Atlantis Club", and hosted primarily rock, New Wave, and punk bands...
scene in the early 1980s. He has also performed with Margot Chapman of the Starland Vocal Band
Starland Vocal Band
Starland Vocal Band were an American pop band, known primarily for "Afternoon Delight", one of the biggest-selling singles in 1976.-Career:The group began as 'Fat City', a husband/wife duo of Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert. The band was also composed of Jon Carroll and Margot Chapman...
. He has scored 15 feature films and more than 25 short films and animations. He was awarded best music in the 2009, 48 Hour Film Project
48 Hour Film Project
The 48 Hour Film Project is a contest in which teams of filmmakers are assigned a genre, a character, a prop, and a line of dialogue, and have 48 hours to create a short film containing those elements. Shortly after the 48 hours of filmmaking, the films from each city are then screened at a theater...
for his score for "Star Pupil."
Rich O’Meara is a percussionist and composer of works for marimba and ensemble that are performed throughout the world. His works for marimba
Marimba
The marimba is a musical instrument in the percussion family. It consists of a set of wooden keys or bars with resonators. The bars are struck with mallets to produce musical tones. The keys are arranged as those of a piano, with the accidentals raised vertically and overlapping the natural keys ...
, vibraphone
Vibraphone
The vibraphone, sometimes called the vibraharp or simply the vibes, is a musical instrument in the struck idiophone subfamily of the percussion family....
and other percussion instruments are published by KPP and have been performed and recorded in Europe, Asia and the Americas. His marimba piece, Restless has several times been performed during encores by Evelyn Glennie
Evelyn Glennie
Dame Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie, DBE is a Scottish virtuoso percussionist. She was the first full-time solo percussionist in 20th-century western society.-Early life:Glennie was born and raised in Aberdeenshire...
and performed by her on the PBS documentary DVD, "The Music Instinct, Science & Song." He has performed with One Earth Percussion Theatre, the Contemporary Music Forum, the Lenox Ensemble, and the New York based Sky Music. He was featured as marimba soloist with the Women Composers Orchestra and under the direction of Michel Camilo
Michel Camilo
Michel Camilo is a pianist and composer from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He specializes in jazz, Latin and classical piano work...
, was a guest artist at the 1998 Latin-Caribbean Festival at the John F. Kennedy Center. With the new music ensemble Amaranth, he premiered Puzzle Piece for three marimbas. In 2010, Rich O'Meara appeared at the 8th International Patagonia Percussion Festival to present a program of his works for solo and ensemble marimba.
Discography
CD, Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (2010)DVD, Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (2001, Image Entertainment)
DVD, Salome/Lot in Sodom (2003, Image Entertainment)
External links
- DVD Talk review of Salome DVD
- Images Journal
- DVD Anonymous
- The Silent Era
- Silent Orchestra, official web site Silentorchestra.com
- Carlos Garza on Internet Movie Database (IMDB)
- Rich O'Meara on IMDB
- Carlos Garza, official web site CarlosGarza.com
- KPP (MostlyMarimba.com) http://www.mostlymarimba.com/