Imagining Women’s Archives of Silent Film Music

While the study of surviving silent film music libraries is essential, it privileges the material that survives as normative, contributing to a skewed scholarship in which what exists receives more attention than that which is lost. Giuliana Bruno counters the pathos of loss with “an ‘archaeological’ intertextual approach,” which I employ here in looking for the traces of women’s labor within a complex of methodologies.⁸ In sifting through what is present, I emulate Bruno in looking for shadows, faint impressions, and notes in the margins. I look at fragments, using Sean Braune’s claim, “the potential of a lone title belonging to either an imaginary or destroyed work contains within it the ability to conjure an entire literary world,” as an impetus for creative historicizing.⁹ Substituting “musical” for “literary” does not change the possibilities of the imagined, destroyed, or lost material, and in speculating about silent film music composed or used by women, I create an imaginary supplemental textuality that, in Braune’s words, “can be considered the potential space that is occupied by the text that no longer exists (or never did).”¹⁰ As Braune notes, both fiction and scholarly writers use imaginary, arcane books to excite the imagination of readers; similarly, “missing” or imagined scores, recordings, and accounts of performance practice animate musicologists, even as this kind of speculative work has yet to be fully accepted in the discipline. I look to Saidiya Hartman’s approach of “critical fabulation” in her Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, in which she explores the lives of urban Black women at the beginning of the twentieth century using both traditional and speculative literary techniques.¹¹ I am further influenced in my work on Marie Lucas and other Black woman musicians by Marcia Chalelain, LaShawn Harris, LaKisha Michelle Simmons, and others who make it clear that Black feminist historiographical work must involve the speculative.

Undertaking this research requires me to examine the often-detrimental fictions that developed around women silent film musicians and the materials that motivate those fictions. The androcentric scholarship, undertaken almost exclusively by male scholars, about the men who composed and performed music for the silent film, has, intentionally or not, created a persistent misrepresentation about the importance of women cinema musicians. In the most-cited studies of the silent film music, women are mentioned only a handful of times, almost always in passing as the wife of a male subject or else as a figure of ridicule or incompetence. In his 2004 book Silent Film Sound, Rick Altman reproduces a sexist cartoon about women cinema musicians and mentions them only briefly in the text, stating that some “young lady pianists” found “outlets” for their musical training at storefront theaters.¹² The more I excavate extant material and consider what is missing, the richer the picture of women’s careers as cinema musicians becomes.

As the author of Music for Silent Film: A Guide to North American Resources and the founder and executive director of the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive (SFSMA), an online, open-access repository that digitizes music used to accompany silent film, I have a heightened sense of awareness of the gender and racial disparities in surviving silent film music. Men’s collections often resemble each other, organized around a similar logic. They primarily consist of music written entirely by men, including new genre music for the cinema; music and arrangements from the Western European symphonic, ballet, and chamber music tradition; and cue sheets, which use the aforementioned kinds of music. Collections of music for the cinema owned and used by women are far more diverse. In addition to the same music as found in men’s collections, women’s collections also commonly include popular songs and dances, music published in music journals, and pieces from melodrama and vaudeville, some of them composed by women.¹³ It is ironic that women accompanists were uniquely qualified as cinema musicians partly because of the gendered treatment to which they had been subjected.¹⁴ Women whose upbringing during this period had included traditional piano lessons, which included character pieces and descriptive repertoire, found that they were especially well prepared for cinema accompaniment. Women accompanists also often had popular songs at hand, as these were often marketed to women. Silent film music scholars wrongly assume that these types of collections are lost or unknowable. However, I am frequently approached by people who have collections of silent film music that belonged to women and who want to share it. These donors sometimes have memories of or a little information about the original owner(s), and I am often able to glean a few more details through talking with family elders or doing research on Ancestry.com or Newspapers.com. I excavate their lives and careers and speculate about their activities even where no records exist.

Women’s silent film music libraries are creative, resourceful, and canny, reflecting the diversity of their locales and audiences. I suspect that this is because many women were also music teachers and were continually acquiring music for use in teaching as well as in film accompaniment. In addition, women performed in women’s clubs’ recitals as both soloists and collaborative pianists as well as for school, church, and/or synagogue events, and would have accumulated repertoire for these performances. Nonetheless, traces of women’s work as cinema accompanists remain relatively scarce in comparison with collections developed by men. The Josephine Burnett Collection, held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, originally consisted of three unorganized boxes of materials—a fragment of the music used for cinema accompaniment by Hazel Burnett (1892–1973) at the Majestic Theater in Austin and the Queen and Aztec Theaters in San Antonio. In contrast, the Hoblitzelle Interstate Theatre Circuit Collection, also held by the Ransom Center, composed of music selected by male music directors at the Palace Theatre and Majestic Theatre, both in Dallas, contains more than seven hundred pieces of music (37.5 linear feet) for cinema orchestra.¹⁵ The difference is not due to the size or success of the theaters: Burnett played three shows a day at the Austin Majestic (now the Paramount), which had a seating capacity of 1,270. One reason for the difference in the treatment of these silent cinema music libraries may have been that the industry was led by men: they helmed the music publishing houses, film-related periodicals, and columns on film music, whereas women did not hold these kinds of positions. Collections developed by men may have been deemed more valuable and therefore saved in greater numbers. Another difference may lie in ownership: large picture palaces bought music instead of relying on musicians to have their own, and so the women who performed in large theaters might have left extensive cinema-owned but personally curated libraries behind at the theater when sound arrived. Clearly some men valued their cinemas’ libraries and had the means to save them at the end of the silent era; the American Music Research Center at the University of Colorado–Boulder has numerous examples of men’s cinema music libraries.

Selecting real, extant pieces of music that I imagine were used by particular accompanists to create scores for real films requires reading archival materials and their absences in ways that bridge different disciplines. This also necessitates grappling with the inequities of Western European bourgeois music traditions, imported by white Europeans to America. In particular, I grapple with the fact that women who did not compose their own music had to use music by men because that is what (male) music publishers made available. It also includes acknowledging the limitations of the nineteenth-century model of the “archive” as a site of knowledge production and extraction and works within the concept of the postarchival process—the creation of ideas and questions raised after working with the materials of the archive.¹⁶ My own scholarship has engaged not just with the items in archives but also with what Liz Czach calls “speculative archival work” in which she documents her process of seeking out “lost” materials.¹⁷

Because accompanimental music was different at every theater, and could be different for every showing of a film, it provokes different questions than reconsidering lost films, for which there is often at least some information about the production, plot, actors, reception, and other factors. What were audiences looking at and hearing when they heard women accompanists? On another level, what were women accompanists looking at and hearing as they created their accompaniments? As Julie Hubbert and other scholars have documented, there were no standard methods of accompanying film, and performers approached accompaniment for movies in a number of different ways.¹⁸ This allows for history-writing described by Carolyn Steedman as “a form of magical realism,” echoing Foucault’s claim that the magic of archives is that they show us “naïvement, et dans l’ombre, ce que tout le monde regarde au premier plan” (“quite simply, and in shadow, what all those in the foreground are looking at”).¹⁹ In order to realize an imaginary archive here, I draw abductive inferences from the extant documentation to theorize plausible materials and practices, which allows for what Samir Okasha calls “our ability to accept the rationality of the unobserved.”²⁰ I begin with an overview of the development and use of early film music and discuss collections created by Charlotte Stafford and Lily Strickland. I then imagine the silent film scores Marie Lucas and Mildred Fitzpatrick might have created.

By 1908 the US cinema industry had largely decided that having accompanimental music for films was essential.²¹ It served a narrative function and assisted in establishing geographical, chronological, and other loci both acousmatically (off-screen) and within the diegesis of a film. Cinemas employed musicians ranging from single pianists and organists to forty-piece orchestras.²² Some musicians—particularly keyboardists—improvised, leaving almost no material record of their accompaniments. Cinema organist Rosa Rio (1902–2010), active in New Orleans, New York, and Pennsylvania, recalled that she often had to accompany films without previewing them, so while she accompanied a movie for the first time, she improvised motifs or themes for the characters and events in the picture. She would then elaborate on these in following showings, ultimately creating a fairly consistent score that she would play from memory each time she accompanied the picture. She did not notate or keep any records of these scores.²³

In the 1910s, publications of music expressly for film accompaniment began to proliferate, particularly what was called genre or mood music. These short pieces—almost exclusively composed and published by men—were used for specific actions, events, and emotions found in film scenarios. Works for “hurry” or “gallop,” for example, were quick in tempo, mimicking the sound of hoofbeats or heartbeats, and employed short note values, suggesting the speed and motion given in the title.²⁴ These were usually sold in photoplay albums—collections of similar pieces, such as five pieces for chases or five pieces for romance. By putting together a series of newly composed genre pieces and/or excerpts from older works that matched the action on screen, cinema musicians created “compiled scores.”²⁵ Many women used their preexisting repertoire of short character pieces and songs to create such scores, also including music from periodicals like The Etude, which was a rare, welcoming venue for music by women. Burnett’s music library, for example, contains hundreds of pieces from The Etude and other publications that she used in compiled scores.

In addition to or instead of using genre music, some accompanists preferred to work from cue sheets, which list a film’s major events or “cues,” and provide suggestions for the music for each cue.²⁶ Professionally published cue sheets generally list the title and/or a musical incipit of each piece’s melody for the accompanist to harmonize and extend as needed to fit with the action. As the demand for music that matched the action and emotions shown in a film grew, studios and music publishers began issuing cue sheets prepared by professional composers and compilers. Most of these cue sheets were compiled by the same handful of men, many of whom were also composers who recommended their own and their colleagues’ music. Film industry magazines also began publishing cue sheets, similarly created by the male editors of their music columns who were also composers.²⁷ Only a few cue sheets by women appear in their columns—and always as letters to the editor—but it is clear that many women created their own cue sheets.²⁸

Studios also began to commission full scores for specific movies.²⁹ Called “special scores,” these were marketed as having all original music written specifically for the film in question, but many contained at least a smattering of preexisting pieces.³⁰ Many composers used the leitmotif technique made popular by opera composers Weber and Wagner, in which specific musical phrases or motifs are associated with specific characters, places, events, or objects.³¹ Accompanists used any and all of these methods; even early sound film used preexisting pieces and genre music, as demonstrated by cue sheets that call for playing recordings rather than playing an instrument.³²

A typical music library for a woman cinema keyboardist includes arrangements for piano or organ of symphonic works, opera, or ballet; pieces from operettas and other musical shows; character pieces; genre music; popular songs from the past twenty to thirty years; dances and marches; and cue sheets, if she used them. Utah-based pianist and organist Virginia Freber’s (1889–1986) surviving music library exemplifies this practice: used at the Paramount-Empress theater in Salt Lake City, her library contains photoplay albums, arrangements of themes from special scores, and character pieces, suggesting that she compiled her scores.³³ However, Freber’s library totals fewer than one hundred pieces; it is unmistakably incomplete. In that, it is also an example of extant women’s music libraries for film.

Women musicians were thought by many to be better than men at accompanying film because of their supposed innate sensitivity. In an issue of Motion Picture Magazine from March 1914, Stanley Todd, a regular commentator on music for the cinema, described women as more emotional and passionate players, making them excellent accompanists for film. Reporting from Denver, he noted that the

Todd was not alone in lauding such “girls”: numerous reports from field reporters for Motion Picture News, Moving Picture World, and other trade magazines reported on the capabilities of women accompanists across the United States.

Based on my research into Burnett’s collection, I have fashioned recreations of her performances by selecting pieces from her library and creating a compiled score from them.³⁵ Her music library contains the same kinds of music as the Freber collection, such as photoplay albums, but also draws from much broader sources: published cue sheets and full scores; character pieces; sheet music, including music by contemporary composers designed for concert performance; etudes; “simplified” editions of music for concert performance and pieces arranged for easier playing and/or for smaller hands; handwritten cue sheets and notes; and hundreds of short character pieces clipped out of magazines. Much of the sheet music is marked with a cinematic mood or other indications that Burnett used for a particular scene (although the films in which these appeared are generally unidentifiable). The collection also includes handwritten cue sheets. However, her library, too, is incomplete.³⁶ I have no doubt that it is missing more original cue sheets, and that her libraries at the Majestic, Queen, and Aztec Theaters would have contained hundreds of pieces of music. The existing materials document Burnett’s practice of combining pieces she knew well with new characteristic pieces—both those written for the cinema and for other venues. In excavating her library and career, I was able to recreate the score she played for the 1920 film Humoresque, which provides an example of how one accompanist fashioned different kinds of scores based on her own personal music libraries, audiences, and preferences.³⁷

The three boxes from Burnett’s music library reveal much more than what is available from most other women cinema musicians. At the Kansas Museum of History, a collection belonging to film accompanist Inez Garrison contains just sixteen pieces of music. The music library of celebrated Chicago cinema organist Mildred Fitzpatrick no longer exists. Neither do those of Gertrude Bailey, Ruth Heath, Carrie Hetherington, Edith Lang, Marie Lucas, and many other women who accompanied silent films in the United States. Furthermore, due to systemic racism and misogynoir, compounded by the Great Migration’s legacies of material lacunas in the archives of Black life, even less music used by Black and other women of color survives than that by white women. While I have identified several Black women film accompanists—such as New York pianist Ruth Heath, Indianapolis-based pianist and singer Alura Mack, and the pianist and singer Victoria Spivey, who was born in Houston and performed in St. Louis, New York, and other places—I have yet to find a single surviving piece of music that I can prove belonged to a Black woman cinema accompanist that she used in accompanying a film. Nor have I yet found references to specific pieces Black women played in accompanying films, although I have found recordings from Mack’s and Spivey’s postaccompanist careers in blues and jazz and newspaper clippings about music Lucas played for live theater.³⁸ These recordings of their accompaniments likely included ragtime, the blues, and jazz. It is probable that they were mostly improvised and included well-known songs, dances, and possibly hymns, and they might have “ragged” preexisting music, playing “serious” works with the uneven rhythms and embellishments of ragtime.

Similarly, works composed by women for film accompaniment have survived in vastly smaller numbers than those by men.³⁹ Of the prolific Hawai‘i- and West Coast–based cinema organist Alice Smythe Burton Jay (1875–1942), only a single score and a handful of recordings for player piano survive.⁴⁰ María Grever (1885–1951), an important Mexican composer who wrote film music for Paramount starting in 1920 and created music for Fox and other studios, composed over eight hundred pieces, but her archive of film music from 1920 to 1925 is lost, as are many of her other works.⁴¹ Of the music composed by midwestern cinema pianist and organist Litta Lynn (1880–1959), only sixteen pieces are now extant, albeit in many different editions.

Only a few published collections of genre music preserve works by women composers. In the thirty albums of photoplay music that comprise the PianOrgan Film Books of Incidental Music, Volume 1, only two women composers are included, with three pieces by Valentina Crespi and one by Pauline Pement.⁴² Women are also poorly represented in published cue sheets: of the ninety-nine cue sheets included in the Sullivan and Hamack collections at the American Music Research Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, there are just five recommended pieces by women: one by Chaminade, two by Patricia Collinge, one by Grever, and one by Carmen Santos. Of the composers whose works were published in Melody, a Boston-based magazine for cinema and home musicians that was active from 1917 to 1930, only four out of 174 composers were women.⁴³

The music libraries of women accompanists, both complete and incomplete, and the works for film by women composers, both surviving and lost, offer significant information about what music women found suitable for film accompaniment and how they constructed their scores for films. These libraries and works offer spaces where I can speculate about the unknown, the incomplete, and the inaccessible, like an accompanist’s motives for collecting what she did, what is missing, and who her audiences were.

In the case of accompanist Charlotte Stafford (1886–1970), the existing archive helps me frame my speculations regarding what kinds of films were popular at Stafford’s cinemas and how she addressed the demographics of her audiences. This information aids in better understanding how accompanists tailored their scores for audiences based on the music they had to work with and helps us trace influences from silent accompanists to sound film composers. Stafford began working first as a piano teacher, and, in 1919, she started accompanying film at the Jefferson Theater in Rochester, New York. While still working as a cinema musician, she also became a rhythm accompanist for the public school system and played for dance studios. Rochester-area musicians like composer Scott Bradley (who later scored MGM’s Cartoon Studio cartoons), film composer Alec Wilder, jazz legends Blanche and Cab Calloway, and students enrolled in the Eastman School of Music could have heard Stafford’s accompaniments. Her music library, now held by the Sibley Library at the Eastman School of Music, is uncommon in its sizeable amount of dance music and love songs; this music made her accompaniments very different from those of other accompanists. Stafford Collection cataloger Elizabeth Wells calls it a “working collection of a Rochester silent film accompanist in the 1920s,” with pieces from a range of sources, but it is not merely a typical collection, like that of Virginia Freber. It is a unique collection for what it can reveal about accompanists using the music they had at hand for cinema accompaniment as well as how accompanists played for their audiences.⁴⁴

The Stafford Collection contains a small amount of standard genre music from the silent era; theme sheets, which are short and relatively easy-to-play pieces that Stafford likely used as genre music in the cinema; and popular and theater songs. It also consists of sheet music for voice and piano and music for dance. There are only a few cue sheets in the collection; I suspect that there were once more, but that they were discarded after sound film became established. I would hazard that Stafford would have used cue sheets frequently, but would have substituted pieces she owned for many of those listed in the cue sheet that were not part of her library.

The unusual makeup of Stafford’s collection opens a doorway for speculation about her audiences and the films that were shown at the theater where she worked: most of her collection is made up of love songs. The vast majority of the theme sheets and theater songs focus on courtship, being in love, intimate moments between couples, longing, and, less frequently, heartbreak. Published by less commonly found publication series and editions, including the Feist All-in-view Easy-to-read Motion Picture editions and Jenkins’s Organist Motion Picture editions, the theme sheets are short pieces published in pairs.⁴⁵ “As Long as I Have You,” is paired with “Make the Dream of the Rose Come True,” and “I’ll See You In My Dreams,” is paired with “No Wonder (That I Love You).”⁴⁶ Many of the composers and songwriters for the theme sheets are from outside of the network that dominated the larger publishing concerns. The theater songs, which are generally longer than the theme sheets, tend to be by more prominent composers and lyricists, like film composer J. S. Zamecnik and lyricist Gus Kahn. While there are a number of nonromantic pieces among the theater songs, there remains an emphasis on love songs, some of which also exhibit the exoticism popular at the time, such as “My Creole Belle,” and “My Girl from Philippino [sic] Isle.”⁴⁷

The majority of the piano-vocal sheet music was published between 1908 and 1928 and exemplifies the kinds of individual popular songs that cinema accompanists used, albeit with the aforementioned focus on romance songs. The collection includes a number of dance songs as well—many of them also romantic in nature—such as the “Adoration Waltz Song.”⁴⁸ Some of this music falls into the category of jazz-influenced music created for white audiences—jazz developed by musicians like Paul Whiteman, Irving Berlin, and others that was “hardly connected with true jazz [jazz performed by Black musicians for Black audiences],” but which was acceptable to white audiences for film accompaniment.⁴⁹

Stafford evidently acquired these pieces deliberately and built this collection to be especially appropriate for romance movies, which proliferated during the interwar period. The pieces are simple enough that she could easily sight-read them as part of a compiled score. Her curation tactics also accommodate the demographics of her audiences, who would have been primarily women and couples, and whose tastes and interests drove the production of romance movies. Steven Joseph Ross notes, “the changing class composition of audiences in the 1920s was accompanied by a shift from highly polemical films that explored conflict between the classes to far more conservative films that emphasized fantasies of love and harmony among the classes,” and this is reflected by Stafford’s music library and its notable lack of music from the symphonic, operatic, or ballet repertoire, which would have been seen as more elite than the popular songs she used.⁵⁰ World War I had resulted in fears about changing social structures, not least of which because of the loss of young men and women in the war and the Great Influenza epidemic. David Taylor claims that the “largest single category of popular song in the inter-war years [in both Britain and America] comprised love songs, with their emphasis on companionship, happiness and marriage.”⁵¹ Audiences craved happy endings like those found in The Big Parade (1925), For Heaven’s Sake (1926), and 7th Heaven (1927).⁵² While it is also true that the love songs could simply reflect Stafford’s own musical taste or the taste of her music supplier, the extent to which she acquired them seems a pragmatic determination in providing music that was sensitive to the desires of her audiences and fit the films she accompanied. Stafford legitimized love songs as narrative music in the cinema and demonstrated that romance films were worthy of serious musical accompaniment, something that carries through to the present day, as seen in scores for everything from conventional romances to space operas like Star Wars. Stafford’s collection informs the development of the sound of the romance movie and offers a framework for theorizing past, invisible audiences.

Composer Lily Strickland made a significant contribution to music for silent film through her character pieces and business acumen. Her works appear in numerous collections of silent film music, and its use was documented by the trade media. Strickland was born into a prominent white family in 1885 in Anderson, South Carolina, where her family had been strong supporters of the Confederacy and had enslaved people on their cotton plantation. Some of the people formerly enslaved by the family continued to work picking cotton and in domestic roles for the family after emancipation, which, according to her biographers, provided Strickland with some access to Black music and culture.⁵³ Her family was musical: Strickland’s mother was a talented amateur singer, and her cousin James Reed Miller was a successful professional singer whose repertoire included spirituals, songs by Stephen Foster, and other dialect songs.⁵⁴

Strickland began piano lessons at age six and started composing at nine. She became the organist at her church when she was fourteen and sold her first song two years later.⁵⁵ She initially studied piano and composition at Converse College; in 1905 she received a scholarship to study piano and composition at the Institute of Musical Arts (later Juilliard) in New York. In 1912, Strickland married Joseph Courtenay Anderson; they moved to Texas in 1917, and in 1920 they relocated to Kolkata. There, Strickland studied traditional Indian music and collaborated with Indian artists in composing works that reflected life there. She also undertook work as scholar, observing, researching, and writing about music and ritual in Southeast Asia for the Musical Courier and other major music journals. On her return to the United States in the 1930s, Strickland’s works were performed by Paul Robeson, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and other major ensembles. Between 1899 and her death in 1958, she composed nearly four hundred songs and numerous instrumental works, most of which were published by large commercial presses including G. Schirmer, Theodore Presser, and Chappell, all of which also published photoplay albums and sheet music. Her music was widely circulated; on a trip to Shanghai, Strickland entered a hotel to find an orchestra playing her song “Mah Lindy Lou”—and learned that it was part of its regular repertoire.⁵⁶

Strickland was an adherent to Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s suggestion that white American composers should use Native American and Black music to create distinctively American music.⁵⁷ She held that American composers “must live and feel America in order to compose American music.”⁵⁸ Her own compositions were heavily influenced by place and culture: over the course of her career, she wrote numerous songs inspired by her observations of Black life in the South, pieces based on Native American themes, and while in India, music reflective of indigenous musics she encountered there.⁵⁹

Strickland’s own understanding of her approach emphasized responding to and remaking sounds; today, her works challenge us to determine the line between dialogic appropriation and reactions to the cultures whose music she appreciated and wished to emulate, and use without crediting the original creators. Strickland’s music was received by white audiences at the time as appreciative of its sources-cum-inspirations, and Rabindranath Tagore praised her “understanding and sympathy” for Indians.⁶⁰ However, there are no such paeans to her work from Black or Native American musicians, and Strickland reaped the profits of her problematic imitation of non-white music for her entire career. Whether Strickland’s work crosses the line from a reception-driven response into impersonation might rest on the context in which it is performed.⁶¹ Nonetheless, Strickland’s patronizing “sympathy and love” for what Guthrie P. Ramsay defines as “race music” testifies to Strickland’s status as a white-savior composer interested in preserving, promoting, and repurposing Black music as a means of demonstrating the worthiness of Black music to other whites. This was a popular and common strategy for white composers creating successful composition careers: Ramsay traces the origins of this white supremacist approach toward and documentation of Black music to the 1867 publication of William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison’s Slave Songs of the United States.⁶² These white Northerners saw in their collection of music evidence that Blacks “held the potential to become more like the ‘cultivated race.’”⁶³

Much of Strickland’s oeuvre is parlor songs of the kind used alongside mood music in film accompaniment, and, starting in 1919, her music was published in albums intended for cinematic use.⁶⁴ These pieces include Two Shawnee Indian Dances (1919), Seven Songs from Way Down South (1920), Bayou Songs (1921), Sketches from the Southwest (1921), Negro Melodies of the Old South (1923), From a Sufi’s Tent (1923), From a Caravan (1924), and many more. The majority of her pieces fit the needs of cinema accompanists and would have been familiar to cinema musicians trained on parlor songs and character pieces: they are generally short, highly sectional, with repeated refrains, and not technically difficult to play. The melody—usually simple and constructed in a regular period of two four-measure phrases with a range of an octave—is almost always in the right hand while the harmony is in the left. In her “Negro” pieces, she uses dialect in her texts and strumming emulation in the piano, likely meant to imitate a guitar or ukulele; in the Indianist pieces, the left hand also has rhythms associated with “Indians,” like a heavy first beat in four. Strickland’s songs were also published in various keys and arrangements, and including those for theater organs, an instrument that would come to be widely used in cinemas.

It is clear from the number of her pieces that appear in surviving collections that accompanists of all kinds—men, women, those in small cinemas, those in motion picture palaces—played her music. Her pieces are found in silent film music collections at the University of Colorado–Boulder; Southern Illinois University in Carbondale; the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY; and several others. The Etude published nearly forty of her pieces, including Black and Scottish dialect songs and pieces inspired by Black and Native American culture.⁶⁵

While there is no evidence that Strickland ever accompanied a silent film herself or made specific music recommendations for one, she composed works that appealed to cinema accompanists and audiences. Like Stafford, she was forward-thinking, writing works that could be performed in multiple venues and for multiple purposes. Her approach to composing and publishing her works was not only a creative practice but a well-run commercial venture. She signed a contract in 1927 with a Fox subsidiary allowing her songs and instrumental pieces to be used in cue sheets and compiled scores, and the following year signed on with De Sylva, Brown & Henderson Inc., a New York company that placed music and recordings in live shows and cinemas.⁶⁶ Advertising and trade journal articles show that Strickland’s Southern songs were performed prior to and during the screenings of numerous films, both dramas and comedies, set in the South and for cinema marketing productions emphasizing the South or the Civil War. Her song “Mah Lindy Lou” was cited by a white author as one of the “more familiar of Negro spirituals [sic]” when it was used to put “patrons in the desired frame of mind for the ensuing screen fare” at the Capitol Theater in New York as part of an extravagant prescreening presentation.⁶⁷ The song accompanied or preceded showings of numerous films, including Pied Piper Malone (1924), a film set in South Carolina. Along with Strickland’s “Mah Li’l Batteau,” it was also used in a special promotion for The Golden Bed (1925), about a white Southern family trying to save their plantation.⁶⁸ Strickland’s music became a signifier of a “South” imagined by white nostalgia—a genteel part of the country where the racial Others were happy in their place in society and beloved by whites for their quirks and idiosyncrasies.

Stafford and Strickland developed bodies of accompanimental music that addressed the needs of accompanists and audiences, creating their own individual archives of music for romance and music for specific places and peoples. Their music provides a foundation for speculation about collections composed, owned, or used by women in playing for the pictures.

My work at the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive has provoked me to think about music, collections, and other materials that have been lost or were never transcribed. I daydream about the music libraries of influential women whose personal collections are mostly or completely lost: Edith Lang, who wrote a textbook about film accompaniment; blues singer Alura Mack, whose talents we know only from a handful of recordings made in the late 1920s and early ’30s; Litta Lynn, who composed and improvised and was a musicologist and left behind a dozen or so songs; and more. The desire to find lost materials is strong, and as Pelejà writes, “lost-and-found narratives are peculiar producers of historical meaning,” valuing the found as representative or canonical, and the lost as outliers, often either superlative or entirely marginal.⁶⁹

Based on my research on extant collections, I have imagined compiled scores that women could have created to accompany particular films. The first of these is a speculative score by Black musician Marie Lucas for the extant film The Flying Ace (1926). Lucas, a conductor, pianist, violinist, and trombonist who grew up in her parents’ vaudeville and legitimate theaters, played for live entertainment and films at the Franklin Theater in New York and the Casino Theater in Philadelphia, both Black theaters. She eventually formed and led New York’s Lafayette Theater Orchestra, for which she specifically recruited Black women musicians. There was a core of four performers in addition to Lucas: Marie Wayne-Townsend on violin, Maude Shelton on cornet, Mazie Mullen on trombone, and Alice Calloway on drums. Well-versed in Western symphonic, operatic, and ballet music, Lucas also included the most up-to-date Black and white popular songs in her accompaniments. Though Lucas has left no extant scores or cue sheets, I speculate about what music she might have used based on reports of her repertoire in the newspapers, which chronicle her knowledge of opera, vaudeville, popular dances, and dance songs.⁷⁰

The Flying Ace is a six-reel feature film directed by Richard Norman, a white filmmaker who made numerous films with all-Black casts, known as “race films.” In The Flying Ace, war hero and flying ace Billy Stokes returns home from World War I to his job as a railway detective, where he must find a missing $25,000 railroad payroll and stop the gang of thieves who stole it. At the climax, villain Finley Tucker, the lead of a gang of thieves, drugs the railway station master’s daughter, Ruth Sawtelle, herself a pilot, and kidnaps her in his plane. In the film’s climax, Ruth daringly escapes from Finley’s plane and jumps onto a plane piloted by Billy.

Lucas would likely have compiled a score beginning with an overture of military marches to signify Billy’s service, featuring Sheldon on the cornet, or maybe “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” an upbeat song first made popular in 1925.⁷¹ With a verse-chorus structure, it would have allowed all of the orchestra players to have a solo turn as the curtain rose on the screen. The introduction of the scheming gang would have occasioned music with an ominous tinge, in a minor key and a low register, with tremolos or dissonances to make clear who the villains are. Lucas may have used an excerpt from opera here like the Preludio from Verdi’s Otello, a work with which she was very familiar; she could well have taken motifs from it to use throughout the film. Communicating jealousy and disloyalty, the music signifying Iago in Otello begins with three ascending triplet sixteenth notes—often each just a half-step apart—slurred to a quarter note. This chromatic, forward-moving gesture suggests danger creating a sense of foreboding.⁷²

Music for the introduction of Ruth would have been sweet and romantic, perhaps newly published genre music or the hit “Sweet Georgia Brown.” This quick-step song could continue through the following scenes as Finley and Ruth fly together, after which Lucas might have used the Iago motif when Finley says he’ll get Ruth to marry him or throw her out of his plane. As the film progresses, Lucas would have been able to reuse these motifs: the military march for Billy, the Iago theme for Finley and his gang, and “Sweet Georgia Brown” for Ruth. As the main plot gets underway, Lucas might have used generic music for “hurry,” “storm,” or “suspense” as Billy investigates the missing payroll, or more opera repertoire like Bizet’s “Les Toreadors” from Carmen. In the final reel, Lucas would likely again have chosen fast, suspenseful music as Finley flies with the captive Ruth, chased by Billy in his plane, and would have played something particularly anxiety-inducing as Ruth jumps from Finley’s plane to a rope ladder hanging from Billy’s—maybe Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee,” featuring violinist Wayne-Townsend. Perhaps Lucas switched to more operatic music, like the triumphal march from Verdi’s Aida, once Ruth and Billy are together on the ground at the end of the film, or perhaps “I’m Sittin’ On Top of the World,” made popular the year before by blackface singer Al Jolson. An intertitle at the end of the film shows a score and an English-language version of the lyrics from Schubert’s Ständchen, indicating the romance between Ruth and Billy. Lucas would have been familiar with the piece and probably used it to close out the picture. Her score would have been a dynamic, smart mix of genres and styles, and it would have been an audience-rouser.

For a second imaginary score, I focus on white Chicago cinema organist Mildred Fitzpatrick, who was, like Lucas, celebrated in the contemporary trade and general press as a highly successful performer.⁷³ Also like Lucas, Fitzpatrick’s mother played for vaudeville in the family’s theater, and Fitzpatrick began playing for the pictures when she was eight. She trained as a concert pianist, taking organ lessons on the side, and turned to cinema accompaniment full-time in her teens, when she became a solo organist in Chicago theaters, in contrast with Lucas’s work with ensembles. She published several pieces, just two of which survive, and only as titles: “The Verdi Rag,” composed when she was employed at the Verdi Theater; and “In My Wonderful Dreams of You.”⁷⁴ Her few recordings are lost. Fitzpatrick played at numerous theaters, and while she wrote in a magazine article about the importance of buying a piece or two each week to develop a personal library, she also likely used music belonging to the theaters at which she played.⁷⁵

Given her concert training and vaudeville roots, any score by Fitzpatrick would have included a mix of popular songs—perhaps her own—and genre pieces as well as excerpts from symphonic works, possibly swung or ragged.⁷⁶ I imagine that her score for the mostly lost 1917 Theda Bara vehicle Cleopatra, directed by J. Gordon Edwards and loosely based on Cleopatra’s historic relationships with Caesar and Mark Antony, pulled from a very large range of works. Fitzpatrick could have used genre music for this picture, playing exoticist “Egyptian” and “Oriental” pieces throughout, like Roy Spaulding Stoughton’s 1916 Egyptian Suite, which uses the pentatonic scale, associated with the “Other,” chromatic glissandi, sensuous gestures like the piece’s opening triplets, and considerable rubato. Material from the piece’s second movement, “The Song of the Priestesses,” with its undulating line in 12/8, could have provided a motif for Cleopatra. Fitzpatrick might have used another “Egyptian” or Cleopatra-related piece, such as the 1917 hit “Cleopatra Had a Jazz Band,” during the scene of the queen “reveling” with Antony at Alexandria.⁷⁷ Generic military music would have suited Caesar, and likewise something martial for Antony. For Cleopatra’s fictional Egyptian lover Pharon, Fitzpatrick could have again turned to exoticist music, perhaps using more of the Stoughton suite or perhaps a love song of the period, such as the popular “Flor do Mal,” sung by Vicente Celestino on a popular record from 1916. For the battle at Actium, Fitzpatrick may have used a combination of Cleopatra’s and Antony’s motifs, or relied on generic battle music—fast, rhythmically driving music with bugle calls or special effects from the organ as men and horses fell in action. Finally, Cleopatra’s death would have required something spectacular, an extended version of her primary theme, or a piece associated with death. Perhaps Fitzpatrick played an exoticized version of Edvard Grieg’s “Åse’s Death,” a common piece in film accompaniment, or even a version of Frédéric Chopin’s “Funeral March.” She might have used a recently published genre piece, like Giuseppe Becce’s “Facing Death,” which was used in numerous cue sheets. Or perhaps she knew Leo Oehmler’s 1910 Cleopatra suite and its fourth movement, “IV. Cleopatra’s Death.” This piece begins quietly and slowly, with an introduction in B minor that uses the dotted eighth-sixteenth pattern of Chopin’s “Funeral March.” This leads to a very loud, stately maestoso in B major. The piece then returns to the slower and quieter character and key of the introduction and incorporates a descending chromatic scale before changing character once again, this time to a still-quiet but more active section in G major in which the eighth-sixteenth pattern becomes much more prominent. Two time-signature changes follow, along with an eventual return to B minor for a final section marked “Larghetto,” in which there are two short crescendos to fortissimos—presumably marking the bite of the asp or Cleopatra’s final death throes—before the music dies away on an unanticipated D major chord. Fitzpatrick’s score would have been hip, dramatic, and epic.

In recent years we’ve witnessed new scholarship and general interest in women composers and performers such as Black American composers Florence Price, Julia Perry, and Helen Hagen. The recovery of women composers and accompanists for early film should receive as much attention as other women composers who are now being rediscovered. We need to consider how this repertoire, its creators and performers—this vast, half-imaginary archive—can function as a platform for feminist theory, history, and musicology. We can use speculative approaches to this archive and bring it to life in a way that illuminates lacunas in silent film music research. In thinking of this body of material and information in speculative ways, we are enabled to further our knowledge of it, its creators, and the challenges they faced. We owe it to the women who created silent film music to investigate their influence and power, not just their struggles.

Furthermore, we need to seek out the relationships between pieces (genres, composers, publishers) held in various women’s collections, and consider what those relationships might mean. We can map where women played and look at trends in music sales, income, or other factors in that area and make educated conjectures about what their accompaniments sounded like. We should hypothesize about influence by uncovering which accompanists played and what they played for the cinemas in the neighborhoods where the film music composers of the 1930s and ’40s grew up.

Although the silent era of cinema in the United States ended almost a hundred years ago, I’m always happily surprised by what still gets found in attics and donated to SFSMA and other archives, and how many people are interested in researching and using those discoveries. Just as I began writing this essay, two things happened. First, Black composer Kathryn Bostic announced that she would be composing new scores for the short film “Something Good—Negro Kiss” and The Flying Ace. I cannot wait to hear what she does for these films. And second, I received a box of music once belonging to a woman named Beatrice Nadeau. Born in 1896 in Newport, New Hampshire, she dropped out of school at age sixteen to “play piano in a silent movie theater,” as her nephew Bob Nadeau wrote to me.⁷⁸ There is yet another feminist history here, another musicological study, more questions to ask, and speculations to be made: about Nadeau leaving school to help support her family, about the music she chose and played, what was missing and what survived after her death in 1995, and what the contents of the box suggest. I can’t wait to explore it.