The third of my four essays on music for silent film is now up at NewMusicBox! In this essay, I discuss how music influences the perception of film. As an example, I use a scene from Buster Keaton’s 1927 film The General, which has been scored by multiple performers and groups and thus offers a great selection of different approaches. This essay is condensed and extracted from a larger article I’m working on in which I examine the visual and aural aspects of Civil War nostalgia both during the 1920s and today in relation to the film’s scoring and marketing.
