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TOSH presents: A Night at the Silent Movies
Nov 16, 2018
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A Night at the Silent Movies
Steamboat Bill, Jr. is a wonderful 1928 silent comedy film starring Buster Keaton. This film and a Charlie Chaplin short will be introduced and then accompanied by pianist Bruce Vogt.
Bruce Vogt, who has taught in the University of Victoria’s School of Music since 1980, is a concert pianist who commands large swaths of the standard repertoire. But he is also a rarity among classical performers in that he revels in improvisation.
A lifelong movie buff, he relished this particular musical genre, though academic commitments subsequently kept him away from it for many years.
About 17 years ago, however, in Paris, Vogt was asked to accompany some short films by Chaplin, and since then he has maintained a side career in silent movies, which he has accompanied as far afield as the U.K., Germany, and Japan, to responses he describes as “extraordinary.”
Vogt has accompanied films several times at the Old School House Arts Centre in Qualicum Beach.
Vogt himself chooses the films, and recommends the program quite apart from his musical contribution. He has bottomless admiration for the imaginative and innovative works of what he considers a cinematic “golden age,” and believes that anyone unfamiliar with Chaplin and Keaton will be “gobsmacked” by these films.
He has accompanied all the movies before, and “knows almost every frame of them.” He does not plan his accompaniments in advance, however, even though this was commonplace in the silent era. Indeed, cue sheets were published for many silent films, indicating (with song titles or musical incipits) what music was appropriate to each scene. But Vogt prefers to improvise anew for each screening — as he did in the beginning, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Western Ontario accompanying films he was seeing for the first time.
This particular specimen of “historical performance practice,” moreover, serves as a useful reminder that music was always essential to the cinema, even before the advent of synchronized recorded sound. Silent movies, in other words, were never really silent
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| Category: | Events |
| Date: | Nov 16, 2018 |
| Time: | 7:00pm |
| Address: | 122 Fern Road West, Qualicum Beach |
| Location: | The Old School House Arts Centre |
| Cost: | $20 |
| Website: | Open Site |
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