by Mike Telin
At a time when performing musical scores during the showings of blockbuster films has become popular programming for symphony orchestras, it’s interesting to turn back the clock to an era when audiences never heard the actors’ voices and the music was always performed live by whatever size ensemble was available.
This past semester a group of Oberlin students in the Music and Melodrama on Stage and Screen class, taught by Emily Laurance, immersed themselves in the creation of film scores from a historical perspective.
On Friday, May 10 the members of the class presented their final projects at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station. “The Many Moods of Melodrama: Sentiment, Satire, Horror, and Noir” was a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining evening that featured five short silent films exploring the melodramatic mode, with original scores performed by the students.