The notion of ‘musical source’ gives rise to considerable problems in the study of silent film music. On a purely historical level, it should be remembered that most of the music for silent films no longer exists. On the other hand, a vast repertoire of mood music from the silent era has come down to us as an example of specialised publishing in the field of film music. Collections such as Kinothek, Motion Picture Moods, Filmharmonie and many others consisted of original pieces that were not associated with a specific film, but were designed to fit into standard narrative situations or to provide a common emotional aura.
The practice of reusing and re-functionalising these pieces of music, constantly oscillating between composition and compilation, raises ontological problems concerning the multiple definition of the musical work, its author and its performance. The score of a piece of mood music is not, in fact, the source of an opus in the strict sense of the term. It is not an aesthetically grounded entity, but rather an operational instruction at the service of a subsequent creative act: the one that will shape the musical accompaniment of a particular film screening in the cinema.
The ubiquity of mood music is not the exception, but the rule. Identifying and cataloguing a piece of mood music is therefore not in itself a useful scholarly knowledge unless it is complemented by knowledge of its adaptive uses. These, however, are not to be found in the primary source, but must be reconstructed by consulting secondary sources of various kinds, from film scenarios to journalistic reviews, which only in their constellation give an account of the cinematic show as a whole.
Francesco Finocchiaro, Ontological Problems of Silent Film Music between Compilation and Composition, IAML Annual Meeting, University of Cambridge, 31 July – 4 August 2023.
FMJ Project 
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