ep. 49: Rudolph Valentino, Ernie Kovacs, Buster Keaton, and the Craft of Supporting Subtleties

The Silent Film Music Podcast with Ben Model

In this episode: Ben plays with holding back musically to help an audience of art deco fans connect with Valentino and Nazimova during a show of "Camille" (1921); he and Kerr Lockhart dig in to details about "Oriental Blues", the theme song Ernie Kovacs used for all of his shows from 1951-1962; and Ben discusses the various intricacies of live-scoring Keaton's "The General" in order to help one gag, get out of the way of another, and to create a musical arc for a feature-length comedy that's essentially one very long chase. Show notes for this episode can be found here.