This weekend three silent comedies will be screened in Spaulding Auditorium, but the theater will be anything but silent.
Instead, Alloy Orchestra will provide a live accompaniment to the classic American movies and fill the theater with sounds so convincing and synchronized one would think they were coming from movies themselves.
Widely considered the premier silent movie band, Alloy is able to manufacture and convey the right mood through its eclectic assortment of instruments that include both conventional, state-of-the-art and highly original items known as the "rack of junk" that are more closely related to junkyard scrap metal than anything sold in a music store.
Alloy's ingenuity derives from its ability to convincingly manufacture any sound to match the events in a silent movie, whether it be Martian radio signals or a German bar band from the 1920s, much to the audience's auditory delight.
Alloy has existed for 10 years and each year they create a new score, which is performed at the Telluride Film Festival in southwestern Colorado. This creative orchestra has scored the music for 13 silent films thus far, and is masterminded by just three members, Terry Donahue, Ken Winokur and Rodger C. Miller. Donahue covers percussion, the accordion and vocals while Winokur works with percussion and the clarinet and Miller uses a synthesizer.
This weekend's performance will take the theme Masters of Slapstick, that will include three short but famous silent comedies from the 1910s and 1920s. "Easy Street" featuring Charlie Chaplin, "One Week" with Buster Keaton and "Big Business" by Laurel and Hardy are all renowned for their slapstick comedy routines. This is also the same group of films that showed at Telluride in September 1999.
In addition to Telluride, the orchestra has performed at many other prestigious festivals and art galleries around the country and around the world. Their venues have included The Louvre, Lincoln Center, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Film Festival and the New Zealand International Arts Festival, to name a few.
Alloy Orchestra will play in Spaulding at 7 p.m. on Saturday January 13.
