The range of emotional expression that Buster Keaton accomplishes with his constantly furrowed brows might be, on its own, somewhat limited in the slapstick comedy, "The General" (1926). However, the film was brought to new heights in Spaulding Auditorium on Sunday night by the Alloy Orchestra's meticulously scored live musical accompaniment. A three-man band covered the sounds of the Civil War, fire-engine trains and the wringing hands of a damsel in distress with skill and a creative quirkiness.
"Our goal is to render the emotional content of the film via music," Ken Winokur, director of the Alloy Orchestra, said. Winokur also plays clarinet and percussion.
Terry Donahue covers a variety of instruments including the accordion and the musical saw, and Roger Miller adds harmony to the arrangements with his adept use of the keyboard.
The ensemble got its start performing junk-metal "assemblage" shows by creating sounds with found objects, according to the group. The idea of writing compositions for silent films came about after one such show on New Year's Eve 21 years ago.
"A film producer approached us and said he wanted to show Metropolis' [1927], but didn't want to use the soundtrack that was on the print that was this very strange rock and roll soundtrack that came out in the '80s," Winokur said. "He asked if we would be interested in putting together the soundtrack."
The ensemble took the opportunity and developed "a fairly improvisational score" for "Metropolis," Winokur said.
"It was one of the coolest shows I have seen at the Hop," Gabe Rosenstein '13 said about "Metropolis."
Rosenstein saw the performance of Alloy's first score when the Hopkins Center screened "Metropolis" last fall.
"There was something really special about the combination of incredible 35-millimeter film and a live musical accompaniment bringing together two of the most powerful media in one presentation," Winokur said.
After working on "Metropolis," the band took to researching more silent films.
"At the very beginning, I was pretty ignorant of silent films I really didn't know the history," Winokur said. "After we had finished Metropolis,' it became obvious we didn't know what else to do, and that began the process of watching every film we could get a hold of."
The process was challenging due to the limited availability of silent films on DVD, Winokur said. In some cases, the ensemble simply had no access to a film until a movie production studio approached them with recovered footage, as was the case with Paramount Studio approaching Alloy about "Underworld" (1927).
The band begins scoring a film by sketching out the scenes, and then returning to rework them.
"We'll go back and forth many times sometimes 50 times over a period of several months until we get it pretty well worked out," Winokur said.
"The General" presented its own challenges to the ensemble.
"It's a fast-paced, kinetic film, which involves a lot of percussion," Winokur said. "We are going to have to make the sound of a train every time a train appears on the screen."
The train, appropriately named The General, appears in a majority of the scenes, making it a character in its own right. Balancing the necessity of consistency but avoiding boredom was difficult, Winokur said.
"What we needed to do is find a way of creating the train musically, but giving it enough variety so that the train can almost be a rhythm, like the lockbeat in the back, without the audience watching the film and getting bored by the piece," Winokur said.
The ensemble accomplished this goal masterfully, emphasizing the consistency of the train as a useful contrast to the intentional subversion of normalcy that is characteristic of slapstick comedy.
"We did actually listen to some Civil War songs just to get a flavor for the music, which wasn't completely obvious to us," Winokur said.
The band's sound is hard to pin down into one particular genre.
"Our style is to not have a particular style," Winokur said. "We have a large variety of really unusual sounds, which keeps us from sounding like anyone else."
Alloy relies on its background in junk metal performances to create a variety of sounds.
"It's an unusual setup with the two percussionists staged behind a 7-foot tall, 12-foot wide drum set," Winokur said.
In addition to a number of basic drums, the band's setup includes a galvanized metal sheet, also referred to as "a thunder machine," plumbing machines, and pots and pans, Winokur said. The objects are suspended on a string hanging between two tripods on either end of the setup.
Alloy's distinctive arrangement of instruments adds the visual component of installation art to an already lively combination of film and music.
"Junk metal assemblage is visually exciting," Winokur said. "This is totally a visual medium, I've always found when I go to a concert, there's a little bit of a deficit of the visual quality in it. The more information you can give people, the more they can get into it and enjoy it."
