Watch Great Film Composers: The Music of the Movies Season 1 Online

The first edition looks at the decades before the first “talking picture”, 1927’s The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson in dubious blackface. Movies were silent — or were they? If you were watching a Chaplin comedy in a “fleapit”, perhaps. In a fancier picture house you might enjoy a live pianist ad-libbing to what he saw on screen, and, by 1915, DW Griffith’s blockbuster The Birth of a Nation was distributed with a full score to be played by a live orchestra.