Music Man

Louisville’s Rodney Sauer makes music for silent movies and more

By Brad Weismann  »  Photos by Bonnie Chaim

“There are so many new restorations; anything you go and see will look good!”

So enthuses Rodney Sauer, 61-year-old Louisville musician and composer, about the avalanche of rediscovered and restored silent films that have come to light over the past 20 years. It has been his business and pleasure to devote decades to creating and playing musical scores as accompaniment to a full range of silent film classics. He is nationally known as a silent-movie music man.

The lights go down in the theater, and images with no sound flicker across the screen. Suddenly, there is a stirring of notes, and the silent film you’re watching comes to life, borne on a bed of melody. 

Silent films from 1895 through 1929 were never really silent—all were accompanied by live music. Today, enthusiasts of the period and the intrigued and curious flock to present-day screenings of these vintage classics. Naturally, the music returned as well. A dedicated group of composers and musicians make those movies come to life again through live performances and recorded soundtracks, and Sauer is at the forefront of that movement.

“I started taking piano lessons back in elementary school,” says Sauer, who was raised in Berkeley, California. “Later, I was accompanist for the choir, but I did not think of music as where I wanted to go.” He studied chemistry at Oberlin College in Ohio. “I chose the school because I knew a lot of good musicians would be there,” he continues. 

He moved to Colorado in the 1980s for graduate work, but he moved away from the discipline and worked various jobs. “I kept making music, and eventually, I realized my wife covered things, so I was able to develop the music.”

So, he has, as an individual on piano or accordion and as a part of the ensemble he founded in 1989, the Mont Alto Picture Orchestra. To date, the orchestra has played for more than 150 films from the silent era, recording dozens of soundtracks to silent films on DVD, including gems such as “The Thief of Bagdad,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “The Mark of Zorro,” plus Westerns, thrillers and the comedies of greats such Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. It’s performed from Lincoln Center in New York to Grauman’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood.

“Silent film is definitely what I’m known for,” he says. “I’ve worked with people around the world!”

Some silent accompanists play improvisationally, but Sauer constructs his scores from preexisting pieces. Many were composed specifically during the silent period for silent music work, generated in “fake books” that allowed performers to match a scene’s mood, illustrate menace, document a chase, or underline a punch line. Surprisingly, there were few complete scores created for individual films.

“I can name maybe four,” says Sauer. “It was not very common because there wasn’t much time. Movies, like now, came out every week. It was up to the theaters what kind of music they played. If you saw the same film in a hundred theaters, you would hear one hundred different versions.”

Sauer watches a prospective silent movie, then puts together a score “like a jigsaw puzzle,” he says, working with films ranging from 13 minutes to four hours. He then syncs the music to the film, does required run-throughs and then steps in front of an audience or into a recording booth, the film unreeling as he and his musical comrades play beneath it.

But silent film is not only what Sauer is known for. When Mont Alto was initially formed, it was a dance band covering the music from the pre-swing era. “There are a lot of bands that do swing music,” Sauer says, “but we went back to the dances that were done from 1910 to 1930.” He also notes an anecdote about Benny Goodman and his orchestra getting bounced from the Trocadero Ballroom at Elitch Gardens in Denver in 1935 because they didn’t know any waltzes. Back then, you had to play what people could dance to.

Still, his primary thrust is movie work. The Mont Alto Orchestra appears regularly at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the Telluride Film Festival, the TCM Classic Film Festival, the Denver Silent Film Festival, the Chautauqua Auditorium film series and the Kansas Silent Film Festival. “It’s gratifying,” Sauer says. “People see silent film as an event.”