Neil Brand on HippFest and silent film composition

Silent film’s closest cousin is sound film, right? Maybe not, says composer and silent film accompanist Neil Brand. “Silent film grew out of big communal experiences like opera, music hall and vaudeville,” he explains, “and was intended to please a crowd.” Give people a beautiful venue like the Hippodrome in Bo’ness – the home of silent film festival HippFest – with its wooden sounding board adding audio warmth, and silent film becomes an engrossing multimedia spectacle. Brand is thrilled to return to the 15th edition of HippFest, which he considers a pioneer in silent film exhibition, for an event where he will improvise the score to a film he’s never seen before.

How does one prepare for such a performance? “The best preparation is to be as relaxed as possible,” says Brand. “I sit down at the piano beforehand, completely relaxed both physically and mentally, and open myself up. Every time I play, it's completely different, and I can't tell you what I played after. It's in the moment.” He likens this to actors finding the subtext in their scenes, and like an actor, he has to embody and respond rather than think and analyse.

Composing has different challenges and opportunities – namely, the possibility of a definitive take. “There is a wild chance this music will outlive me, so it has to work from second to second with every audience,” Brand says. He references the famously fastidious Stephen Sondheim: “Check every word and line, because if you don’t, someone else will.” He almost always reworks the beginning of his scores once he’s finished the film and its motifs have emerged organically. He also avoids relying on piano, instead utilising the entire orchestra’s colours and textures. 

Hitchcock’s 1929 thriller Blackmail was Brand's first full score. The project was brought to him by Timothy Brock, the musical director for the Charlie Chaplin estate, who helped Brand learn how to synchronise music to film. Since early film music was conducted live, every shot and intertitle is in the score to anchor the music to the action. “The poor conductor has to hold the orchestra to the film for an hour and a half or two hours, or God forbid, three,” Brand says. 

Brand’s favourite composers include Miklós Rózsa, whose noir scores influenced Brand’s music for Blackmail, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, best known for The Adventures of Robin Hood. When Brand scored his first western with a 40-odd piece orchestra, including banjo and a lead violinist who could play “redneck fiddle”, out came homages to Aaron Copland and Elmer Bernstein. “That was such a joy,” he says. “I draw on music and the great composers that have meant a great deal to me.”

Neil Brand and The Dodge Bros @ HippFest 2022. Credit: Tom Duffin

Brand says he relishes the relative freedom of scoring old movies. “My joke is that I work with early film because all the directors are dead. You are given a great film which doesn't have any sound, and you're required to make that film sing. That's like working with Hitchcock or Fairbanks. It’s the best job in the world.” 

While historically informed, Brand places less value in recreating the past than in bridging the gap between the film’s era and ours, creating music that the audience understands and connects with. “That’s the necromancy – the film hasn't changed in 120 years but what you're doing is happening right now,” he says. “The tension between the two has a fantastic energy.”

Brand describes his job as “locking the doors with my playing so that the audience is as deep inside the film as I am.” If people say they forgot he was there, he takes it as a compliment. “If they say that with an orchestral piece, you've done it right, because a whole orchestra could not be more there if they tried.”

Some people might see silent films as museum pieces, but Brand rejects this idea. “It doesn't occur to people that this is an entirely immersive experience,” he says. “People say they have never experienced anything like it – even seasoned theatre-goers, concert-goers, and opera-goers – but it's true, because it is all of these [artforms] at once.” 

It appears that festivals like HippFest are helping break down these preconceived notions of silent film, and Brand is busier than ever. He’s heartened that HippFest attracts a young audience from all over the world and hopes to see silent film catching on more widely. For him, there's nothing like the joy of discovering silent film’s magic. Hopefully, HippFest 2025 will be full of such experiences.

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HippFest, Hippodrome, Bo'ness, 19-23 Mar
Neil Brand: Key Notes, 21 Mar, 12.30pm; online viewing available 23-25 Mar
Neil Brand also provides live scores for Skinner's Dress Suit (22 Mar) and I Want to be a Train Driver (22 Mar) at HippFest
hippodromecinema.co.uk

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