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My name is Neil Brand. I am a composer, musician, writer, performer. My background is a mix of all those different things. I actually studied drama at university

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and came out as a fully fledged actor-musician. I've always been able to play the piano by ear and music, sitting at the piano was always enormous therapy for me. I hadn't planned for it to be a career.

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But when I came out of university, although there was a bit of acting work, there wasn't a huge amount. So I was doing music for theatre.

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I was writing music. I was being a theatrical MD and, as I say, actor-musician. And I got into silent films because a film society on the south coast in Eastbourne approached me.

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I was part of a group of students who had all left university together. And we opened an arts centre in an old cinema in Eastbourne. And the film society was going to be showing films

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right the way through the year. But they said, we really want to do a silent. And we know you play piano. Would you like to have a go at it?

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So I said, yeah, sure, I'll give it a go, with all that insouciance of youth. And there was a one and a quarter hour film called Steamboat Bill, Jr. by Buster Keaton that they sent me

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on 16-mil film. And although I went in knowing I was up against it, because he was brilliant, he didn't need me. I also thought that something would take over

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when I was improvising to this film because, although I prepared two or three ideas that would get me 10 or 15 minutes into it, what took over was the audience. And the audience were laughing, obviously.

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But the first big laugh that came-- the music changed under my fingers, and I started playing something I'd never heard before. And that was when I realised that this was actually something

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I was good at, and that there was an element, like stand-up comedy, like improvised acting, there was an element of that that I could just do it, as long as I had the inspiration of what was on the screen.

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So I auditioned and got into the National Film Theatre on the South Bank, now BFI Southbank, 40 years ago, so 1986, and really began my learning then, which was to do with seeing films from all over the world.

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At the time, the National Film Theatre was showing a lot of early cinema, and quite right, too. And even now, from this distance, if you're looking back at cinema beginning in 1895,

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the first 30 years is silent. So cinema history doesn't begin in 1927 with The Jazz Singer. It begins 30 years before. So I suddenly found myself playing films

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from obviously Hollywood, obviously Britain, but all over Europe, the Far East, Japan, Australia, films of every language, every kind of story, every kind of attitude.

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And from there, really, I've been lucky enough to make a career that's taken me around the world several times, and also into all the other areas of music and analysis that I've got into through BBC Radio and BBC

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Television, all of which ultimately is about asking, how does music tell story? So what you have to remember with the very earliest years of cinema is that it was a process of discovery.

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The technology only allowed for a camera to shoot about 50 seconds of film initially. So all the films were really, really short. But because no one had seen moving image,

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that was enough to pack out any space that was showing these films. People couldn't get over watching waterfalls, watching ship launchings, seeing countries they'd never thought

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they would be able to visit. It's only really towards the end of the 19th century, between 1895 and 1900 and that pre-war period, that cinema becomes a storytelling machine which has

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an industry behind it, whereby more and more and more and more people are becoming fascinated by it. So between those two dates, 1900s and the start of the First World War, 1914, cinema grows up hugely in terms

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of technologically what was possible. Cameras could move easier. They were lighter. The lighting got better.

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It was possible to now light scenes without just having natural daylight, which is what they had to use before they could come up with decent lighting.

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They still couldn't record sound. It wasn't the case of recording sound. Edison had been doing that for years. It was synchronising it.

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How do you shoot something and record the sound at the same time? And there was experimentation on that going on all the way through that period.

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But the biggest developments were in how people watched stories. And we're talking about big groups of people, either to begin with sitting in spaces that had been set aside

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that would be just perfect for a projector with throw, probably hand-cranked, onto a screen and some kind of music. We know, even at the very beginning, even with the Lumiere brothers in 1895,

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there was music playing when they showed those very, very, very first films. So slowly, cinema as an idea, of what we now think of as cinema, a group of people

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in a specific state with a big screen, with sound grew through that period. And what you find after a while is that they go through a period that, particularly in the UK,

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there are called biograph tents or bioscope tents that go around fairgrounds and around towns whereby they'll set up a tent. They have specific bioscope films.

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They put them on. Audiences come to, flock to see them. A couple of extraordinary men called Mitchell and Kenyon then went out and set up their cameras outside factory gates,

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and in streets, and in markets, and then said to people, come and see yourselves on screen. So they sold their films that way. People were fascinated with music.

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But after a while that wasn't enough. People wanted stories. And the earliest stories are films that exist from about 1904/1905.

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And by story, I mean something that's got several elements to it, to get from A to Z. I'm thinking of a film that in Britain, for instance, like Rescued by Rover, which was an absolute groundbreaker.

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And it's a baby being stolen and taken away. And the dog has seen where the baby's been taken, goes back to the master, leads the master through all the various different parts

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of Walton-on-Thames, which is where it was shot, to get the baby back. And this was an absolutely massive hit and, in fact, got pirated in countries all the way around the world.

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There are probably heading for tens of Rescued by Rovers because of the way that story worked. Ditto, The Great Train Robbery in America, same thing again. Business people interested in cinema

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knew that the best way to make money was to, a, make sure that they got people to their space, whatever that space was, b, then provide something that those people couldn't get somewhere else,

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and c, if at all possible, provide it with an element of luxury. Because the first big audience for cinema, without doubt, was working class.

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And one of the big things about cinema and what we think of as cinema is that you could go to the pictures wearing your working clothes.

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Whereas if you're going to go to the theatre, to the opera, to concerts, you had to go home, get washed, get changed, go back out again. So cinema just attracted people because it

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was happening where it was. They could go in. They could just hang out. And yes, there was drink.

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Yes, there was trouble. Yes, there was a rowdy crowd. But hey, they were loving it. And one of the things that I think silent cinema differs

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so much with our experience of cinema is that they were rowdy places. You'd have a band or you'd have a piano player, sure. But at the same time, the films were built to make people want

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to yell at the screen, "don't go with him, don't." He's going to mislead you." "Don't do that." "Don't"--

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So that's why so many of the films have got what we now think of as melodramatic situations where someone has got a decision to make, and there's time for the audience

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to just let fly at the screen going, "No, don't do that. Don't go." Hence all the murders, hence all the love affairs, et cetera, everything that anybody could want.

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You could make money out of the working class, but you could make a lot more money out of the middle class. The middle class wanted spaces in which they felt at home, spaces that recognised their status because their status was

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higher than the working class, and ultimately material on that screen that was aimed at them. And here we arrive, slap bang in the middle of Shakespeare, because that material could not be understood

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by anyone who didn't know the plays, but to be absolutely frank, wasn't aimed at them either. The people who were putting Shakespeare into cinemas knew that they were after an audience who were Shakespeare

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savvy, who knew these films-- And more often than not wanted to see specific famous performances of those films by actors they'd heard of, and that those films were happening

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near where they lived, rather than having to go to London to see them, or in some cases with some of the great European stars, never get to see them in the UK except on film.

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It is quite difficult to get a one-size-fits-all answer to how people experience silent film. It depended on the size of the space they were in. It depended how much money had been spent

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on making that presentation. But the assumption, I think, would always be that there was a piano or an organ, because that would give you the basic idea of music that

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could create the sense of an occasion about the space. One thing I think that's really important to understand is that what silent cinema with music was not trying to do was create what we think of as a film score.

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There was no attempt to try and create music that fitted the film exactly from second to second until much later, towards the mid-'20s and onwards. There were extraordinary examples of that happening.

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Saint-Saens wrote the first actual score for a silent film. And that's in 1908. And it works a treat. He made a film score before there was

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such a thing as film scoring. But in general, what the music was there to do was create a mood within which these films could work, and that that mood would change according

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to what the band were able to play, what music they had in front of them. There may well have been some improvisation, but for a band to improvise together

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would take a lot of time. For the most part, when you've got a band, even I'm thinking about a trio, or something like that, so that's piano, cello, and violin,

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you've pretty much got to make sure that all those parts are scored. So it would be down to the individual bands and the individual cinemas and the individual spaces moving

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picture spaces to work out who their band was going to be, whether it be one person, two, or three. And then it would be down to the person in charge of that band to come up with music

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that fitted the show. And when I say "fitted," I mean if you had a beautiful travelogue of waterfalls would play music that fitted with a beautiful travelogue of waterfalls.

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And if that didn't change that much for the next two or three travelogues, that would be fine. If you then went to a fire, they would have to come up with something that had a feel of a fire.

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And this would be music they had to go out and find. They would hardly have written anything themselves. One of the things about early cinema is that even right from the earliest

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5 or 10 years of cinema, it's very intensive. The turnover of prints is really fast because an audience, once they've seen something, wanted to see something else.

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So the very least, they were having to feed this machine with more and more and more footage of different things, and hence the beginnings of stories and the different ways stories were told,

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which meant the musicians had to pretty much turn on a sixpence, come up with what was needed at the time, certainly prepared, ready for the show. And slowly, slowly there grew up an industry

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to support these people. When I say "these people," I mean any musicians playing for film. They started to be able to find music specially printed out

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for them. The music publishers realised that there was a market here for music that was mood-linked, not specific title-linked. So if you wanted a piece of music that said fire,

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you could find fire music. You could go out and find a piece of music existed already, could be Verdi or Mozart or whatever, con fuoco. Fine, there's your fire music.

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But at the same time, if you wanted a fire in which there's an element of danger or of threat or jeopardy or whatever, then that music had to be slightly different.

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So slowly, slowly, up until about 19-- well, just heading into the First World War, there started to be music made available that was specifically for silent movie musicians, and often

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multiple parts. And after a while, a book was made available to pianists Moving Picture Moods by a chap called Erno Rapee.

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And that is a thick book like that, about the thickness of a Bible. And it has an A to Z index going down one side. And whatever your theme is you're looking

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for, if you're looking for fire, and if you're in the middle of a film, you could actually go F, "fire." And there's 1, 2, 3, 4 fire pieces of 8 bars or 32 bars or 16 bars or whatever.

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So anybody who could be fairly nippy with their fingers and could read really well, probably could play a silent film at site with just that book in front of them, even if they couldn't improvise.

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But at the same time, as more money is being made out of cinema and as more people get to see cinema and have their own taste in how they want to see it, slowly, you begin to get ensembles and proper ensembles

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at that. Bear in mind, certainly in the UK, that the first 10 years of the 20th century, music was everywhere.

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There were concerts. There were public concerts. Most homes have a piano in them. Most people could play something.

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Your party piece was you turning up to play something on your instrument. So people were more used to having live music and listening to live music as part of their everyday lives.

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So any cinema that didn't bother with more than a piano began to find themselves left behind by the cinemas that actually took that seriously and hired two players, three players, four players.

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In the case of the big city cinemas where they were making real serious money, they would have an ensemble of 12 or 13. The largest ensemble in London by the end of the silent period

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had got 36 musicians in the pit. And they were playing music that was absolutely tailored to go with the film. So the music, too, increases in both the amount of it

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and its quality over the years. Probably one of the most famous British composers to write silent movie music was Ketelbey, who wrote music like In A Monastery Garden

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and In An Arabian Market. And those pieces of music were so successful that they became standalone light music concert pieces, but they were written specifically for silent film.

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And the specifics could be very specific. The most specific I've ever found was a piece of music called Desert Monotony, which is a piece of music you play if you've got a desert scene where

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somebody is crawling through the desert desperate for a drink. And I guess I've never tried it with anything else, but I guess that would have been used a fair bit, because there were a lot of films, Westerns particularly

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with monotonous desert in there, and specifics as well to do with-- there were multiple Charlie Chaplin pieces written because Chaplin was such a huge success in the mid teens. So if you wanted to play music for silent film,

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there was now an industry set up to support even that. It's worth bearing in mind that when sound came in and silent movies were swept away between 1927 and 1930s, a huge industry disappeared with it.

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We think possibly up to 55,000 musicians were put out of work when sound came in, because music for silent cinema was a major musical industry for those players. The curious thing is that the music side of silent film

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was considered to be very disposable. So there's very little absolute record of who played in specific places, what they played. There's some.

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And I have a website which has got a lot of the materials that were available at the time. I found a tiny cinema in Hall Green in Birmingham, which even in 1912 was producing a biweekly, twice a week,

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programme programme, with the films listed down the outside, and then the music that's going to be played with them listed down the middle and who the bandleader was. He didn't say how many were in the band.

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But it did at least give you an idea of what sort of music would have been put with what sort of films at the time. But an awful lot of the facts we have to hand, certainly for the UK, has come from really deep and complex research

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into newspaper archives, into the industry papers. The UK film industry had an industry sort of journal that came out every week. And that's got all the details of the films being

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made, where they're being made. And every one had got a single page devoted to the music. And that tells you who's producing what at the time, what music is available,

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critiquing some of the bands, saying what they were playing. So there is a kind of-- there's stuff about this, but it is quite hard to find, compared with all the information there

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is about silent cinema itself. A lot of the work that's been done, I know, by my colleagues in this country has been going to newspaper archives and then literally comparing and contrasting

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between what they know about the programme and the local cinema at the time and anything that was written about it by the press. And that way you can find at least some idea

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of what the public response was to what they were seeing. And also interesting things like council inquiries, any lewd goings-on in cinemas, for instance, would turn up in police records.

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The council would have to licence spaces. They'd have to licence them according to very basic fire regulations. So from that, we know how many people, for instance,

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they could get into a cinema at a particular time. We get some idea, as I say, of just how rowdy these could be, letters to the newspapers, letters of complaint about films.

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There was a big backlash to all of silent cinema, from a kind of evangelical right who basically said, these films are all sinful, apart from the biblical ones. And there were many cinemas that, for instance,

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just as the same with theatres and concert halls, refused to play films on a Sunday because that was the day of rest. That was the Sabbath.

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The thing to be most aware of, I would say, with the music, with silent film, is that every individual cinema would do their own music to go with the films, which meant that you probably saw a different film from one cinema

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to the next because the music is so influential. There was also an attempt, I think, to really please the local audience with the kind of music they'd expect.

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So we do know, for instance, in the Southern states in America, they would have much more particularly aimed at Afro-Caribbean audiences, they would have much more of the kind of gospel-style of music

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that you would expect for that audience to be hearing as a matter of course anyway. I've heard they had brass band accompaniments in the North. Scotland had much more in the way of Celtic

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sound for the instruments that they were using. But this was all to make sure that the audience were comfortable with the music they were listening to. They might not all particularly want

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to listen to Chopin or Mozart. They would be something that pleased them more. And I think particularly with comedies, it's one of the elements that crops up, for instance,

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with our Oh'phelia, is that a comedy is kind of all bets are off where the music is concerned. It's a bit of fun, so what music you decide to put to that. And even later on in the '20s, with the great comics like

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Chaplin and Keaton and Harold Lloyd, it was quite often left to a little bunch of musicians within the pit to come up with something that felt right for them.

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With Shakespeare, I think that the tone would have been deeply, deeply respectful. But at the same time, depending on what area we're talking about, you have different

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takes on what respectful sounds like. But I don't think there's any specific music that in my head you'd go, oh, you're doing Shakespeare, well, you've got to use blah.

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There's folk music. There's certainly ballads that would have fitted to something like Shakespeare. But with the kind of violence that you

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get in the Forbes-Robertson Hamlet, that's a different kind of drama that needs a different kind of music. And I'd be interested to know, for instance, if there

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are any reports of Shakespeare films being shown to an audience that give mention of what that music was, because I haven't come across that anywhere else. It's interesting.

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I think music does two things when it comes to film. If you watch a film with no music at all, the first thing is that you are thrown back entirely on looking at what's on that screen.

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And because we're 100 years down the line from this, we're all much more sophisticated, we've all grown up with pictures and music telling stories, of course, it looks archaic.

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Put music on there, and suddenly, some of that archaic disappears. Suddenly, there is blood coursing through those performances again.

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And I can't tell you why that is. I can only tell you that seeing the films with music like this gets you that bit closer to what it must have felt like to actually be there.

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It's more immersive. Silence is odd. Silence is this, which becomes awkward after a while. Whereas music gives us a kind of--

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I talk about it as a sacred space. It makes a space redolent of what we're watching. And that gives us more ability to move into the screen, to actually feel the film surrounding us,

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to make ourselves feel we're part of it. The other big difference that music makes, and again, I don't know why this is, but it's true-- it speeds the films up.

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If you watch these films with no music at all, they crawl by. If you watch them with music, and if you were to do a compare and contrast with no music and then with music, the films move so much faster,

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because they're moving at the combined speed of the pace of the music alongside the pace of the film. And that is extraordinary, but it is without doubt a thing. And it's part of what I've learned over 40

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years of doing this job. What I hope students-- what I hope viewers will take away from this is that the music isn't just there.

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The joke used to be it's to cover up the noise of the projector. The music is actually there to draw us in to what we're watching, as it always is, whenever

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it's used right as a narrative.