About the project

As few as the anachronistic term silent film is able to capture the soundscapes in early cinema, music composed especially for a specific film is the exception from the rule in early films. More than 120 surviving scores of special music for individual films up to 1918 are a relatively small number, but in absolute terms they are considerable. Even though the complete films of only c. 25% of this music have been preserved, the entire corpus will be considered for the first time in this research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as a Reinhart Koselleck Project running from 2024–2029. In a first sub-project, Fabian Müller examines scores for American silent films up to 1914.