Each score is an opportunity to discover a new way of combining music and silent film
Phillip Johnston’s first live performance of an original score for historical silent film was commissioned by the American Museum of the Moving Image and premiered at the Silent Movies: Loud Music festival on 19 Sep 1993. That film, Tod Browning’s The Unknown (1927), starring Lon Chaney and the then-19-year-old Joan Crawford, with Johnston’s score, began a 30+-year body of work, including multiple feature films, numerous short films, and related multimedia works (such as Wordless! [2013] with Art Spiegelman).
The most important of these works, aside from The Unknown, are The Merry Frolics of Méliès (1899-1907), a collection of eight short films including the iconic “Trip to the Moon”; Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Japanese Expressionist masterpiece Page of Madness (1926); F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926), and Lotte Reiniger’s silent silhouette animation The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926).
In addition to the 12 works that combine comics/comix and music in Wordless!, recent works include comics He Done Her Wrong (Gross, 1930), Big Head Pointy Nose (Pratap, 2022) and Buster Keaton’s short film masterpiece, Cops (1922).
Writing about silent film music
In 2015, he completed a PhD in Music Composition at the Newcastle Conservatorium, University of Newcastle, with the thesis title: ‘The Polysynchronous Film Score: The Relationship Between Music and Image/Narrative In Contemporary Scores For Silent Film’. He expanded these ideas in his book Silent Films/Loud Music: New Ways of Listening to and Thinking about Silent Film Music (Bloomsbury, 2021; paperback published in 2023).
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Over the last three decades, he has performed these works widely in the US, Europe and Australia, at cinematheques, film and music festivals, universities and local movie houses. Australian venues include The Sydney Film Festival, Sydney Opera House, Sydney Vivid, Melbourne Festival of the Arts, MONA FOMA, Woodford Folk Festival, Revelation Perth Film Festival, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, National Film and Sound Archive and Melbourne International Jazz Festival.
European venues include Teatro Verdi, EtnaFest, Teatro Manzoni/Apertivo in Concerti, UBI Jazz Festival, La Palma, Garda Jazz Festival, Jazz and Image Festival (Roma), Cinemazero Festival (Pordenone) [ITALY], Slovenska kinoteka [SLOVENIA], Cultuurcentrum Brugge, De Roma/Antwerp [BELGIUM], Rotefabrik [SWITZERLAND]
(list of US venues upon request).
His work has been commissioned by the American Museum of the Moving Image, the Film Society of Lincoln Centre and the Sydney Opera House.
- Silent Film & Comics
The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) is a silent silhouette animation by Lotte Reiniger, considered by many to be the first…
This 1926 German Expressionist silent film, starring Emil Jannings, Gösta Ekman, and Camilla Horn, was Murnau’s last German film before…
One of the most startling and striking silent films from Japan, PAGE OF MADNESS was rediscovered by director Teinosuke Kinugasa…
The films of Georges Méliès, one of the cinema’s earliest visionaries, have inspired filmmakers for over 100 years. Practitioners as…
This score for Tod Browning’s 1927 silent film The Unknown was originally commissioned by The American Museum of the Moving…
Buster Keaton’s Cops (1922) is one of Keaton’s most surreal, anarchic and melancholy films. Johnston’s complete score, begun in 2001…
