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The Selection Process

FIG. 3: The cue sheets prepared for The Indian Tomb include SMPTE times on the far right to indicate the location of each sequence. The numbers in parentheses show the running times in minutes, seconds, and frames. (click image for larger view)

Silent films that are released on video have scores using everything from rock and avant-garde to new-age music. But because I’m a stickler for authenticity, I insist that the score be composed of music that is contemporary with the film. The Indian Tomb initially played theaters in 1921 and 1922, so I limited myself to the music that would have been in print at or before that time.

In keeping with the film’s Eastern setting, I began my search in the Oriental section of my music library. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Antar Symphony provided the haunting theme that I used for Veidt’s Ayan character. I underscored the big festival scene, featuring multitudes of soldiers, elephants, and horses, using “March of the Mogul Emperors” from Elgar’s Crown of India Suite. “Patrol of the Boxers” by Irenee Berge, composer of many silent-film themes, accompanied a journey by elephant train to the tomb site.

To acknowledge the film’s German origin, I worked in quotations from Wagner’s Ein Faust Overture and the funeral music from Gotterdaemerung. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’Or and Ippolitov-Ivanov’s Caucasian Sketches provided material for some of the more mysterious moments. One important action sequence uses “Orgies of the Spirits” by Ilynsky, a selection often heard in 1930s adventure films such as the Flash Gordon serials. I also employed selections from Delibes’s opera Lakame, Cesar Cui’s Orientale, and Berge’s Oriental Suite to good effect.

Rounding out the score were silent-film standbys such as “Weird Oriental Theme” by Sol P. Levy, “Sunrise and Incantations” by Gaston Borch, and “La Foret Perfide” by Gabriel-Marie. (The fact that all of this music was in the public domain was another bonus for producer Shepard.) As I selected music, I matched it to sequences on the cue sheet. Often, the music for a given sequence had to be changed several times before I felt that it evoked the proper mood and feeling (see Fig. 3).

FIG. 4: Eric Beheim’s home studio fits into a corner of his family room. A plaque displayed nearby says it all: This or Something Better. (click image for larger view)

Using Coda’s Finale music-notation program, I sequenced the individual instrumental parts using the original orchestrations. For its audio output, my PC-based home studio relies primarily on a collection of E-mu sound modules, including a Proteus 2000, two Proteus/2s, and an ESI-32 sampler. The outputs from the sound modules are routed to a Mackie 1402 VLZ 14-channel mixer, and the combined signal is sent to a Lexicon Alex effects processor, which adds the approximate ambience of a medium-size theater (see Fig. 4).

My ultimate goal was to emulate the sound of a small pit orchestra that might have been used in a medium-size theater in the 20th century’s second and third decades. Through trial and error, I came up with a combination of instrument voices that blended well together. For The Indian Tomb, this nucleus “orchestra” had to be expanded to accommodate the lush Oriental numbers, which often made prominent use of bassoon, oboe, and English horn. With so many instruments playing at once, extra care was required to balance individual voices to achieve as realistic a sound as possible. Following the sequencing and mixing process, I edited the music to match the running times listed on the cue sheet.

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Reprinted with permission from

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