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What music accompanied Black silent film? Who were the musicians who accompanied “race films,” as they were called, made by Black directors like Oscar Micheaux? What music did they play? What music accompanied White films shown in Black theaters? How was cinema accompaniment viewed as a profession for women in Black communities? Can we—considering how rarely and poorly the materials of Black life like newspapers and theater documents have been saved and archived—reconstruct the sound of the movies in a Black cinema? 

Over the last year, Visiting Scholar Kendra Preston Leonard has been doing research in hopes of finding answers to these questions. The research has been tough for several reasons. Moving pictures were—at first—controversial in Black communities. The ratio of White cinemas to Black ones means that there were many more White cinema musicians than Black ones. Many Black-owned and -operated theaters attracted violence, particularly in the South, where they were subject to vandalism, arson, and outright destruction. Black filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux created feature-length films, but they were mostly confined to showings in churches, clubs, and the occasional Black-owned cinema. In some areas affected by the Great Migration, like Chicago, there were dozens of Black cinemas, but the film industry trade magazines and other publications ignored them. Major film industry periodicals published during the silent era like Moving Picture World and Motion Picture News catered to White cinema owners, managers, and musicians, and rarely mentioned race films, much less the music that accompanied them. Little was printed or recorded about Black cinema music during this era, and even less has survived. But the absences of information can be informative as well, and the great archival silences on Black silent film music are very telling about how Black cinema in general was treated at the time and how it has been treated by scholars.

In this talk, Dr. Leonard will discuss the effects of White supremacy on researching Black music and musicians; what happens when there are enormous gaps in the primary sources; and the unexpected finds researchers can come across in archives and libraries. Research is a messy process: here I’ll show you how my own research has gone and is going, and how I make sense of it all to offer new information on music for silent film.  

Kendra Preston Leonard is a musicologist and music theorist whose work focuses on women and music; and music and screen history. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive and the founder of the Julia Perry Working Group. She is the author of six scholarly books and numerous book chapters and articles, and has been a research fellow at the Newberry Library, the Harry Ransom Center, the American Music Research Center, and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Her current book project is Race and Gender in Silent Film Music.