ATG President, Dee Langley, will perform live music for Charlie Chaplin’s silent film “The Gold Rush” with the Minnesota Orchestra this weekend. Dee said, “I’m proud to be part of the MN Orch for these performances, yes, there’s an accordion part complete with a solo.” The performances will be Friday, January 8th at 8 PM, Sunday, January 10, at 2 PM, and Thursday, January 14, at 11 AM . The Minnesota Orchestra is led by Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, who became the Minnesota Orchestra’s tenth music director in September 2003.
Dee Langley specializes in both solo and ensemble work on the accordion and has performed with the Minnesota Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Ancia Quartet, Minnesota Sinfonia, Minneapolis Philharmonic and Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra. She is presently the President of the Accordionists and Teachers Guild, International and event coordinator for the NE Accordion Festival. Dee lives in NE Minneapolis and teaches music privately.
Of all Charlie Chaplin’s films, The Gold Rush (1925) is the one he most wanted to be remembered for. There will be a big screen on the Orchestra Hall stage and the orchestra will play the jaunty, tender tunes Chaplin himself wrote to go along with this brilliant silent comedy. Memorable moments abound, as the Little Tramp tries to eat his boot, also to make biscuits dance by stabbing them with his fork—and scrambles to safety as his ramshackle cabin teeters on the edge of the cliff.
With the advent of films with spoken dialogue in 1927, Chaplin’s pantomiming Tramp became something of an anachronism, but the king of silent cinema found a way to adapt his films and his signature character to the era of synchronized sound. His 1942 project is one such example: Chaplin re-released The Gold Rush with several adjusted scenes, spoken narration and a musical score credited to Chaplin himself.
Chaplin was not a composer by the traditional definition; he had no formal music training
and could not read or write notes on a staff. He was, however, an adept keyboard improviser and had experimented with stringed instruments as a teenager. Beginning in 1923, he began to help compile anthologies of previously published music that were distributed for live performance with his silent films, a common practice at the time. But he found this approach inadequate, and in frustration declared that “[recorded] music which has the quality of a symphony orchestra is much better as an accompaniment than feeble vamping on a piano or the excruciating efforts of an incompetent or ill-led orchestra.” Starting with his 1931 film City Lights, he enlisted the aid of Hollywood arrangers to compose full orchestral scores.
For the Gold Rush re-release, Chaplin collaborated on the score with composer-arranger Max Terr. The process capitalized on each man’s strengths: the director sat at the piano, singing or playing snippets of melodies. Terr would then expand on those ideas, and together they would meticulously revise the passages until Chaplin was satisfied. But regardless of whose pen touched the page, it was Chaplin who retained creative control throughout the compositional process. He relied on others to develop arrangements and complex orchestration. Still, as biographer Jeffrey Vance declared: “The musical imperative is his, and not a note in a Chaplin musical score was placed there without his assent.”
Chaplin’s Gold Rush score is playful, heartfelt and well suited to its story. As with much of his music, it is heavily influenced by popular songs of the day as well as classical music. It quotes several themes verbatim: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee accompanies two frenetic action sequences, Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Waltz underscores a dance scene, and a recurring love theme comes from a lesser-known work, Brahms’ Romanze in F major.
Chaplin’s film scores rank alongside the Tramp as one of his great contributions to cinema. His sole competitive Academy Award, in fact, came in 1972, recognizing his score to the movie Limelight. Throughout his career, Chaplin was equally productive and versatile: he acted in 87 films, directed 75, wrote screenplays for 62 and composed original scores for 15. Even today, three decades after his death, very few artists have been involved in so many facets of filmmaking, and none have matched the extraordinary range and degree of his success.
The presentation of The Gold Rush combines music from the 1942 edition, adapted by contemporary composer Timothy Brock, with visuals from a reconstructed version of the original 1925 release.
For tickets please call: 1.800.292.4141 For further information: squeezermn@yahoo.com
