Musicians |
Frank Bockius
Frank Bockius has worked as a drums and percussion teacher and as a freelance musician. For many years he toured with the jazz quintet Whisper Hot and the percussion band Timpanicks. He also played medieval, flamenco and latin music, worked with dance companies and for theatres. Twenty-five years ago, he started to accompany silent films and since then he has worked intensively for national and international venues and festivals (Kyoto, Sodankylä, Pordenone, San Francisco, Bologna, London, Paris, Zurich). Throughout the last few years Bockius has also collaborated with many other great silent film musicians.
Neil Brand
Neil Brand has been a silent film accompanist for over 35 years throughout the UK and at film festivals around the world. He now has a very fruitful relationship with the BBC Symphony Orchestra with his acclaimed orchestral scores for Hitchcock’s silent Blackmail, Asquith’s Underground, Chaplin’s Easy Street and Fairbanks’s Robin Hood, published. He is a TV presenter with five Sound of… seasons on BBC4, is a regular presenter on Radio’s Film Programme, Add to Playlist and Soul Music, a Fellow of Aberystwyth University and a Member and Visiting Professor of the Royal Academy of Music, and was awarded the BASCA Gold Badge in 2016.
Timothy Brock
Timothy Brock specializes as a conductor in concert works of the early 20th century and live performances of silent film. As a score preservationist, his work includes the restoration of Shostakovich’s New Babylon, Erik Satie’s Entr’acte, Saint-Saën’s The Assassination of Duke DeGuise, and Wolfgang Zeller’s Vampyr. Since 1999, he has been working with the Charles Chaplin family and made 15 critical editions of his scores including Modern Times and City Lights. As a composer he has written over 40 silent film scores, including Buster Keaton’s The General, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Fritz Lang’s Frau im mond. Timothy Brock has conducted some of the most prestigious orchestras in the world, including the New York Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, BBC Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France. In June 2023, he made his debut with the Orchestra del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in the live world premiere of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator at the historic Terme di Caracalla of Rome.
Matti Bye
Matti Bye has been the permanent silent film pianist at the Cinemateque of the Svenska Filminstitutet since 1989. He is widely recognised for having written a series of innovative scores for such early Swedish silent film classics as Phantom Carriage by Victor Sjöström and Gösta Berling Saga by Mauritz Stiller, as well as countless other silent films. He has developed a personal and contemporary accompaniment style for early film with a dramaturgical fingertip sense that led him to create music for modern cinema and give film concerts worldwide at various film festivals. He has engaged in different projects, from having been Ingmar Bergman’s silent film pianist in the play The Last Gasp to composing the soundtrack for Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments and for the Italian feature film Marcel!, directed by Jasmine Trinca.
Antonio Coppola
Antonio Coppola began to study the piano at a very early age. In 1965 he enrolled in the Santa Cecilia Conservatory, and followed courses in piano performance, composition and orchestral conducting until 1977. In 1975 the Rome Cineclub L’officina invited him to perform as piano accompanist for a series of silent film retrospectives. He was so fascinated and inspired by this experience that he gave up all other musical activities in order to devote himself exclusively to creating soundtracks for silent cinema. From that time onwards, Antonio Coppola has been the guest of film festivals and retrospectives all over the world, both as a musician and as a member of juries, as well as having been engaged by a number of film archives and universities as a research consultant on the restoration of original soundtracks. He has also taught at workshops and given papers at conferences on techniques of improvisation and the composition of soundtracks for silent cinema.
Daniele Furlati
Daniele Furlati, pianist and composer, has a degree in composition, piano and arrangement. He earned two diplomas with honours in courses in advanced music for film conducted by Ennio Morricone and Sergio Miceli at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena. He has composed music for television commercials, short films and documentaries. His work on features includes creating the score for the film Viva San Isidro by Alessandro Cappelletti. He co-wrote, with Marco Biscarini, the music for the feature films by Giorgio Diritti Il vento fa il suo giro, L’uomo che verrà, Un giorno devi andare and Volevo nascondermi. He is working with Cineteca di Bologna, playing the piano in accompaniment for silent films. He adapted and orchestrated the original music by Teo Usuelli for Italia K2. Riprese di Mario Fantin.
The selected students of the Applied Music course of the Venezze Conservatory in Rovigo who took part, under the direction of M° Daniele Furlati, in the programme Corti in musica, part of Il Cinema Ritrovato Kids: Maele Allorio, Vincenzo Calì, Yuri Casali, Alberto Dolfi, Olmo Frabetti, Marta Lucchesini, Patrizia Pieraccini, Giacomo Salzani, Guido Vignati.
Stephen Horne
Stephen Horne, based at London’s BFI Southbank, has recorded music for DVD releases, TV screenings and online presentations of silent films. Although principally a pianist, he often incorporates flute, accordion and percussion into his performances, sometimes simultaneously. He regularly performs internationally, and his accompaniments have met with acclaim at film festivals in Pordenone, Telluride, San Francisco, Cannes, Hong Kong and Berlin. In 2022 he was commissioned to write orchestral scores for The Manxman and MoMA’s restoration of Stella Dallas.
Valentina Magaletti
Valentina Magaletti is a drummer, composer and percussionist whose goal is to strategically enrich a folkloristic and eclectic palette through endless listening and experimentation with new materials and sounds. She has performed and co-written with many artists including Nicolas Jaar, Jandek, Helm, Raime, Malcom Catto, Charles Hayward, Graham Lewis (Wire, Dome), Tighpaulsandra (Coil, Spiritualized, Julian Cope), Thurston Moore, Bat for Lashes, Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals), and many more. In her current project, Vanishing Twin (Fire Records), she has a more conventional jazz approach that finds its escape in the drone/field recordings of the percussive approach in her other main experimental/avant-garde duo Tomaga.
Silvia Mandolini
Silvia Mandolini was born in Montreal and after graduating as a violinist at the Conservatory of her hometown, she continued her studies firstly at the McGill University and then at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan. She has performed with important chamber music ensembles, prestigious Italian orchestras (Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai in Turin and Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, among others) and at several festivals such as Milano Musica, Angelica, Verona Contemporanea, Montreal’s Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and at the Venice Biennale. She has played live for radio stations, for CBC, Radio-Canada and RAI. Mandolini co-founded the Zipangu Ensemble and she played the violin for the soundtrack of Pane e tulipani and Le acrobate. Since 2008, she has been a resident violinist of Teatro Comunale in Bologna.
Meg Morley
Meg Morley, Australian-born, London-based pianist, composer and improviser, creates music within diverse artistic genres (silent film, contemporary dance and ballet, solo piano, contemporary jazz ensembles and electronic music). Classically-trained, she has worked extensively with various dance companies (English National Ballet, Rambert Company, Matthew Bourne, Pina Bausch) and performs and composes for international silent film festivals and institutions (BFI, Flatpack Festival, Nederlands Silent Film Festival).
Maud Nelissen
Maud Nelissen is a Dutch composer and pianist who has dedicated herself to the creation of musical accompaniment for silent films. She worked with Charlie Chaplin’s last music arranger Eric James. Since then she has been performing at festivals and special events in Europe, America and Asia. She founded her own ensemble, The Sprockets, and performs with them or with various other ensembles and orchestras in Holland and abroad. Among her most notable orchestral scores is that for Erich von Stroheim’s 1925 classic The Merry Widow, interpolating themes from Franz Lehár’s operetta, and The Patsy.
Stefano Pilia
Stefano Pilia is a guitar player and electro-acoustic composer, founder member with Valerio Tricoli and Claudio Rocchetti of the 3/4HadBeenEliminated group. He is also part of the psychedelic rock band In Zaire, of the BGP trio with David Grubbs and Andrea Belfi, of Il Sogno del Marinaio with Mike Watt and Paolo Mongardi, guitar player for the Malian star Rokia Traoré and the Italian rock band Afterhours.
Eduardo Raon
Eduardo Raon, Portuguese composer and musician, is the author of numerous projects for cinema, animation, theatre, dance and the arts. In particular, he composed the music for several silent films, including Ernst Lubitsch’s Die Puppe, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm – The Symphony of Donbas. He has also performed world premieres of solo and chamber pieces by Eurico Carrapatoso, Clotilde Rosa, Ivan Moody, João Lucas, Joana Sá, Daniel Schvetz, Eli Camargo, Sebastian Duh and Fernando Lobo.
Donald Sosin
Donald Sosin, composer, keyboards, arranger, conductor, grew up in New York and Munich. He has performed at Il Cinema Ritrovato since 1999, often joined by his wife, singer Joanna Seaton. They also appear at Lincoln Center, MoMA, the National Gallery and other film festivals including Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Telluride, Jecheon (South Korea), Seattle, San Francisco, Moscow, and college campuses like Yale, Harvard, Emory and Brown. The couple leads silent film music workshops around the US. In 2017 Sosin received the Career Achievement Award from the Denver Silent Film Festival. Recent scores include three Jewish-themed silents co-composed with klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals.
John Sweeney
John Sweeney has played for silent film since 1990, starting at Riverside Studios in London and subsequently playing at many venues in Britain including the National Film Theatre, the Barbican Cinema, Broadway in Nottingham, the Imperial War Museum, and Watershed in Bristol. He has played for the British Silent Cinema Festival since its inception and has since 2000 been a regular pianist at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone. He is a regular performer at the Slapstick Festival of silent comedy in Bristol. He has played at the Shanghai International Film Festival, and in festivals in Germany, Turkey, Hong Kong, Russia, Taiwan and Kazakhstan, among others. He has recorded DVDs for the BFI, Cineteca di Bologna and Edition Filmmuseum as well as a soundtrack for broadcast on Sky. In 2018 he composed and performed a score for the London Film Festival Archive Gala which he subsequently performed at MoMA in New York. He is one of the founders of the Kennington Bioscope, doing regular screenings of silent films at London Cinema Museum with live music.