Phantoms of the Archives slides

Archives are full of ghosts—the ghosts of music long-forgotten, technologies now superseded, practices that have faded away with time. This talk examines music used to accompany and signify the supernatural the silent film, as well as what can be learned by excavating the ghosts of musicians’ lives and careers now held in archives both at the University of Colorado at Boulder and elsewhere. Learn about the sounds of the séance, how mediums and cinema musicians were uniquely trained and positioned for their jobs, and about the music used in spirit films—the forerunners of movies like Beetlejuice, Ghost, and and other films with friendly phantoms, and about the lives of individual women who helped create the sound of the cinema through their musical educations and personal tastes in music