Silent movies were always accompanied by music, but they were only rarely released with an official score. Instead, the studio would send out a "cue sheet" with a list of the major scenes, the approximate length of each scene, and the title of an appropriate piece of music. The musical director at each theater could find the appropriate music and put it in order, or if their library did not include a particular piece, they would substitute something similar in mood. Many music directors ignored the cue sheets altogether, and scored each film as they saw fit.
Being a music director required a huge library with hundreds or thousands of orchestrations, and-- not foreseeing that their careers would vanish with the coming of "talkies" in 1928-- many music directors invested in such libraries. Theater orchestra arrangements of classical works were popular for film scoring, but many original compositions were also published specifically for motion picture orchestras.
This method of scoring of films meant that a single score might contain the music of thirty or forty different composers, and it was impossible to give the each composer public credit for the work they had done. Thus the composers' names, despite the enormous exposure of their music, became known only to other musicians and orchestra directors.
An accomplished violinist, Zamecnik's first professional job was with the Pittsburgh Symphony under the direction of Victor Herbert. After several seasons he returned to Cleveland, and became the music director of the Hippodrome Theater. He conducted orchestras for musical variety spectacles, and wrote "six operettas and spectacular productions."
In the early teens, movies took off as entertainment, with many small theaters opening across the country. This created a huge demand for musicians of any caliber, from experts to amateurs. These musicians were left to their own devices to find music wherever they could, and they either improvised or they pilfered the classical and popular literature. In 1913, Zamecnik published the ground-breaking Sam Fox Moving Picture Music Volume I, containing 25 short, simple pieces for piano. Although several composers had written music to accompany specific films before this, Sam Fox Moving Picture Music was the first widely published music that was composed for general film accompaniment. The book and its sequels remained hugely popular through the entire silent film era, and in a way established the sound of early silent film. In keeping with the films of the early teens, the pieces in this collection were suited to chases, swordfights, exotic locales, death scenes, and other staples of comedy and melodrama.
As the motion picture became more sophisticated, film music developed with it, and both started to be taken seriously as art. In 1920, Zamecnik published the Sam Fox Photoplay Edition Volume I for orchestra, followed by Volume II in 1922. In the seven years since Moving Picture Music, Zamecnik's music had acquired a depth and complexity suited to the longer scenes and more complicated dramatic situations in the new feature-length films.
Zamecnik's output was so vast (estimated at over 1500 published compositions in his lifetime) that his publisher encouraged him to assume as many as 21 pseudonyms, fearing that such prodigious output by one composer would seem implausible, or would call the quality of the music into question. The absence of a complete list of these pseudonyms makes it impossible to find all of the pieces that he wrote. Zamecnik had minor hits as "Dorothy Lee" (Out of the Dusk to You) and "Lionel Baxter" (Valse June).
In the mid twenties, the studios began commissioning more "original" scores for their big-budget movies. In 1924, Zamecnik moved his family to Hollywood where the work would be; offending the classical music community in Cleveland by his desertion. In California, Zamecnik created original scores for the films The Wedding March, Redskin, Betrayal, and Wings, which won the first Academy Award for best picture.
In a September 1927 interview with Metronome, Zamecnik predicted that the day was coming when all studios would have a scoring department, and when the score of a film would receive as much care as the screenplay. What he failed to foresee was that live orchestras would be replaced by pre-recorded sound-tracks, and that the classical music community would never regard the music that accompanied films as highly as the music that accompanies opera. Sound films were a great disappointment to Zamecnik, although he collaborated on music for several sound films, including The Power and The Glory.
Zamecnik was afterwards active in the development of music in schools, and published several folios of music for school orchestras. He died in 1953.
Despite once being one of the most widely performed American composers, J.S. Zamecnik is almost entirely unknown today. The obscurity of Zamecnik is not surprising. His major work was for silent films, a medium where he got little credit, and which virtually vanished overnight. Zamecnik was a quiet man who did not care for self-promotion, and he had no apparent ambitions of writing symphonies or other major works. Cleveland, although an arts center for the midwest, was not the place to be noticed by the music and film critics whose opinion mattered. New York silent-film composers such as Hugo Riesenfeld and Erno Rapee received much more acclaim in their lifetimes than Zamecnik.
Rodney Sauer, "J.S. Zamecnik and Silent Film Music," The Silent Film Bookshelf, June, 1998.
© 1998 Rodney Sauer
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