ABSTRACT
In his 1996 article 'The Silence of the Silents', RickAltman commented that many writers on film music, at least since Kurt London, have assumed that early einem atic exhibition routinely employed musical accompaniment. However, Altman challenged the idea that 'silent cinema was never silent' through research that cites reviews of theatrical showings in the USA between roughly 1904 and 1907. There are things that only silence can express. Silence and music have coexisted in films in a thousand different ways in the past, and music is the loser when silence dies. Claudia Gorbman has defined the former as 'nondiegetic silence' and the latter as 'diegetic musical silence'. The binary status of music in silent film, either present or absent, cedes to a new relationship mediated by electronic 'mixing', between sound design and music 'cues'. There is no musical underscore to assuage what seems like a very long sequence in cinematic time.
