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Sheet Music of the Week: The Birth of Cinema Edition

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"His cute moving picture machine," by Albert Gumble and Alfred Bryan. New York: Jerome H. Remick & Co., 1916.

This week’s featured sheet music celebrates one of the pioneers of  cinema.  The aptly named Louis Lumière was born on this day in 1864.  In 1895 Louis and his brother Auguste patented the cinématographe, a device that worked as a film camera, developer and projector.  This was in contrast to Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, first demonstrated in 1891, which provided motion picture entertainment through a cabinet device intended for a single viewer.

The Music Division is loaded with materials  related to the movies, from music composed for silent films to the score for the Marx Brothers film Horse Feathers; to works by film composers like David Raksin,  Ennio Morricone, and Bernard Herrmann; to production documents for the films Cabaret and All That Jazz in  the Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon Collection .

This week  also marks the birthdays of a variety of movie stars past and present, from Buster Keaton (October 4)  to Tommy Wiseau (October 3). Commemorate this anniversary by going to the movies and singing along to this song by Albert Gumble and Alfred Bryan, whose songs have been previously featured in Sheet Music of the Week.

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