By the People: Transcribing Cue Sheets for Silent Film

The following is a guest post from Senior Music Reference Specialist Dr. Paul Allen Sommerfeld.

The Library of Congress launches its newest “By the People” crowdsourced transcription campaign today: 1,600 items in Silent Film Music Cue Sheets. Cue sheets provided suggestions to film accompanists for live music before the development of the sound film—“talkies”—by the end of the 1920s. This collection includes cue sheets for action, horror, romance, drama, mystery, western, and comedy films ranging from the early 1910s to the late 1920s. Many of these cue sheets have handwritten annotations from the accompanists themselves—who, in a way, put their own compositional spin on the film experience.

We invite the public—this means you!—to transcribe the titles, composers, timing indications and copyright information, advertisements, and other handwritten and printed text (not musical notation). This transcription opportunity should appeal to teachers wanting to engage students with primary sources in a new way, musicians wanting to dive deep into film music repertoire, veteran “By the People” transcribers interested in working with a unique format, and truly anyone with an interest in film music and music history. In so doing, you can explore the wide ranges of music used to accompany films in all genres from their inception.

Many of the films for which these cue sheets suggest musical accompaniment have been lost to time. Transcribing cue sheets provides a window into those films’ contents. We can begin to unpack and understand how film—and its music—developed in its early decades. Through transcribing these cue sheets, performers, teachers, and researchers alike will be able to keyword search all textual content, seeing how often certain pieces were used, who were some of the frequently suggested composers, and how film music developed to inspire, thrill, move, and scare us.

The collection includes titles such as the lost comedy “Broadway Fever,” the drama “Classified” (starring Corinne Griffith, known as “The Orchid Lady of the Screen”), the drama “Don’t Marry for Money,” the modern-day fairytale “Ella Cinders,” the comedic short film “The Gosh-Darn Mortgage,” the dramatic thriller “Jealous Husbands,” the comedy “Kid Boots” (starring Clara Bow, one of the most influential film actresses of the 1920s), the lost mystery-horror film, London “After Midnight,” an early silent western, “The Pony Express,” the lost adventure films “Rupert of Hentzau” and “Shanghai Bound,” and the lost comedy “Wedding Bill$.”

Before you jump into transcribing, make sure to review our special cue sheet transcription instructions! Thousands of pages of cue sheets are awaiting your attention. Explore the campaign, let us know how you find cool ways to bring transcriptions into the classroom, or tell us what you learn while transcribing. And, as always, email our reference librarians with any questions about the collection. Ready, set, go!