A still from the 1938 public domain comedy/silent by Orson Welles featuring Joseph Cotten in which a man finds out his lover is seeing another man, acts like a villain and chases him down.
Erin Freeman conducts the “Tramp Orchestra” in the world premiere of Hagen’s score for “Jekyll and Hyde.”
Hagen and Freeman collaborating on the score to the silent Barrymore classic, “Jekyll and Hyde” at the Wintergreen Festival.
ABOUT CONDUCTOR ERIN FREEMAN
Versatile, engaging, and spirited, conductor and artistic leader Erin Freeman serves in multiple positions throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia and maintains a national presence through guest conducting engagements. Freeman is Director of the award-winning Richmond Symphony Chorus, Artistic Director of Wintergreen Music, Director of Choral Activities at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Resident Conductor of the Richmond Ballet, the State Ballet of Virginia.
Guest conducting engagements include the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Portland (Maine) Symphony Orchestra, South Carolina Philharmonic, Savannah Symphony, Charlottesville Symphony Orchestra, Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and additional ensembles in New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, and Illinois. She has conducted at Carnegie Hall, Boston Symphony Hall, La Madeleine in Paris, and the Kennedy Center, and has conducted and/or prepared the Richmond Symphony Chorus for multiple recordings, including the 2019 GRAMMY-nominated release of Mason Bates’ Children of Adam on the Reference Recording label. After a year of creating online experiences for multiple organizations and leading the 2021 in-person Wintergreen Music Festival, in 2021-2022, Freeman returns to the podium in engagements with the Virginia, Portland, Williamsburg, and Richmond Symphony Orchestras, choral preparation for the Defiant Requiem Foundation, a performance of Faure’s Requiem in Carnegie Hall with Distinguished Concerts International New York, two productions with the Richmond Ballet, and the Richmond Symphony Chorus’ long-awaited 50th anniversary celebration, featuring Haydn’s The Creation.
A recent finalist for Performance Today’s Classical Woman of the Year, Freeman has also been named one of Virginia Lawyers Weekly’s “50 Most Influential Women in Virginia” and an “Extraordinary Woman Leader” by the VCU School of Business. Freeman holds degrees from Northwestern University (BMus), Boston University (MM), and Peabody Conservatory (DMA).
ABOUT “THE TRAMP ORCHESTRA”
An intrepid chamber orchestra drawn from the Wintergreen Festival Orchestra has, for the past six years, banded together under the direction of Erin Freeman to premiere not only new Hagen scores for the films “The Tramp”, “City Lights”, “A Dog’s Life”, and “Jekyll and Hyde”, but also six “Exquisite Corpse” projects featuring musical scores composed by over 25 festival composers.
“Movie Night” has become one of the Wintergreen Festival’s more beloved traditions.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Filmed in 1938, Orson Welles’ unfinished (and unscreened) silent film Too Much Johnson was shot to serve as the film component of a staged production of William Gillette’s 1894 comedy. It was meant to be shown between acts of the play, and not to stand up as a narrative on its own. The ceiling of the Stony Creek Theatre, in Connecticut—where my own film Orson Rehearsed was screened in August 2021 and where Welles was staging a rare “out of town tryout” before moving the production to Broadway—was apparently too low to allow for its projection, and so Welles’ production debuted without film.
Evidently, there was also the matter of an attorney’s letter that Welles received from Paramount informing him that they owned the film rights. Ironically, both of Paramount’s film versions of the play are now lost. The footage for Welles’ film, shot only three years before Citizen Kane, his explosive cinematic debut, was also believed lost, but in 2008 a work print was found in a warehouse in Italy.
The original score for the film was by Paul Bowles, who published fragments of it as the suite Music for a Farce. My score builds on the array of themes and gestures that I have built up over a five year period composing scores commissioned by, and premiered by members of the Wintergreen Music Festival Orchestra (which adopted for these ongoing projects the name “The Tramp Orchestra” over the years) under the direction of Erin Freeman, artistic director of the Wintergreen Music Festival, where it has become a tradition to have a silent movie evening in a tent high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Previous scores that I have provided include The Tramp, City Lights, A Dog’s Life, and a score to the Barrymore classic, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Out of that process also grew the score to my “operafilm,” Orson Rehearsed, which is available on DVD and CD.
I determined not to watch the public domain footage available for download on the internet before scoring it. The result was that my sense of it grew as I scored it, from left to right. For Too Much Johnson, I crafted simultaneously the film score and a free-standing concert music work called Moviola that celebrated the traditions, concerns, techniques, aesthetic, and ebullient joy of scoring to picture. Really, it is for me something of a composer’s holiday, and I relish it. (The score to The Tramp, of course, also serves as a piano concerto, but that’s another matter, as is The Passion of Jekyll and Hyde — with which I am still tinkering—which serves as the instrumental spine of a combination live opera performance and screening.)
I flew through the Welles third, started feeling the “padding” of unnecessary extra “beats” in the second, and, upon reaching the “Cuba” footage, realized that I was going to have to take a heavier hand. I decided not to provide intertitles, as they exert a powerful influence on narrative design and structure; I had music for that. Unless one knows the play, the film will make only the sort of surreal sense that many early silents do—it’s a chase, you know? And there’s a bad guy, and a Harold Lloyd-like (very) young Joseph Cotten, Welles’ wife, his friend and producer John Houseman obviously having a ball, and an uncredited bit part for Marc Blitzstein as a Stevedore.
I have followed the lead of previous film editors who’ve taken a hand to cutting it with the important difference that I cut it to work best with music. Only the first third had been closely edited by Welles. Acutely sensitive to the death by a thousand cuts inflicted on Welles for the rest of his career, I left that third alone, of course. There were no intertitles (which Welles had planned), and alternate takes were placed back-to-back for future reference in the second third. I omitted most of the alternate takes and chose the one that I liked best in this part of the film. The final “Cuba” section of the film consisted of long, repetitive, unedited establishing takes; closeups and reaction shots were made for only the last few beats in the pond. I took a scissors as I scored the film to the last twelve minutes, cutting about ten minutes of repetitive coverage, and emulating the Chaplin and Keaton leavened with Soviet montage editing voice that Welles himself used in the first section.
The film as I have cut it runs 48 minutes; the concert work runs 24—exactly half as long. The music? I would describe it as a nostalgic love song to the artistic world of the 1930s, disarming, affectionate, and gleefully subversive in the technical virtuosity with which it manipulates themes, allusions, history, and style. I know that Lukas Foss would be delighted by the fact that the more one understands how music functions, the more fun it is to listen to. I really enjoy gently provoking self-appointed experts who like to call out what they subjectively deem cliché, conflating “classism” and “taste,” for example.
Maestra Freeman and the Tramp Orchestra will premiere Moviola, my score to the public domain silent film Too Much Johnson, to film on 22 July as part of the Wintergreen Music Festival. Popcorn, mountain air, dusk falling as the orchestra tunes up, dogs running in the fields, young children wandering about, and a top-notch chamber orchestra of terrific players playing challenging (but satisfying to play) music joyfully composed to a fascinating and funny silent by one of the greatest filmmakers of all time made in the months before international fame came to surround him: that’s my idea of fun.