Author’s Note: Musicologists have for many years worked to create a Handbook of Public Musicology to be published by one of the large academic publishers that put out such compendia. Most recently, Dr. Reba Wissner at Columbus State University in Georgia undertook creating a volume with Oxford University Press (OUP). Reba asked me to contribute a chapter on the establishment and running the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive (SFSMA), which I founded and of which I am the Executive Director. I was delighted to contribute to the collection…until I got the contract from OUP. It asked for
“the entire copyright and all other rights in the nature of copyright … any rental lending and database rights subsisting in the Content, present and future, and all other rights in the Content of whatever nature…throughout the world and together with all related rights.”
This is an extreme position, and I can only believe it stems from OUP wanting to be able to scrape content for use in an in-house LLM or similar database, and/or digital products. I made the decision many years ago not to publish in any outlet that did not allow open access (OA) of any kind. My last two long-form works of scholarship were published as full OA on Knowledge Commons after undergoing Open Peer Review. This was not an option for this project, and the Oxford Handbook of Public Musicology did not receive sufficient funding (such as subventions from disciplinary organizations, institutions, or other sources) to make it OA on any level. OUP’s policy is that authors who are contributors to collections such as the Oxford Handbook of Public Musicology have their work embargoed for a year, after which they may apply for a license to share a single copy in a repository. Once that license is granted by OUP, authors are permitted to share no more than 25% of that work in a repository or their own website.
This is ludicrous.
Therefore, I am posting my essay as a PDF on Knowledge Commons Works and below, in the body of this post, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only. If others modify or adapt the material, they must license the modified material under identical terms.
I am happy to answer questions about this essay, the circumstances under which I have published it, or any other related issues.
Citing this essay:
Leonard, Kendra Preston. “Preludes from the Past: Creating an Open Access Archive of Silent Film Music.” Knowledge Commons Works, 2026. doi: 10.17613/y37ja-9n485
PRELUDES FROM THE PAST:
CREATING AN OPEN ACCESS ARCHIVE OF SILENT FILM MUSIC
KENDRA PRESTON LEONARD
SILENT FILM SOUND & MUSIC ARCHIVE
[1] When silent cinemas closed or were converted to sound in the late 1920s, the music libraries they and their musicians had acquired for accompanying film were often discarded or broken up; in in the 1960s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios deaccessioned its entire collection of scores and orchestral parts and sent them to a landfill.1 Although a considerable amount of music for silent film (published c. 1895-1926) does survive—and new caches of silent film music are still being discovered—it is geographically scattered among a large variety of repositories, including public, college, and university libraries, small museums, and private collections. While some institutional libraries held substantial collections of silent film music, these collections are not often readily available for researchers. This lack of access could be attributed to numerous causes, including the condition of the materials, lack of collection cataloguing and/or finding aids, and remote storage. Music for silent film accompaniment was published in a wide range of genres and formats, in some cases contributing to confusion in identifying it.2 Some institutional repositories had the staff knowledge to be able to provide correct and clear records of the silent film music they held, but others did not, assigning music to incorrect categories and taxonomies and making it harder to identify, find, and use. Private collectors, often silent film musicians themselves, had historically significant libraries of sheet music, accompaniment guides from the period, and other resources, but these too were often inaccessible, locked away in storage units and garages. With the development and expansion of the digital humanities in the early 2010s, it became clear to me that this repertoire and documents associated with it could be made far more accessible, and for multiple audiences, than it was at the present time. While scholars including Michelle Moravec lamented the loss of accessing “the ineffable smells, holes, tears, and smears that often offer more clues” about archived documents, I agreed with Brian Ogilvie that digital archive projects that “sought to reproduce unique archival material in a manner that allows for open-ended historical inquiry without the need to travel to archives and manipulate physical objects” unquestionably offered possibilities perhaps yet undreamt-of for researchers.3 In any event, the losses listed by Moravec—many of which are in fact captured in digitization, metadata, and other tools of describing artifacts—were worth grappling with if the result was providing access to materials otherwise unavailable to populations that wanted to use and contribute to them.4 I founded the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive (SFSMA) in 2014 to explore the possibilities that might develop from creating an open access collection that could draw from a range of collections worldwide and provide digitized sheet music and materials for silent film accompaniment. Today, there is no disputing that, as Chela Scott Weber summarizes it, “digitization facilitates access.”5 And given today’s precarious environment and losses of funds for academic research, digitization (and digitization on demand) is essential for almost anyone pursuing scholarship in the humanities.
[2] My primary goal was to establish an online archive of music and materials in the public domain that could be easily accessed, downloaded, and used for analysis, performance, and in the creation of new scores or accompaniments for silent films. My guiding ethos included two closely related philosophies. The first was that, as a public humanities/music(ology) project, SFSMA needed to, as Herman Beavers has written, involve “the surrounding community as an equal partner in the work of knowledge production, giving communities equal say in how those projects should be conceptualized, implemented, and sustained.”6 Initially, I invited musicologists, music theorists, and screen media historians to consult on this project, but I quickly learned that, with a few exceptions, the people who were actually willing and able to put time and energy into the project as volunteers were performers and aficionados rather than scholars. This very serendipitously bolstered my goals for making the Archive a source that could cater to a broad user base. This robust community of silent film music practitioners and fans were eager to help me locate collections of music and other publications, share their own collections and knowledge, and help me make SFSMA as accessible as possible. This approach provided me with the ability to make connections between individual items in the archive with historical context, to share those contexts with users, and to develop the Archive so that it functioned equally well for users with varying aims.
[3] The second philosophy was that while the result of scholarship undertaken using SFSMA’s holdings would undoubtedly include quantitative approaches and data analysis, use of the Archive that resulted in new artistic outputs, like performances, recordings, scores, influences, conversations, and the sharing of knowledge in general, needed to be given equal importance and value. Devoney Looser, writing about archival public humanities scholarship and minoritized communities, argues that “there ought to be an imperative to consider what it means not only to go into an archive and assess what’s there (and not there) but to reorient the shape of the knowledge we bring out of an archive and how we communicate it to others.”7 There would be no segregation between “scholarly” and “vernacular” materials in the Archive, which is fitting, as the music itself bridges and amalgamates genres and conventions all the time. Nor would SFSMA shy away from or hide the problematic nature of some materials and the fact that SFSMA is not immune from being, like all archives, a “flawed [space whose] materials tell, at best, a partial story about the cultural past.”8 The silent film era falls within the boundaries of Jim Crow in the United States, and there is no lack of racist music used in film accompaniment. There is also a considerable amount of exoticist music, misogynist music, and anti-German music from the period of the First World War. As disturbing as some of these works are, they are part of the history of film music, and offer insight into the ways cinema accompanists perceived and communicated their—and their communities’—prejudices against people of color, women, the disabled, and other minoritized groups. SFSMA provides a content warning regarding these materials, and future research projects using them will help explicate the relationships between social and judicial inequities and popular entertainment, and what legacies such problematic film music has created in sound film and other music for screen media.
[4] After obtaining 501(c)3 not-for-profit status as an educational entity and securing free web hosting from DreamHost, I brought together a different group of volunteers as advisors and board members to plan just how this project would work. Based on the principles I’ve outlined above, along with other collective goals for the Archive, and in consideration of our availability to donate labor to the project, we created several policies:
- SFSMA board members and volunteers would digitize (or outsource the digitization of) sheet music, cue sheets, instruction books, and other music and materials intended to be used in the cinema before the advent of film-on-sound technology and post these online using current standards for metadata collection.
- SFSMA would not purchase any music for digitization or acquire any physical holdings: we would borrow music from collectors and libraries, digitize it, and return it to its owners. This encouraged collectors and practitioners to have their music included in SFSMA, because they would not lose control of or have to relinquish it; and saved SFSMA from having to pay for storage and maintenance of physical holdings.
- SFSMA would not do conservation work. We did not have the training, matériel, or other resources to undertake paper conservation. We would, on occasion, provide new archival-quality storage materials, such as folders and boxes, to collection owners in exchange for their lending us their collections.
- SFSMA would be primarily volunteer-run, with any grants received covering the costs of digitizing that couldn’t be done by the volunteer board.
- Every item we posted would be available as “libre open access.” The designation of libre open access means that information is made available free of charge and can also be used through open licenses like Creative Commons, as opposed to gratis open access, which provides information free of charge, but limits further use of it.9 Making SFSMA’s materials libre open access was crucial in making the Archive useful for performers, composers, and arrangers.
- SFSMA would only include materials in the public domain. As new works come into public domain every year, SFSMA would maintain create a protocol for making materials available as they entered that category.
- SFSMA would offer limited digitization on demand from lenders and donors. Individuals or organizations that lent SFSMA music or other documents could request that their materials be bumped to the top of our digitization queue. We would also, on request, provide scans of material on disc or USB drive for lenders and donors.
Over time, the SFSMA board would make a few allowances that deviated from these general policies, notably accepting physical music when donors did not want it and had no place to otherwise donate it.
[5] SFSMA’s first digitizations ranged across the breadth of its scope. The first items to appear on the Archive’s site in March and April 2014 included textbooks on accompanying moving pictures, sheet music published in Jacob’s Orchestra Monthly, a photoplay album (a collection of thematically-related music for cinema accompaniment), an issue of Melody magazine, billed as “for the Photoplay Musician and the Musical Home,” and cue sheets, both with and without musical incipits. Subsequent additions included full scores for films, interviews with cinema musicians, individual pieces, and collections of genre music. In 2016, SFSMA won a GRAMMY preservation grant and the Sight and Sound Subvention from the Society for America Music. The GRAMMY grant enabled SFSMA to digitize MoMA and Library of Congress silent film accompanist Ben Model’s collection of music, which included rare pieces from Europe as well as the United States; and the subvention allowed SFSMA to expand the media it included in its holdings by commissioning pianist Ethan Uslan to record twenty-five pieces from SFSMA’s collections. Other grants and awards supported digitization efforts at the University of Kansas for the Chuck Berg Silent Film Music Collection and other works. The Archive grew, adding complete sets of photoplay albums, dance music used to accompany films, annotated cue sheets used by cinema musicians in various parts of the United States, and handwritten pieces and cues. SFSMA accepted every loan of music offered, which occasionally meant we were working with damaged, mildewed, or moldy materials. We also often received materials that were not yet in the public domain; in keeping with our policy, we digitized these and held back their release online until they were.
[6] Both individuals and organizations have lent or given music, cue sheets, and other documents to SFSMA for inclusion in the Archive; other organizations and individuals donated money to be used to digitize documents. Donors of both music and money include performers, researchers, collectors, and inheritors of materials. Scholar and performer William L. Coale gave SFSMA access to his databases on theater organists’ careers, cinema music written by them, materials related to cinema organist Gaylord Carter, and more. Relatives and former students of cinema accompanists offered music that had been given to them, such as the Carl Braun Collection; the Victor Herbert Foundation sponsored the digitization of hundreds of pieces of music in exchange for an exhibit on Herbert and his music on the Archive’s site, achieved through the involvement of the Public Musicology Certificate students at Columbus State University; the American Theatre Organ Society provided scans of scores from its library; cinema musician Rodney Sauer personally scanned Erno Rapee’s giant collection Motion Picture Moods and donated the scan to SFSMA. Users began to contact SFSMA to ask for help in finding specific pieces or publications, and to share with SFSMA how they had made use of the archive, such as Richard Bossons’s reconstruction of a period score for Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent film Man with A Movie Camera. Students and professionals shared the new scores they had compiled using SFSMA’s resources. Musicologists and theorists began using SFSMA to teach film music historiography and conduct analysis for publication. The Archive was reaching the audiences for which it was intended.
[7] As I became more familiar with what music had typically survived from the silent era to the present, I became aware that the majority of the music SFSMA digitized was both composed by men and came from collections that had been curated by or belonged to men. I made gender in the silent cinema and women cinema musicians the focus of my scholarly work. As I have documented elsewhere, women cinema musicians outnumbered men following the United States’s entry into World War I, and, during the silent era, women were widely considered better arbiters of taste in selecting music for film accompaniment.10 My research into the role of women in silent film music led me to collections that had been created and owned by women, including the Josephine Burnett Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin; the Charlotte Stafford Collection, held by Sibley Music Library at the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester; and the Claire H. Hamack and Adele V. Sullivan silent film music collection at the University of Colorado-Boulder, which is also shared on SFSMA. As I began to publish and give talks on women musicians in the silent cinema, SFSMA began to receive more queries from prospective lenders who had collections that had belonged to their great-grandmothers and great-aunts, cousins, and other women relatives or close family friends. Did SFSMA want this music, they asked. Most were happy to ship it to me, pleased that it would be made freely available for anyone to use. Suddenly, my guest room had a dozen boxes of silent film music in it, something SFSMA (and I) had hoped to avoid on its founding. At the same time, other repositories of silent film music, such as the University of Pittsburgh’s Finney Music Library’s Mirskey Salon Orchestra and Silent Film Music Collection, had begun digitizing their holdings, which often overlapped with SFSMA’s. In order to avoid becoming redundant, SFSMA needed to revisit its policies and practices in terms of what to include.
[8] The SFSMA board decided to narrow the Archive’s focus somewhat and to collaborate with other collections of silent film music and related materials. If we were offered materials that were easily available in a digitized format elsewhere, we would only accept and add those that contained handwritten notes or performance markings, or any other unusual information that differentiated them from identical materials in other collections.11 Under these policies, we digitized a collection of heavily hand-annotated cue sheets used by cinema accompanist Carl Braun, as well as sheet music from his library. While the Carl Braun Collection includes cue sheets that can be found in other repositories, the annotations that make this collection unique. Braun marked places where he used substitutions, cues and title cards to for synchronizing his playing with films, the presence of characters and their themes, where to “fake” a piece while playing, and other notes. He also included the order in which the newsreels showed events, allowing researchers to determine the dates when the films he accompanied were shown at the theaters where he worked. Further notes list the genre of music used to accompany the news items and in some cases specific titles. We also decided to seek out materials owned or used by women or nonbinary cinema musicians and/or by accompanists of color. And we would mirror the holdings of other repositories as possible, providing multiple points of entry for researchers and performers. In collaboration with the American Music Research Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder, SFSMA provides access to the Grauman’s Theaters Scores collection, more than three thousand sets of music including scores and parts for cinema orchestra. This collection had previously been held by cinema musician Rodney Sauer, who stored it in his garage. It contains use markings from numerous conductors, composers, and arrangers.
[9] The policy of preferentially accepting and digitizing music owned by accompanists from minoritized groups has allowed SFSMA to acquire and make available materials that were not otherwise accessible by the public, having been held by private individuals. A music library shared by three women who worked as cinema pianists, Leslie Tilden, Honey Tilden, and Beatrice Nadeau, was passed down through the Nadeau family to Nadeau’s grandniece and is an important representative of the practice of using popular songs and dance tunes to accompany films rather than generic music published for film accompaniment. Collections currently (as of 2025) being digitized include those owned by Myrna McNeil, a cinema organist who worked in Chicago and in Bozeman, Montana, and Salt Lake City organist Virginia Freber.
[10] SFSMA also found ways of reaching out to the public with educational materials. I developed a guide for teaching using SFSMA resources, and in 2025, students in Reba Wissner’s Public Musicology Certificate students at Columbus State University undertook for their class projects the development of materials about composer Victor Herbert for an exhibit to reside on SFSMA. Herbert’s musicals and songs were enormous successes and were used frequently in film and formed the basis for several silent films, and Herbert also composed the score for the now-lost 1916 film The Fall of a Nation, a piece of anti-German war propaganda. Students prepared posters, essays, analyses, and short videos that explore various works by Herbert and their use in the silent cinema. SFSMA board member Brent Ferguson created a choose-your-own-adventure style video game as part of SFSMA’s public outreach. In the game, the player is transported back in time to a moving picture palace, where they’ve apparently been hired as the musical director. The manager tells the player that they’ve gotten a new film in—Buster Keaton’s 1926 film The General—and it’s up to the player to decide whether to improvise, compile, or compose a score, and for what forces. Each choice leads to a different outcome and a clip of the film with a different accompaniment. Players can find a cue sheet for The General and many of the pieces for it in SFSMA’s holdings if they’re inspired by the game to create their own full score, or even select scenes. The game also includes examples of more recent scores written for the film, providing information on how varied present-day scoring for silent film can be.
[11] Based on the success SFSMA has found among scholarly, performer, and fan communities, I argue that small archives and those specializing in what might be considered niche areas should embrace and implement policies that make their holdings as accessible and as open as possible. Offering libre open access to digitized materials can also expand an institution’s user base, and leaders should consider and address a broad range of potential audiences and users and the multiple ways in which they might engage with an archive’s holdings when creating a program for digitization and access. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, archives worldwide were asked to provide more of their materials in digital formats. As researchers have become more accustomed to using digitized documents and materials, and in conjunction with the widespread loss of travel funding for scholars affiliated with academic institutions and the desire not to have to travel (particularly by air) in order to undertake research, this demand seems to have become an expectation. Smaller and more specialized archives with easily digitized holdings or which have always provided digital materials have opportunities to serve both disparate and overlapping user bodies all over the world, becoming preeminent sources in their areas.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beavers, Herman. “Ephemerality and the Ethics of Public Humanities Scholarship.” PMLA 140, no. 1 (January 2025): 118–25. https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812925000045.
Leonard, Kendra Preston. “Imagining Women’s Archives of Silent Film Music.” Feminist Media Histories 10, no. 2–3 (April 1, 2024): 61–86. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2024.10.2-3.61.
———. “Using Resources for Silent Film Music.” Fontes Artis Musicae 63, no. 4 (2016): 259–76.
———. “Women at the Pedals: Female Cinema Musicians during the Great War.” In Over Here, Over There: Transatlantic Conversations on the Music of World War I, edited by William Brooks, Christina Bashford, and Gayle Magee, 149–73. University of Illinois Press, 2019. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/66hzs5kd9780252042706.html.
Looser, Devoney. “Theorizing Archival Public Humanities Scholarship and Telling Excellent Stories.” PMLA 140, no. 1 (January 2025): 136–44. https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812925000033.
Moravec, Michelle. “How Digitized* Changed Historical Research.” On Archivy (blog), January 24, 2017. https://medium.com/on-archivy/how-digitized-changed-historical-research-d77c78540878.
“OA and Reuse.” Accessed May 6, 2025. https://open-access.network/en/information/open-access-primers/open-access-and-reuse.
Ogilvie, Brian. “Scientific Archives in the Age of Digitization.” Isis 107, no. 1 (March 2016): 77–85. https://doi.org/10.1086/686075.
Weber, Chela Scott. “Digitization and Access in Archives—Digitization and Access in Archives.” Hanging Together (blog), October 25, 2023. https://hangingtogether.org/digitization-and-access-in-archives/.
NOTES
1Kendra Preston Leonard, “Imagining Women’s Archives of Silent Film Music,” Feminist Media Histories 10, no. 2–3 (April 1, 2024): 61–86, https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2024.10.2-3.61.
2Kendra Preston Leonard, “Using Resources for Silent Film Music,” Fontes Artis Musicae 63, no. 4 (2016): 259–76.
3Brian Ogilvie, “Scientific Archives in the Age of Digitization,” Isis 107, no. 1 (March 2016): 77–85, https://doi.org/10.1086/686075.
4Michelle Moravec, “How Digitized* Changed Historical Research,” On Archivy (blog), January 24, 2017, https://medium.com/on-archivy/how-digitized-changed-historical-research-d77c78540878.
5Chela Scott Weber, “Digitization and Access in Archives – Digitization and Access in Archives,” Hanging Together (blog), October 25, 2023, https://hangingtogether.org/digitization-and-access-in-archives/.
6Herman Beavers, “Ephemerality and the Ethics of Public Humanities Scholarship,” PMLA 140, no. 1 (January 2025): 121, https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812925000045.
7Devoney Looser, “Theorizing Archival Public Humanities Scholarship and Telling Excellent Stories,” PMLA 140, no. 1 (January 2025): 137, https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812925000033.
8Looser, 138.
9“OA and Reuse,” accessed May 6, 2025, https://open-access.network/en/information/open-access-primers/open-access-and-reuse.
10Kendra Preston Leonard, “Women at the Pedals: Female Cinema Musicians during the Great War,” in Over Here, Over There: Transatlantic Conversations on the Music of World War I, ed. William Brooks, Christina Bashford, and Gayle Magee (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 149–73, https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/66hzs5kd9780252042706.html.
11This mirrors the Library of Congress’s practice, which no longer takes unmarked silent film music but considers accepting music with annotations of interest.
