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“The Realm of Serious Art”: Henry Hadley's Involvement in Early Sound Film

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2014

HANNAH LEWIS
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Abstract

Composer-conductor Henry Kimball Hadley (1871–1937) is widely viewed as a conservative musical figure, one who resisted radical changes as American musical modernism began to flourish. His compositional style remained firmly rooted in late-Romantic European idioms; and although Hadley advocated for American composition through programming choices as a conductor, he mostly ignored the music of younger, adventurous composers. In one respect, however, Hadley was part of the cutting edge of musical production: that of musical dissemination through new media. This essay explores Hadley's work conducting and composing film music during the transition from silent to synchronized sound film, specifically his involvement with Warner Bros. and their new sound synchronization technology, Vitaphone, in 1926–27. Drawing on archival evidence, I examine Hadley's approach to film composition for the 1927 film When a Man Loves. I argue that Hadley's high-art associations conferred legitimacy upon the new technology, and in his involvement with Vitaphone he aimed to establish sound film composition as a viable outlet for serious composers. Hadley's example prompts us to reconsider the parameters through which we distinguish experimental and conservative musical practices, reconfiguring the definitions to include not just musical proclivities but also the contexts and modes through which they circulate.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 8 , Special Issue 3: Music and Sound in American Cinema, 1927–56 , August 2014 , pp. 285 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2014 

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Footnotes

I wish to thank Daniel Goldmark, Carol Oja, Leta Miller, Sindhumathi Revuluri, and the anonymous readers of this journal for their valuable feedback on various stages of this article. Thank you also to Sandra Joy Lee Aguilar at the USC Warner Bros. Archives for bringing the orchestral score to When a Man Loves to my attention. Finally, I am grateful to my colleagues at Harvard for their insightful comments and suggestions during this project's early stages. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Society for American Music conference in 2013 in Little Rock, AR.

References

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