What Did Silent Films Sound Like?

Jim Cassaro

If you had walked into the Metropolitan Theater in Washington, D.C., in 1921, it wouldn’t just be a crowd and a screen. Between the two would be a 30-piece orchestra—violins, brass, and woodwinds—and leading them all would be Nek Mirskey, a prolific conductor and scorer of silent films.

A yearslong effort to categorize and digitize Mirskey’s music collection wrapped up at Pitt this year, making it available for historians and the public amid a renewed interest in silent film. “This is really a spectacular collection,” says Dietrich School Department of Music Professor Jim Cassaro. “I think it’s going to have wide impact on the study of silent film.”

Mirsky’s collection was donated to Pitt in 1991, and with a 2021 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the digitization process began. The roughly 3,500 sets of music that make up the collection are now viewable online.

It’s surprising the collection survived at all, according to Cassaro, who led the project to digitize the collection as head of Pitt’s Theodore M. Finney Music Library. Many collections from the time were degraded or lost due to the brittle and acidic nature of the paper that was common back then. 

The collection now stands as a free online resource both for historians looking to understand how composers shaped the representation of characters onscreen in silent films and for those attempting to screen films in the same way viewers experienced them in the 1920s.