Paul Lewis

Salute the Silents!

Orchestration: Violin 1, Violin 2, Viola, Cello, Bass
This work is a celebration of some of the genres and character types most popular in the days of the silent movies.
1. Ride-em Cowboy! Early Westerns contained a great deal of high speed galloping about. An interlude describes a cowboy on a reluctant steed that just doesn't want to get going.
2. The Vamp Actress Theda Bara began a fashion for films about dangerous, predatory women who passed the time of day (and night) seducing weak-willed men and separating them from their money and their wives before leaving them high, dry and ruined when their money was spent. This is a slinky, suggestive movement starting in blues tempo and continuing with an up-beat section as the vamp swings into action!
3. The Villain The opening portrays the type of villain often seen in Charlie Chaplin films: of towering build, bad-tempered, with bushy eyebrows, long black beard and glowering countenance. In the fast section we encounter the type of villain who pursued the hapless heroines such as in The Perils of Pauline and The Hazards of Helen.
4. The Heroine Fragile, delicate, innocent and oh so pretty - the heroine of so many silent movies. The movement begins with eight bars of harmony but no melody: an affectionate reference to Lewis's mother Phyllis's first job in a movie house at the age of fourteen. She was told to play the violin solo in the big love scene, but so mesmerized by the film was she that when the scene came she stood watching the screen transfixed, the violin dangling beside her in one hand and the bow in the other, and didn't play a note! (The manager sacked her and threw her out in the interval!)
5. Slapstick Strings Chases and madcap stunts performed with breath-taking precision and an apparent disregard for safety. The musical action is interrupted by a galumphing interlude: could that be Laurel and Hardy putting in an appearance? The action gets dafter and after a chaotic section the music hurtles towards a helter-skelter conclusion.
Salute the Silents! was commissioned by Michelle Roberts, Instrumental Music Director, Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Spring, Maryland, U.S.A. with financial assistance from the Wolf Trap Foundation.
Duration 19 minutes