12/29/2006

The sound of silence at museum

Keaton film features organ accompaniment

By Garret Ellison

gellison@record-eagle.com

Record-Eagle/Douglas Tesner
Organist Stephen J. Warner plays returns to the Music House Museum tonight for two performances of the silent film, "Our Hospitality," starring Buster Keaton. The accompaniment will be played on the newly refurbished Wurlitzer Theater Organ.

TRAVERSE CITY — Organist Stephen J. Warner grew up amidst the sounds of the Music House Museum before it even was a museum.

Tonight, the University of Michigan graduate returns to his old stomping grounds for two performances of the silent film, "Our Hospitality,” starring Buster Keaton. The accompaniment will be played on the newly refurbished Wurlitzer Theater Organ.

The show is the fourth in this year's series of accompanied silent films at the Music House, which plans to continue the series in 2007. The organ accompaniment is a throwback to the modern art of movie scoring.

"It's almost like any performance you would have seen at a movie palace,” Warner said, "minus the dancing dog and pony show.”

The movie will be shown inside the museum on a drop-down screen. The film takes place in 1830s Kentucky, as a take-off on the Hatfield and McCoy's legendary feud. Keaton — a virtuoso who wrote, directed and acted in hundreds of films between 1910 and 1960 — plays a Romeo trapped inside his newfound love's family home, where he's safe as long as he stays indoors. A strict social code of the time affords protection to any house guest, but he's fair game once he steps outside.

Warner, 29, chose "Our Hospitality” based on its weave of comedy and drama, which allows him a wide range of thematic choices for sound. While the performance requires a degree of improvisation, he has been practicing on the Wurlitzer for the past week. The score he composed borrows heavily from 1890s American pop music, "woven together with some atmosphere and a little bit of slapstick when it's appropriate,” he said.

"It represents a balance of all the different accompaniment styles,” he said. "Even though (the film) is not directly holiday themed, the sense of families coming together and conflict fits the holidays pretty well, I think.”

The organ, a 13-rank, three-keyboard Wurlitzer from 1924, was built for the Cinderella Theater on the east side of Detroit. The Music House spent close to $150,000 on restoration and automation. It became operational last June.

Known as the sequencer of its day, the organ blows close to 3,000 cubic feet of air per minute out of its 961 pipes. The theater organ controls feature a semi-circle of key tabs that, when flipped, allow the keyboards to play the sound of the organist's instrument of choice, from oboe to flute to chimes.

And, with the music setting the tone, it can tug at your heartstrings.

"It's an emotional experience,” said Sally Lewis, president of the museum's board of directors.

She said organists of the day kept a bag of tricks for producing sound effects. The Music House Wurlitzer has a pullout panel with buttons for effects like a train whistle, sleigh bells, bird whistles, a door knock or blowing horns.

"That's how movies were accompanied in those days,” Lewis said. "Before sound came along.”

The show is particularly special to Lewis because Warner is performing it. The folks around the museum have taken a great interest in his career.

"Some of us around here have known him since he was a young boy,” she said.

Warner's father, Jim, is a phonograph collector who was close to the museum. He started his son on the piano in third grade after Stephen fell in love with a Wurlitzer in a pizza parlor downstate.

A double major at college in organ performance and engineering, Warner currently pays the bills with staff positions at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian Church and the Holden Pipe Organ Company. He will speak briefly before the film's showings at 5 and 7:30 p.m. The programs also will feature caroling and singing.

"We're really pushing it as a family show,” Lewis said.

The cost is $15 for adults, $25 for couples and $5 for kids. Space is limited to 100 seats; call 938-9300 for reservations.