MIT Office of the Arts 
Lynn Heinemann, Office of the Arts
(Published in Tech Talk 4/12/1995)
"Ever since I was about 12 years old, I was just as much in love with what I heard at the movies as with what I saw," says Martin Marks, associate professor in Music and Theater Arts. As a boy, he says, "I would buy all the music I could find -- themes like Exodus and Mutiny on the Bounty and Tom Jones -- as a supplement to my classical piano studies."
This movie romance continued into adulthood. When Marks needed a research topic for his PhD, film music seemed a great idea. "No one was doing anything on it," he says.
Now a leading scholar in the field, he has performed and studied original scores from Germany, France and the US. Since 1986, he has enjoyed teaching an MIT class on film music to what he calls a "a real mix of people interested in music and film studies."
"I like playing original scores for silent films," Marks says. "If the score hasn't survived, I create one of my own devising." Such is the case with the film Metropolis, which will be screened through the LSC Classics series on Friday, April 21, 1995, in Rm 10-250 with Marks providing live piano accompaniment. (Admission is $2; MIT/Wellesley ID required.)
A number of years ago, at the State Library in East Berlin, Marks discovered a copy to the score to Metropolis, composed by a German named Gottfried Huppertz. "It's actually a piano reduction of a full orchestral score, so it's hard to play on the piano," says Marks. "Even more so because the version of the film Huppertz worked with was longer than any version that survives today. I follow the Huppertz score as faithfully as I can while trying to be 'musical' and depart from the score to improvise here and there as necessary," he says.
Marks has just returned from a trip to Ann Arbor, MI, where he gave a lecture comparing the scores for Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon and played a score he devised for His People, a 1925 Jewish film. In June, he'll play for Broken Blossoms and The Thief of Baghdad at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In addition, he is currently finishing the edited copy of a book on Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924 (to be published by Oxford University Press). This summer he'll complete a draft of his next book, Music in the Early Sound Film, 1925-1950.