Sonic Silents, a new festival curated by composer Mark Orton, brings four nights of newly commissioned scores for silent film to the Hollywood Theatre stage September 17-20. Each score will be performed live by the musicians who wrote it.
A SHARED CENTENNIAL
The inaugural festival pairs rare and canonical silent films with original music created expressly for Sonic Silents. The program culminates in a special dual-centennial presentation of Buster Keaton’s THE GENERAL, which was released in 1926, the same year The Hollywood Theatre opened as a Silent Film Palace.
Sonic Silents is built on a single premise: commission new work from composer-performers who move fluidly between idioms, then feature them onstage performing it. The festival’s all-star roster represents some of the industry’s finest musicians working across chamber music, jazz, film scoring, and indie rock, assembled into shifting ensembles that change for each program.
