COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
SCORING MANHATTA (1921) BY CHARLES SHEELER AND PAUL STRAND:
HISTORY, CONTEXT, AND THE ISSUES OF A 21ST CENTURY INTERPRETATION
AN HONORS COMPOSITION AND RESEARCH ESSAY SUBMITTED TO
THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF MUSIC IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF
BACHELOR OF ARTS
DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC
BY
THOMAS ERIK NIELSEN
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
APRIL 16, 2018
ii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements.……………………………………………………………………………...iii
Recording Personnel..……………………………………………………………………………iii
1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….1
2. The State of American Silent Film and Silent Film Music in 1921……………………………3
3. Manhatta: History and Artistic Context.……………………………………………………….7
4. Critical Evaluations of Manhatta and the Problem of Ambiguity..…………………………...11
5. Musical Accompaniments for Manhatta……………………………………………………...17
6. Open Voices: A New Musical Interpretation………………………………………………….21
7. Concluding Thoughts………………………………………………………………………….31
Appendix and Bibliography……………………………………………………………………...33
Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………33
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..40
iii
Acknowledgements
This project would not have been possible without the constant support and suggestions
of my faculty advisor, Zosha Di Castri. Zosha encouraged me to cultivate a personal
compositional aesthetic in a class called Techniques of 20th Century Music, and I later studied
composition with her in an advanced undergraduate course where I further refined my individual
voice. She generously agreed to sponsor this project and has been invaluable throughout the
process of writing music for Manhatta. She has also been incredibly helpful in suggesting edits
to this essay, as well as avenues for further research. Thanks also to the talented Longleash Trio,
who recorded the score to be paired with the film. Thank you to Ralph Whyte, whose Film Music
class gave me the background necessary to write a research paper on silent film and silent film
music, and to Terry Pender, who taught me the basics of mixing recorded sound. Thanks to
Bruce Posner for graciously responding to my emails regarding his restoration work on
Manhatta and recommending books filled with information on avant-garde film. As always, I am
indebted to my parents, David and Debra Nielsen, who were the first to cultivate within me a
passion for music and who have supported me since my first music class at age 3, attending all of
my concerts, providing me feedback on my compositions, and helping me to fund my lessons.
Finally, thanks to Luiza Leão, who loves listening to music as much as I love composing and
writing about it. I am forever grateful for her support.
Recording Personnel
Open Voices was recorded on March 28, 2018 by Longleash (Pala Garcia, violin; John
Popham, violoncello; Renate Rohlfing, piano). The recording was engineered by Zak Argabrite.
It was mixed, mastered, and synced to Manhatta by Thomas Nielsen.
iv
Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed
– T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)
1
1. Introduction
Sunday, July 24th, 1921. At the Rialto Theater, located on Broadway by Bryant Park in
New York City, music director Hugo Riesenfeld’s theater orchestra has just concluded its
performance of selections from Jules Massenet’s 1884 comic opera Manon. The CanadianAmerican dancer Lillian Powell presents a routine she calls “Danse Orientale,” accompanied by
Riesenfeld and the Rialto’s orchestra. The audience is restless, waiting for the evening’s main
attraction: The Mystery Road, directed by Paul Powell, with title cards designed by a young, upand-coming filmmaker named Alfred Hitchcock. But before the feature presentation, Riesenfeld
lifts his baton and launches into a rousing orchestral rendition of the old Irish folk tune “Annie
Rooney,” the projector rattling to life to show one final entrée: a “scenic” film directed by
Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, marketed by the Rialto as New York The Magnificent rather
than its original title, Manhatta.1 To accompany the eleven-minute-long film, which features
shots of downtown Manhattan interspersed with placards containing snippets of Walt Whitman’s
poetry, Riesenfeld conducts a number of popular songs, including “Sidewalks of New York,”
“She May Have Seen Better Days,” and “My Mother Was a Lady.” The audience loves the
music, and a few particularly boisterous individuals shout out select lyrics to accompany the
orchestra.2
Despite its warm reception, New York The Magnificent’s run at the Rialto lasts for only
one week, suffering a common fate of silent films at this time. In the following decades, it falls
through the cracks of cinematic history and is largely forgotten, save a few critical
1
The “scenic” genre will be defined on page 6.
This account of the premiere of Manhatta has been compiled from two contemporaneous newspaper articles. The
Rialto’s July 24th program appears in Motion Picture News. See Motion Picture News 24, no. 7 (6 August 1921):
756. The information on Reisenfeld’s orchestral accompaniments, as well as the audience’s reception, appears in
Hariette Underhill’s July 26th New York Tribune review. See Hariette Underhill, “’Mystery Road’ at Rialto Must
Have Been Written for Children,” New York Tribune, 26 July 1921.
2
2
commentaries, until the archivist Bruce Posner restores a damaged dupe negative from 1946,
previously thought lost but serendipitously found in 2006 at the British Film Institute in
London.3 The restored film is hailed as a masterpiece and one of the first works of American
avant-garde cinema.4 It returns to New York City in 2008 and is screened at the Museum of
Modern Art, enthralling a new generation of audiences.
Against all odds, Manhatta has survived into the 21st century. Despite positive reviews of
the newly restored release, however, it is still not well known outside of contemporary art
enthusiasts. Consequently, few composers have taken up the task of writing music for the film in
an attempt to broaden its appeal. This paper, which accompanies my piano trio score for
Manhatta, entitled Open Voices, is my effort to highlight what I perceive to be the genius aspects
of the film, as well as its continued relevance in the 21st century. I will first contextualize
Manhatta within the world of commercial film and film music in 1921, establishing that despite
its conventional position on the Rialto’s program as a “scenic,” Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand
considered it to be an experimental film. I will then discuss the artistic aesthetics of Sheeler and
Strand and how their prior visual artwork is synthesized within Manhatta. In surveying the few
critical analyses of Manhatta that exist, I will establish that the majority of commentators have
tried to declare Manhatta either fundamentally modernist or fundamentally romantic, to the
detriment of the film’s nuances; in reality, it is intentionally both. Pivoting to music used for
Manhatta from 1921 to the present day, I will then argue that composers who have written scores
for this film, like critics, have generally not confronted its ambiguities with great depth in their
3
See Bruce Posner, “On Fragmentation” (speech, Alternative Film/Video Research Forum, 2014), Unseen Cinema.
http://www.unseen-cinema.com/BP_2014_on_manhattaOPT.pdf.
4
See the New York Times review of Posner’s restoration and the MoMA exhibit: Dave Kehr, "Avant-Garde, 1920
Vintage, Is Back in Focus," The New York Times, November 08, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09
/movies/09kehr.html.
3
soundtracks. Finally, I will discuss my composition Open Voices, explaining how my music
intends to answer these quandaries while grounding my compositional choices in the history and
theories discussed in this paper.
2. The State of American Silent Film and Silent Film Music in 1921
In 1921, American cinema was in a state of rapid change. The first movie theaters, which
appeared around 1905, were directly descended from vaudeville theaters, featuring multiple short
films and live acts in a single program of entertainment. These “nickelodeons,” named so due to
their five-cent ticket prices, offered shows “lasting from twenty minutes to a full hour” that
included “a single-reel melodrama, a comedy, and a novelty,” often employing a lecturer to
“explain the story” and perhaps, in between acts, a singer who led the audience in popular songs
aided by “illustrated hand-colored slides.”5 The cinema of this era was limited in scope; film
theorist Kristin Thompson explains that nickelodeon films “appealed to audiences primarily
through simple comedy or melodrama, topical subjects, exotic scenery, trick effects, and the
sheer novelty of photographed movement.”6 More importantly, nickelodeons were not only
dedicated to film; rather, they employed film as part of a series of variety-type acts, which “often
featured attractions…including illustrated songs and vaudeville acts.”7 And yet, as better
technology allowed filmmakers to create longer films, things started to change. By 1914,
“feature-length spectacles, [and] large theaters in fashionable neighborhoods…began to bring
into the movies’ sphere a broader…type of audience.”8
5
Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia
University, 1968), 56.
6
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of
Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 157.
7
Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 181.
8
Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History, 156.
4
As films grew in length from single to multiple reels, audiences started to tire of the
cramped, small nickelodeons and instead flocked to larger theaters, modeled on the “high
culture” of symphony halls and opera houses, that began to pop up in densely-populated areas.
The films themselves changed, too. Whereas before “no individual film was expected to stand by
itself,” the longer durations facilitated by new technology offered spectators an experience
“directly comparable to that offered by a play.”9 As a result of these changes, feature films
became narrative in focus and associated with more “sophisticated” forms of art – Paul Powell’s
The Mystery Road from 1921 being one example – “drawing upon aspects of the novel, the
popular legitimate theater, and the visual arts.”10 Narrative film grew in popularity, then, because
it positioned audiences as spectators “within or on the edge of narrative space,” an experience
that despite being less interactive than vaudeville was far more immersive than that offered by
the simplistic moving pictures of the nickelodeon era.11 Consequently, the variety-type programs
offered by nickelodeons became obsolete; the longer length of feature films encroached on the
vaudeville sketches and other non-filmic entertainment, and the innovation of intertitles –
placards featuring dialogue or context – rendered the role of the “lecturer” unnecessary.
The music that accompanied these films was in a similarly transitional state. Nickelodeon
pianists provided the music for vaudeville acts and films alike; these pianists were skilled in
anything from the classical repertoire to (most frequently) popular songs. They often conceived
of their performances as an opportunity to interact with the audience as opposed to the film,
choosing songs whose titles cleverly commented upon the onscreen action, even if the music
itself was completely inappropriate to the scene. Thus, as Altman states, “the pianist’s triumph
9
Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 163.
Ibid., 158.
11
Ibid., 158.
10
5
[with the audience] was often the manager’s debacle.”12 As a result of this behavior, music, too,
became the subject of a debate between “high” and “low” culture that catalyzed the transition to
narrative film and the closure of nickelodeons. In a famous 1911 article entitled “Jackass Music,”
writer and filmmaker Louis Reeves Harrison explains that “inappropriate music may ‘do’ for an
unintelligent part of the audience, but what is the use of driving away the intelligent portion? All
other parts of the theatrical working force move in harmony, like the wheels of a clock.”13
Invoking cinema’s connection to the highbrow theater, Harrison decries pianists who pitch their
music to the audience at the expense of the screen, arguing that this alienates higher-class patrons
and diminishes the artistic status of film.
Harrison was not the only one demanding change; by 1912, Motion Picture Weekly was
“providing musicians and musical directors [with] the publication of suggestions for musical
accompaniment.”14 These recommendations “ranged from those tropes that would generate
specific musical moods needed to emphasize “proper” narrative meanings to exact pieces for
precise scene-by-scene accompaniment.”15 As a result of this advocacy, theaters began to
“choose music that…increase[d] their prestige.”16 The use of popular tunes diminished in noncomedy films, and theaters more frequently employed classical-type music, either from the
standard concert repertoire or from contemporary composers who published short snippets of
music evoking various scenes and moods in special editions specifically made for silent film
pianists. This music employed simple harmonic structures, frequent cadences, and repeats that
allowed the selections to be trimmed, expanded, or otherwise altered to fit what was on screen
12
Ibid., 221.
Louis Reeves Harrison, “Jackass Music,” in The Routledge Film Music Sourcebook, ed. James Wierzbicki,
Nathan Platte, and Colin Roust (New York: Routledge, 2012), 15.
14
Tim Anderson, "Reforming "Jackass Music": The Problematic Aesthetics of Early American Film Music
Accompaniment," Cinema Journal 37, no. 1 (1997): 3-22. doi:10.2307/1225687, 10.
15
Ibid., 10.
16
Altman, Silent Film Sound, 246.
13
6
without the need for extensive melodic improvisation or modulations from one key to another.
The largest theaters possessed massive music libraries filled with these anthologies, ready ondemand for any film that may come along.
And yet, these shifts did not occur overnight; even in 1914, by which point most
nickelodeons had already shuttered, vestiges of vaudeville programs remained in large,
prestigious movie houses. Although these institutions were, as Thompson states, modeled on the
“legitimate theater” of the playhouse or opera, they continued to offer entrées to the feature
film – orchestral overtures, ballets, and short films featuring comedy or other simple subjects, to
name a few – that resembled a more “sophisticated” version of the nickelodeon variety-type
programs. These productions employed, for example, a full orchestra playing classical repertoire
in lieu of a pianist playing popular songs, giving performances an element of prestige associated
with the “high culture” of the symphony hall. One of the most frequently-screened types of short
introductory film was the “scenic.” The scenic genre, like the other parts of these programs, was
descended from an old vaudeville practice: the travelogue lecture. Such lectures “were hugely
popular in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. In these presentations, live lecturers
described foreign lands…accompanying their talks with…slides.”17 In the early days of cinema,
nickelodeons replaced these slides with moving pictures of natural imagery from “interesting
locales,” creating the “scenic” film.18 Even when other remnants of vaudeville such as the
lecturer were phased out in lieu of placards and intertitles, the “scenic” continued to be used as
an entrée to feature films, the foreign and exotic character of the locales represented onscreen
contributing to the cosmopolitan atmosphere of “high culture” sought by large movie houses.
17
Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2013), 23.
18
Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 159.
7
Such films were thus enduringly popular; Altman writes that “according to a 1922 Motion
Picture News survey, 22 percent of [American] theaters showed scenics.”19
Even though the “scenics” themselves were a vestige of an older filmic genre, the
soundtracks that accompanied them changed alongside other film accompaniments, shifting from
the popular music of vaudeville towards classical selections that listeners perceived to be more
prestigious. Erno Rapee, a composer and one of the first film music theorists, wrote in 1925 that
“the scenic picture, by the very nature of its being, as a rule portrays scenery and atmosphere
with relatively little action and all it requires for its accompaniment is purely melodious music
moving in the same atmosphere as the picture.”20 Rapee suggests the music of Dvořák,
Tchaikovsky, and Mendelsohn as ideal, but notes that “it is advisable to have different strains for
different sections of the picture.” And yet, this practice is a far cry from the music that
accompanied Manhatta’s premiere: although marketed as a “scenic,” Manhatta’s focus was
urban as opposed to pastoral. This could explain why Riesenfeld chose to accompany the film
with the contemporary popular music of the city, a choice that by 1921 was decidedly oldfashioned, as opposed to lyrical classical music appropriate to natural imagery.21 It also implies,
however, that Manhatta’s directors, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, saw their film as a
departure from the commercial “scenic” tradition.
3. Manhatta: History and Artistic Context
Sheeler and Strand were visual artists, not commercial filmmakers. Charles Sheeler
(1883-1965) was most famous as a painter; his works “were revolutionary in their perception of
19
Altman, Silent Film Sound, 382.
Erno Rapee, Encyclopaedia of Music for Pictures (New York: Belwin, 1925), 9.
21
For the exact selections performed by Riesenfeld at the premiere, refer back to page 1 of this essay.
20
8
the American landscape and cityscape” because he saw “the harsh geometry of industrial
development” as being no less inspirational than the pastoral scenes and human subjects which
traditionally attracted painterly attention.22 The school of painting associated with Sheeler,
known as Precisionism, synthesized “Cubism’s geometric simplifications and faceted,
overlapping planes” and, in Sheeler’s case, portrayals of American “urban settings…and the
sprawling industrial locales of steel mills, mines, and factory complexes.”23 His most famous
urban paintings include Church Street El (1920) which features a distant, geometrically abstract
view of a Manhattan elevated rail line portrayed in muted colors. The scene is entirely devoid of
human presence, with the outlines of buildings and train tracks rendered in straight lines
intersecting at clearly-defined angles.24
Paul Strand (1890-1976) was chiefly a photographer, a protégé of Alfred Stieglitz (18641946) and member of Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionist school, which emphasized the “truthful
rendering of abstract form and tonal variation in the real world.”25 Stieglitz lauded Strand’s
urban photography as being “brutally direct. Devoid of flim-flam; devoid of trickery and of any
‘ism;’ devoid of any attempt to mystify an ignorant public.”26 Indeed, Strand’s city photographs,
such as Wall Street (1915) and The Docks (1922) share striking similarities with Sheeler’s
paintings; they are harshly geometric and feature pedestrians dwarfed by the abstract shapes of
buildings and industrial equipment.27 Jan-Christopher Horak, the director of the Film and
Television Archive at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, explains that the two
22
Scott Hammen, “Sheeler and Strand’s “Manhatta”: A Neglected Masterpiece,” Afterimage 6, no. 6 (January
1979): 6.
23
Jessica Murphey, “Precisionism,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, 2007).
24
See fig. 1. All figures are located in the appendix.
25
Lisa Hostelter. “Pictorialism in America,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 2007).
26
Hammen, “Sheeler and Strand’s “Manhatta,” 6.
27
See figs. 2-3.
9
artists likely met at Stieglitz’s “291” Gallery, located on Fifth Avenue in New York City, in
1917.28 They quickly bonded over their shared “fascination for cityscape architecture and its
application to visual design.”29 Soon after their meeting, Sheeler paid $1600 (a significant
investment, equivalent to $20,000 in 2018 dollars) for a Debrie Interview type E camera from
Europe and proposed the two collaborate on a “little film about New York.”30
Manhatta, the product of their collaboration, features sixty-five individual shots of
various goings-on in downtown Manhattan: the Staten Island Ferry approaching the South Ferry
slip; the Trinity Church graveyard; the towering skyline of the city and workmen perched
precariously on iron skeletons of half-constructed structures; rooftops rendered jagged by the
juxtaposition of tall and short buildings; trains and train tracks; ships large and small in the
Manhattan harbor; the Brooklyn Bridge; an elevated rail line.31 The name Manhatta was
appropriated from Walt Whitman’s poem “Mannahatta,” first published in 1860, the title of
which was itself sourced from the indigenous Lenni Lenape word for the island of Manhattan.
Whitman’s poetry is also featured on intertitles placed between various groups of cuts. Finally,
the sixty-five shots are bookended by the progression of the day from morning to evening, the
film opening with commuters arriving in Manhattan and concluding with the sunset over the
harbor waters.
Manhatta is deeply indebted to Sheeler and Strand’s similar aesthetic sensibilities. As
Horak explains, they “break down images into their basic geometric construction, privileging
28
Jan-Christopher Horak, “Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta,” in Lovers of Cinema, ed. Jan-Christopher
Horak (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 268-269.
29
Ibid., 269.
30
Ibid., 269.
31
This and all further references to Manhatta are taken from Bruce Posner’s restored version of the film. See
Manhatta, dir. Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand (New York: Anthology Film Archives / Image Entertainment, 1997),
DVD.
10
abstract and formal compositional elements over the images’ iconic signifying functions.”32 As a
result of this cinematographic technique, “more than half the images are either low-angle shots
looking up…or high-angle shots looking down…these extreme perspectives…contribut[ing] to
the fragmentation of the subject’s perception,” the camera’s shots appearing strikingly inhuman
in perspective and scope.33 This effect is furthered by the fact that throughout Manhatta,
humanity is either dwarfed or completely erased by the urban landscape, as in Church Street El
and The Docks. And indeed, Sheeler and Strand drew explicitly from their prior work as they
filmed; the view of the elevated rail near the end of Manhatta is shot from nearly the same
perspective and location as Church Street El, and Strand’s Wall Street is almost exactly
replicated in the second minute of the film.34
Sheeler and Strand also took filmic inspiration from the then-burgeoning movement of
German Expressionism, whose practitioners embraced a cinematic aesthetic similar to that of the
Precisionist painters and Photo-Secessionist school of photographers. These filmmakers aimed to
“creat[e] powerful reactions to their work through the use of [sets with] bright, clashing colors,
flat shapes, and jagged brushstrokes.”35 In a press release that preceded the premiere of
Manhatta, Strand explicitly linked it to one of the most famous German Expressionist films, The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), writing that he and Sheeler “tried to do in a scenic with natural
objects what in ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ was attempted with painted sets,” an effort to
legitimize Manhatta within the context of the experimental cinema of the time.36 Horak notes
32
Ibid., 275.
Ibid., 275.
34
See figs. 4-5.
35
Alissa Darsa, "An Introduction to German Expressionist Films," Artnet News, March 16, 2015, accessed April 07,
2018, https://news.artnet.com/market/art-house-an-introduction-to-german-expressionist-films-32845.
36
Jan-Christopher Horak, “Modernist Perspectives and Romantic Desire: Manhatta” in Afterimage 15 no. 4
(November, 1987): 12. Also note that the film’s relationship with avant-garde film and visual art of the period will
be explored in the following section.
33
11
that Strand’s “invoking the expressionist abstraction of Caligari…points to the film’s usage of
oblique angles, collapsed space, and static compositions” in lieu of clear significations of place
and perspective that characterized the American commercial films of the era. Indeed, Manhatta
is less a “scenic” than a progenitor of the “city symphony,” a subgenre of German Expressionist
cinema that would come to be popular among European avant-garde filmmakers in the late
1920s. These “city symphonies” contained abstract shots of urban scenes spliced together;
Walter Ruttman’s 1927 production Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a
Metropolis) is a particularly famous example.37
It is clear, then, that Manhatta has little in common with commercial “scenic” films and
is far more deeply indebted to the Precisionist school of Sheeler and his contemporaries, the
photographic style of Strand and Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionist school, and the films of the
German Expressionists – three artistic movements which themselves shared a commitment to
abstractly representing, and interrogating, life in the modern world using angular imagery and
extreme perspectives. Thus, although its routine position on the Rialto’s program as a “scenic”
would indicate otherwise, Manhatta was radical in 1921; rather than being a simplistic portrayal
of natural imagery, it is perhaps the first filmic exploration of humanity’s relationship with the
increasingly built-up urban landscape surrounding it.
4. Critical Evaluations of Manhatta and the Problem of Ambiguity
Despite Sheeler and Strand’s ambitious aspirations for Manhatta, the film did not attract
the attention they had hoped; Horak remarks that “Strand and Sheeler were possibly unaware that
independently produced films…only rarely managed to break into the commercial market, since
37
Chris Chang, “Manhatta,” in Film Comment 39, no. 5 (September/October, 2003): 17.
12
distribution and exhibition were rigidly controlled by film producers,” which explains why
Manhatta only ran for a single week at the Rialto.38 Although it was occasionally rescreened for
“art house audiences” in New York, Paris, and London in the coming decade, Manhatta
remained a commercial failure.39 In the decades since its premiere, it has also attracted markedly
mixed critical reviews from the few scholars who have offered analyses of it. Considering
Manhatta in the context of Sheeler’s paintings and Strand’s photographs, a number of critics
have dismissed it as “a relatively colorless documentary” or “a series of static photographs,” a
peculiar compromise sacrificing the earthy tones of Sheeler’s paintings and the shocking stillness
of Strand’s photographs for an amateurish artistic product that is not only colorless but also
strangely sedate by cinematic standards, lacking the narrative trajectory of German Expressionist
films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.40
Upon closer examination however, Manhatta is a fascinatingly and intentionally
ambiguous work, romantic in its expression of unity between man and machine, industrialization
and nature, and modernist in its alienating, jagged imagery and abstract structure that appears to
lack narrative cohesion. The romanticism is most blatantly embodied by the Whitman intertitles;
Whitman had a “transcendental view of the city as a natural phenomenon,” infusing his poetry
with images of cityscapes that are themselves a living, breathing entity, a lyrical celebration of
human achievement.41 The second placard, for example, is taken from Whitman’s “A Broadway
Pageant” (1860) and reads “When million footed Manhattan unpent, descends to its pavements”
(1:03).42 Here, and elsewhere, the urban landscape is anthropomorphized, given life through
38
Horak, “Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta,” 271.
Ibid., 271.
40
Ibid., 267.
41
Ibid., 277.
42
See fig. 6. For the reader’s convenience, I provide timecodes from here onward.
39
13
Whitman’s verse, suggesting the oneness of the industrial, ever-growing city and its human
makers and occupants. This romanticism seems to be constantly questioned, however, by the
camera’s images of New York, in which “figures move constantly” but do so “in the shadows of
such cement and steel behemoths that their activity seems futile” when compared to the
constructions around them that awkwardly saturate the camera frame.43
In light of these ambiguities, is Manhatta fundamentally modernist with romantic
elements, romantic with modernist elements, or an intentional amalgamation of both?
Understanding this debate is essential to interpreting the film, not only as a spectator but also
when considering an appropriate soundtrack for it. Manhatta’s focus on the form and
composition of images in lieu of what Horak calls their “signifying functions” implies that any
core message of romanticism or modernism intended by Sheeler and Strand is similarly
unclear.44 That has not stopped critics from attempting to pigeonhole the film into a single
category, however; nearly all of the few critical studies of Manhatta adopt either modernist or
romantic readings, but not both. David Peters Corbett, a professor of American Art at the
Courtauld Institute of Art in London, tends toward a modernist interpretation. He writes that
Sheeler and Strand’s frequent use of images containing either no human life at all or people
dwarfed by the surrounding architecture indicates that the filmmakers are “reach[ing] for a
connection [to the pre-industrial past] that proves elusive, so that the American past returns
instead in hauntings, absences, and uncertainties, visions of emptiness which substitute for that
uncertain relationship.” 45 Similarly, the American experimental filmmaker Scott Hammen
decries the design of the Whitman titles as “insipid” and states that Whitman’s words “have the
43
Hammen, “Sheeler and Strand’s “Manhatta”: A Neglected Masterpiece,” 7. Also see fig. 7.
Horak, “Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta,” 275.
45
David Peters Corbett, “The Problematic Past in the Work of Charles Sheeler, 1917-1927,” Journal of American
Studies 45, no. 3 (August 2011), 566.
44
14
double negative effect of ascribing a literal meaning to the images and destroying their visual
flow,” negating the abstract camerawork constructed to remove the signifying features of the
locations onscreen by providing clear interpretations of the film’s imagery. For Hammen, this
takes attention away from what he sees as Manhatta’s core, modernist message: that there is an
“absence of any individuality among the crowds” as commuters are “reduce[d]…to the visual
equivalent of ants” rendered powerless and meaningless by the structures towering above them.46
Alternatively, other critics have interpreted the Whitman intertitles as indicative of a
symbiotic unity between man and city that the film as a whole supports, a reading that is
decidedly romantic. The only substantial critical review of Manhatta that was remotely
contemporaneous with its premiere appeared in the October 1921 issue of the journal Arts &
Decoration, where critic Robert Allerton Parker extolled Sheeler and Strand for “giving us, by a
brilliant emphasis of its own way of speaking, the spirit of Manhattan itself, Whitman’s ‘city of
the world,’ Whitman’s ‘Proud and passionate city.’ The city, they discovered, reveals itself most
eloquently in the terms of line, mass, volume.”47 Parker, like Whitman himself, personifies the
metropolis, the masses one with the urban landscape, city and citizens in a mutually beneficial
relationship fueled by “dynamic power and restless energy.”48 This is a view shared by Dickran
Tashjian, a professor at the University of California, Irvine who specializes in the American and
European avant-garde. Tashjian writes that Sheeler believed “the modern artist might achieve a
valid expression…through paying heed to the contemporary environment shaped by
technology.”49 For Tashjian, the Whitman intertitles further this end; he notes, “Although
46
Hammen, “Sheeler and Strand’s “Manhatta”: A Neglected Masterpiece,” 7.
Robert Allerton Parker, “The Art of the Camera: An Experimental ‘Movie,’” Arts & Decoration 15, no. 6
(October, 1921): 369.
48
Ibid., 369.
49
Dickran Tashjian, Skyscraper Primitives – Dada and the American Avant-Garde, 1910-1925 (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 2005): 223.
47
15
occasionally obtrusive, Whitman’s lines serve…to underscore the film’s affirmative mood,”
celebrating the integration of human beings and the modern cityscape.50
Manhatta continues to provoke these opposing interpretations because neither is wholly
correct. Despite the experimental cinematography and the lyrical poetry, both imagery and
intertitles are simultaneously modernist and romantic. Mark Rawlinson, a professor of literature
at the University of Leicester, explains that the film’s portrayal of the monolithic, impersonal
city is more “human” than it might first appear, since Sheeler and Strand’s “depictions of the
machine and the products of the machine age [also] capture the hidden imaginative force behind
these objects: the engineer.”51 Similarly, although Sheeler and Strand’s camerawork superficially
appears to lack human touch in its stillness and straight-on objectivity, a number of shots feature
subtle movement, such as the early scene showing the Staten Island Ferry, which has “an
uncanny reality” due to the camera’s motion mirroring the “slight rocking quality and forward
progression that a ferry entering that berth would have” (1:33-1:36).52 This, along with variations
in the length and frequency of cuts, gives Manhatta a subtle humanity at odds with the apparent
impersonality of the cinematography.
Conversely, the Whitman titles are more alienating than they superficially seem. While
Whitman’s verses can be read as a celebration of human accomplishment, his words also imply
that the city can exist independently of mankind. One such example is the intertitle “The building
of cities – the shovel, the great derrick, the wall scaffold, the work of walls and ceilings” (3:15).
Here, Whitman celebrates “walls and ceilings” as products of mankind’s ingenuity. He also
implies, however, that human beings require inhumanly large machines like “the shovel” and
50
Ibid., 221.
Mark Rawlinson, Charles Sheeler – Modernism, Precisionism, and the Borders of Abstraction (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2007), 64.
52
Hammen, “Sheeler and Strand’s “Manhatta”: A Neglected Masterpiece,” 6-7.
51
16
“the great derrick” to construct the buildings, and that moreover, the “walls and ceilings” are
capable of doing the “work” of standing – against the natural forces that would pull them down –
by themselves, absent human input. Thus, mankind is rendered unnecessary, a sentiment that is a
far cry from romantic. By the film’s concluding intertitle, which reads “Gorgeous clouds of
sunset! Drench with your splendor me or the men and women generations after me” (10:00),
Whitman’s words feel strangely hollow. His call for a unity between urbanites and their
surroundings is disquieting in the wake of poetry that has removed human beings from the urban
landscape, replacing them with mammoth machinery and self-sustaining structures.
The dualistic modernism and romanticism of the cinematography and intertitles of
Manhatta shows that, contrary to critical commentaries, the film and the poetry do not contradict
each other. In a larger sense, both imply a desire for a unity of man and the urban landscape
while remaining cognizant of what makes realizing this desire difficult: the seeminglyinsurmountable divide between city-dwellers and the monolithic concrete and steel structures
around them. Horak explains that Manhatta yearns “for a reunification with nature” not yet
achieved. 53 As a result, the film consistently “inscribe[s] technology, urbanization, and
industrialization in mass society with naturalistic metaphors” such as the closing image of the
sunset and its associated fragment of Whitman, both of which are simultaneously optimistic and
discomforting in light of the material seen before (10:00-10:28).54 The cinematography and the
intertitles together exemplify this tension throughout, and as a result, scholars privileging either a
modernist or a romantic reading do not do the film’s core ambiguities justice; Manhatta is both.
Corbett seems to capture this sentiment most effectively, then, when he writes that “the awkward
wrestling in the scholarly literature with the question whether Sheeler [and by extension, Strand]
53
54
Horak, “Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta,” 280.
Ibid., 280.
17
was or was not in favour of modern life and the ‘machine age’ [has] no straightforward answer
because neither option is true: Sheeler did not know and could not say.”55 Manhatta, in short, is
alienating in its depiction of formless masses of people dwarfed by the structures around them
and optimistic in its hope for a unity, yet to be realized, between nature and machine, engineer
and structure, filmmaker and camera.
5. Musical Accompaniments for Manhatta
Manhatta’s unresolvable ambiguity establishes that artistically, it operates on a level far
beyond that of a run-of-the-mill “scenic” picture. And yet, musical accompaniments for the film
from 1921 to the present day have not engaged satisfactorily with the questions provoked by
Sheeler and Strand’s work. Hugo Riesenfeld’s choice to pair the film with popular tunes as its
premiere implies that he was selecting music on the basis of mass appeal as opposed to
appropriateness as an accompaniment to Manhatta. His choices were popular with the audience,
judging from Underhill’s note in the New York Tribune that a number of spectators began
singing along with the tunes during the premiere, but are remarkably unsuitable to the carefully
constructed pacing and complex meaning of Manhatta. The songs also distract from the film
itself, as the audience’s response to the music, rather than the picture, shows. When Manhatta
was screened again in Paris in 1922 at the behest of Sheeler’s friend Marcel Duchamp, it was
accompanied by the music of Erik Satie.56 It is not known which Satie pieces were played, but,
as established above, classical-type pieces were frequently used to accompany “scenic” films.
While Satie’s music may have worked better for Manhatta than that of Tchaikovsky or
Mendelssohn, it likely still did not fit with what was onscreen, as the slow tempi and echoic
55
56
Corbett, “The Problematic Past in the Work of Charles Sheeler, 1917-1927,” 580.
Tashjian, Skyscraper Primitives, 222.
18
timbres that characterize Satie’s music lack the pulse embedded within Manhatta’s images of
human beings in motion, as well as Sheeler and Strand’s rapid cuts from scene to scene.
In the nine decades since 1922, few composers have tackled the project of scoring
Manhatta. The most noteworthy soundtracks for the film written in the 21st century are those of
Michael Nyman (2003) and Donald Sosin (2008). Like much of the critical commentary that
exists on Manhatta, however, these composers have taken clear stances on the “message” of
Sheeler and Strand’s work that seem out of step with the film’s vagueness. Nyman (b. 1944), a
British composer famous for his concert music as well as film scores such as The Piano (1993),
wrote a soundtrack for Manhatta that exists in several instrumentations, including one performed
by the Bang on a Can All-Stars.57 The only publically available complete recording, however, is
a transcription for three pianos – two prerecorded and one live – performed by Nyman in San
Francisco in 2005.58
Nyman’s music features a near-constant pulse under a series of repeated melodic cells
that seem almost jocular in their syncopation. This texture persists throughout Manhatta,
accompanying the film’s celebratory and alienating moments alike, and thus does not
acknowledge the tension between romanticism and modernism present in Sheeler and Strand’s
work. Nyman’s erasure of meaning suggests a postmodernist approach, or the belief that “no
orthodoxy can be adopted without self-consciousness and irony because all traditions seem to
57
The Bang on a Can All-Stars (formed in 1992) is a sextet consisting of violoncello, contrabass, piano, percussion,
guitars, and clarinets that is sponsored by the Bang on a Can Festival, an annual contemporary music festival that
takes place in the summer and is organized by the Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art.
58
Michael Nyman, perf., Manhatta, by Michael Nyman, 2005, MP3, https://archive.org/details/MNyman
ManhattaOM11. This performance was not conducted alongside the film and is 30 seconds longer than Posner’s
restoration of Manhatta, which is itself nearly a minute longer than the pre-restored version. As such, I can only
offer limited commentary on Nyman’s synchronization of music and film, aided by the 4-minute-long sample of the
score performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars with a projection of the film, available at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb2AjEbf9ss.
19
have some validity.”59 This self-conscious irony is underscored by the brisk tempo of Nyman’s
score, which never abates, and seems remarkably inappropriate paired with scenes showing the
Trinity Church graveyard (2:13), the construction workers precariously balanced atop bare
girders (3:54), the smoke slowly rising from rooftop chimneys (5:01), and the peaceful sunset at
the conclusion (10:00). Throughout these moments, the music relentlessly pushes viewers
through Manhatta without pause, a sardonic repudiation of the complexities of the film.
Nyman’s postmodernist reading puts his soundtrack in communication with what Juan A.
Suárez, a professor of American Studies at the University of Murcia, calls the proto-post
modernism of Manhatta itself: “A close look at…Manhatta – reveals…a mongrel practice that
combines traditionalism and innovation, abstraction and figurativeness, romanticism and
antiromanticism, the cult of technology and that of nature…[the film] anticipates the eclecticism
and popular savvy routinely attributed to postmodernism.”60 Nyman’s score adds another layer to
this postmodernism, rendering all the nuances of Sheeler and Strand’s work humorously flat: the
rhythm of life is relentless, and people will continue on their distracted way, so why contemplate
the relationship between city and nature, man and machine at all? In disavowing the
philosophical quandaries raised by Manhatta, Nyman musically calls its very status as a work of
art into question. This does not make it an ineffective score; as Suárez demonstrates, Manhatta
itself anticipates some of the tenants of postmodernism, and Nyman places his own music in
conversation with this argument. With that said, Nyman also does not engage directly with the
ambiguities of Manhatta; rather, his music provides an additional layer of bewilderment that
makes these ambiguities irrelevant.
59
Jann Passler, "Postmodernism," Oxford Music Online, 10 Apr. 2018, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/view/
10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040721.
60
Juan A. Suárez, “City Space, Technology, Popular Culture: The Modernism of Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s
Manhatta,” Journal of American Studies 36, no. 1 (April 2002), 90.
20
Donald Sosin (b. 1951), an American pianist and composer who specializes in music for
silent cinema, composed an orchestral soundtrack for the film to accompany its release at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2008 following Bruce Posner’s extensive
restoration of the dupe negative. It was later recorded by the Empire Chamber Orchestra under
David Buosso.61 The harmonic language and orchestral timbre of Sosin’s writing resembles that
of Aaron Copland’s “Americana” period, with lush string lines and pentatonic melodies
reminiscent of the first movement of Copland’s 3rd Symphony, among other works. This
optimism hearkens back to Parker’s laudatory review of Manhatta as “awakening and kindling
our interest in that neglected beauty that crowds in upon us from all sides, and through which too
many Americans walk with blind and unseeing eyes.”62 And yet, while recognizing that portions
of the film – like the Staten Island Ferry scene – have what Hammen calls a “proud and resolute”
character, Sosin does not explore the darker questions of alienation between man and modernity
that are unavoidable when considering Manhatta. Sosin’s music is indeed “proud and resolute”
as the ferry approaches (1:43 in the recording, 1:12 in the film), featuring syncopated piano
chords outlining an A major triad that punctuate the slow-moving rhythms of the music heard
previously. This faster tempo persists into the scene of Trinity Church graveyard, however (2:46
in the recording, 2:13 in the film), even though within the scene, as Hammen notes, “passersby
near [the] cemetery are turned into walking counterparts of the gravestones,” a marked shift in
tone from that of commuters vivaciously disembarking the ferry moments before.63 Although
61
Manhatta, cond. David Bousso, by Donald Sosin, Empire Chamber Orchestra, 2015, MP3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOEnd8clM0A. The Empire Chamber Orchestra performed Sosin’s score
without Manhatta, again making it difficult to provide specific commentary on the links between the soundtrack and
the film. However, there is a 2-minute sample of the score synced to Manhatta publically available, which allowed
me to see where certain portions of Sosin’s music align with the film. The sample can be viewed at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhipOUaGIXU.
62
Parker, “The Art of the Camera,” 369.
63
Hammen, “Sheeler and Strand’s “Manhatta”: A Neglected Masterpiece,” 7. Also see fig. 8.
21
Sosin’s music belatedly slows down in the middle of the shot, he shies away from darker
orchestral textures, and the rhythm picks back up as soon as the movie cuts to pedestrians on
Wall Street, as if the graveyard scene never happened (3:06 in the recording, 2:28 in the film).
Similarly, Sosin orchestrates the scenes of skyscrapers (3:12 in the recording, 2:44 in the
film) with high strings that echo the height of the buildings onscreen, but when the film shifts to
the shots featuring construction workers, Sosin builds music around broken B major triads
played in the low strings that do not engage with the darker side of the relationship between
citizen and city (4:10 in the recording, 3:45 in the film). As Corbett states, within Manhatta,
“People almost never appear, and when they do [as in this scene] […] they do so at a distance,
minute figures servicing machinery or moving anonymously against the camera’s remote
perspectives,” heightening the sense of distance between man and machine.64 All of this is to say
that Sosin’s score highlights the optimism of Manhatta without exploring its bleakness. This
does not make Sosin’s work in any way inferior; he merely adopts an interpretive perspective he
shares with Parker and Tashjian: that Manhatta tends toward positiveness, suggesting a unity of
man and city that these critics believe is continually reinforced by Whitman’s poetry on the
intertitles. In not acknowledging the ambiguities in the cinematography and the poetry that
challenge his interpretation, however, Sosin falls prey to the same shortcoming as Nyman, even
though the composers have markedly different musical aesthetics.
6. Open Voices: A New Musical Interpretation
In composing Open Voices, my piano trio score for Manhatta, I sought to engage with the
aforementioned tensions in the film while simultaneously using musical language that brings it
64
Corbett, “The Problematic Past in the Work of Charles Sheeler, 1917-1927,” 561.
22
into the 21st century, provoking questions about the similarities between Sheeler and Strand’s
time and the present day. To this end, I chose to write for piano trio – perhaps the most orthodox
of chamber ensembles besides the string quartet – but attempted to use dissonant harmonies and
extended techniques to underscore how the ambiguities of the city, and by extension, the modern
world, explored by Sheeler and Strand remain relevant. Using a piano trio to perform
experimental techniques and harmonic dissonances also recalls the “high culture” of classical
music scores for “scenic” films in the 1920s while constantly questioning the idealism of such
music, echoing the complex relationship between modernity and romanticism in Manhatta.
Finally, I chose a piano trio over a string quartet due to the piano’s ability to play hammering,
percussive rhythms, an effect I saw as critical to capturing the energy of certain portions of the
film. In searching for a trio to record the work, I selected the New York City-based Longleash
Trio; Longleash is committed to exploring new sounds and textures with the piano trio, upending
listeners’ expectations as to the traditional nature of the ensemble.65 Consequently, they seemed
to me to be ideal candidates for musically evoking the complex meaning of Manhatta.
Hammen notes two ways in which Manhatta speaks to modern audiences, to which I
propose adding a third, all of which are in my eyes interesting to consider. The crowds of people
moving along the streets and standing on the ferry “can be seen, depending upon one’s
viewpoint, as being a terrifying glimpse of men reduced to automations by the enslavement of
capitalism, or as having the rigor and precision of a victorious army.”66 Manhatta as a whole
celebrates human labor as the force behind the great structures on screen (both in terms of
65
The Longleash Trio consists of violinist Pala Garcia, cellist John Popham, and pianist Renate Rohlfing, and is
“inspired by new music with unusual sonic beauty, an inventive streak, and compelling cultural relevancy.” The trio
has been praised by critics for “navigating an incredible breadth of musical styles with technical expertise and
expressive innovation” (from http://longleashtrio.com/about/longleash).
66
Hammen, “Sheeler and Strand’s “Manhatta”: A Neglected Masterpiece,” 7.
23
physical building and, as Rawlinson argues, engineering and design) while at the same time
underscoring the oppressive disconnect between the microscopic workers and the massive
buildings they build; the machines they use are impersonal, the fruit of their labor is inhuman in
its scale.67 As we witness the increasing automation of labor and, consequently, a widening
income gap between society’s richest and poorest members, these questions remain important to
contemplate in the present day and age.
The film also speaks to modern environmentalist concerns: Hammen explains that in
1921 “the presence of smoke in almost every sequence of Manhatta was seen as a virile sign of
progress, [but] it now has negative connotations: poisoned air and the dangers of industry run
rampant.”68 Duchamp recognized the omnipresence of smoke when he screened Manhatta in
Paris, renaming the film Fumée de New York, or The Smoke of New York.69 It is particularly
pervasive from 4:33 to 5:30 in a series of shots of rooftops and chimneys, as well as the scenes
showing trains from 6:10 to 6:46. Smoke also permeates the views of ships in the New York
harbor from 6:52 to 8:25. In a ten-minute film, then, smoke clouds more than a third of the shots,
making it a powerful motif, simultaneously indicative of industry and pollution. Again, this
imagery provokes questions that continue to be pertinent, with the Trump administration’s
systematic rollback of environmental protections in lieu of coal-friendly energy policies.
One final way in which I see Manhatta as being in conversation with modern day
discourse is less obvious: Whitman’s poem “Mannahatta” celebrates “immigrants arriving,
fifteen or twenty-thousand a week” as part of the “million people – manners free and superb”
who comprise the population of New York.70 Manhatta echoes this concern in the images of
67
See fig. 9.
Ibid., 7.
69
See fig. 10.
70
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1900): 320.
68
24
ships that populate its latter half: specifically, the passenger liner RMS Aquitania, arriving in the
New York harbor (7:30).71 As in the rest of the film, the few glimpses Sheeler and Strand
provide of people on the Aquitania’s deck emphasize their collective ant-like nature compared to
the large ship, but the scene has a subtext: commonly-held hopes and dreams of immigrants
approaching New York City, as well as xenophobic fears targeting racial and ethnic groups as a
whole that the immigrants will inevitably face. Anti-immigrant legislation existed in Sheeler and
Strand’s time in the form of the Naturalization Act of 1906 and it continues to exist in the present
day with Donald Trump’s so-called “Muslim Ban,” underscored by his hostile rhetoric towards
illegal aliens in general. The obscure images of travelers on the deck of the Aquitania remind the
viewer, then, of immigrants’ aspirations while also hinting at nativist sentiments that will likely
affect those immigrants’ lives once they arrive in the city.
Although I am sure there are many others, I looked to these three ambiguities embodied
within the city’s relationship to human beings – mechanized labor, environmentalism, and
immigration – as I wrote Open Voices, seeing them as the most profound ways in which
Manhatta remains relevant in the 21st century. The title of my composition is itself a phrase from
Whitman’s “Mannahatta” that emphasizes the ambivalence of the film towards these questions:
Manhatta is open to any and all voices, each lending their own interpretation to Sheeler and
Strand’s work. In planning Open Voices, I drew inspiration from one of Horak’s observations:
that Manhatta can be divided into four distinct parts. He writes:
The first movement begins with a camera approaching Manhattan from the deck of the
Staten Island Ferry, followed by a sequence involving commuters leaving the ferry and
dispersing into the streets of the city. The second movement centers on the construction
of skyscrapers and their architecture. Images of modern modes of transportation,
specifically railroads and steamships, compose the third movement. Finally, the fourth
movement returns to lower Broadway and images of the Hudson River.72
71
72
See fig. 11.
Horak, “Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta,” 277.
25
I found Horak’s divisions to be insightful and follow them in the overall structure of my score.
The first part of Open Voices features a fast, energetic series of notes that begin quietly
and build to the scene of the Staten Island Ferry and the release of commuters into the city. From
the first notes, the music is ambiguous, the F ostinato played by the piano immediately rendered
dissonant by a G-flat in the second measure. The overall tone of the music is nevertheless
optimistic, however, as the film has just begun and has yet to interrogate the tension between
modernism and romanticism that will come to characterize it. Open Voices expands at m. 17
(0:39), our first view of lower Manhattan from the deck of the Staten Island Ferry. When the
scene shifts to the ferry approaching the dock at m. 26 (1:00), the texture thins out; the violin
moves up an octave and the piano ceases playing low octaves, creating a feeling of weightless
anticipation that echoes the eagerness of the commuters who fill the boat to continue onwards to
their destination. Again, the music is subtly darkened by slightly dissonant harmonic choices,
such as the low E-natural octave played by the piano in m. 26 (1:00), that disrupt harmonic
material largely centered around A-flat major triads and sevenths. Slightly later, A-naturals in the
violin part in mm. 36 and 42 feel similarly out of place in the otherwise consonant musical
texture, but quickly resolve, creating a sense of release as the throng of people hurry off the boat
in m. 44 (1:43) and the violin switches to playing quick sixteenth-notes, musically illustrating the
frenetic movement of the crowd. The dissonance prominently returns, however, when we see the
Trinity Graveyard (m. 56, 2:12). This reminder of human mortality, occurring on the heels of
shots of commuters mindlessly traversing the streets, is one of the first truly ambiguous moments
of Manhatta. I accompany this increasingly bleak imagery with glissandi and sul ponticello
indications in the strings, claustrophobic intervals such as minor seconds in the piano part, and a
slowing tempo that casts a shadow on the image of commuters walking down Wall Street.
26
The second section begins at the placard “High growths of iron, slender, strong,
splendidly uprising toward clear skies” and builds on the dissonance of the music that
accompanied the shots of Trinity Graveyard (m. 67, 2:38). Whitman’s poetry is simultaneously
optimistic and disconcerting; Whitman anthropomorphizes the inanimate buildings as the result
of human-like “growth,” celebrating them as a product of mankind’s construction but also
implying that they can stand on their own once “grown,” diminishing the ongoing role of their
human “parents.” The music is thus slow and pensive, again featuring claustrophobic cluster
chords (for example, in m. 72 of the piano part) that echo the anxiety one might feel at the
prospect of being erased by modernity. As the camera pans downward to reveal the expansive
skyline of the city, the cello performs a “seagull” glissando (m. 71, 2:51), giving the music a
sense of vertigo that evokes the massive height and scale of the buildings that populate New
York.
Open Voices grows even more dissonant, with additional intervals of a second in the
piano chords, at the placard “The building of cities – the shovel, the great derrick, the wall
scaffold, the work of walls and ceilings” (m. 79, 3:16). Here, as mentioned before, Whitman
emphasizes that human beings require inhumanly large tools to construct the city, and that
moreover, the “walls and ceilings” do not need mankind’s help in facing the natural forces that
would tear them down. As construction workers balance perilously on steel beams, the music,
too, seems to float precariously in midair, the workers’ positions as agents of construction
challenged by the machines they operate.73 Throughout this section, the cello interjects with
harmonic glissandi that have a vaguely metallic sound (for example, in mm. 67 and 88), recalling
the machinery present in the film. The music shifts to a more hopeful sound centered around a C
73
See fig. 12.
27
major third alternating with an F-sharp in m. 91 (4:01), however, recognizing that the poetry also
celebrates the buildings as a product of human achievement. The skyscrapers are not wholly
alienating, then, recalling Rawlinson’s argument that such images also serve to remind viewers
of the engineers behind the urban landscape. The music of awe and wonder we may feel toward
the buildings does not last, however; I introduce an anxious, percussive jeté in the cello in m. 105
(4:55) where we see vaguely ominous smoke rising from the uneven rooftops and polluting the
skies, but the texture as a whole remains slow and thin, filled with string pizzicati and a quiet
ostinato F-sharp in the piano, a musical embodiment of the weightless white billows. By 5:30,
the score has slowed down to a near stop as the smoke dissipates into the sky above, preparing us
for the next movement.
The placard “City of hurried and sparkling waters, city of nested bays” indicates the start
of the third “movement” (m. 112, 5:30). Here, I bring back the rhythm and texture of the first
section in a more agitated fashion (m. 125, for example, is a quasi-recapitulation of m. 17, but
with more minor chords and dissonances). I see the third portion of Manhatta as the most
tension-filled, since it simultaneously touches upon the labor that goes into seamanship and rail
building, the environmental effects of train and ship smoke, and the byproduct of developed
transportation networks: immigration. The music in its energy expresses the progress symbolized
by these modes of transportation, but also reflects the various sorts of anxiety they might
provoke. It grows especially dissonant at the placard “This world all spanned with iron rails,”
with the piano quickly oscillating between a single D-natural and tritone chords built on C (m.
135, 6:28) while the violin plays sixteenth notes in paired slurs that resemble the chugging sound
of the steam engines onscreen (see mm. 136-142). Whitman’s words here conjure images of both
rapid, efficient train transportation and restrictive shackles around the planet itself, justifying the
28
musical discord played over a relentless rhythm. Then, when Manhatta shifts to “lines of
steamships threading every sea,” the music hurtles towards a climax, abruptly moving to a tonal
center of D-flat to represent the shift from trains to ships at m. 143 (6:48). As the ships approach
the shore and their smoke billows into the atmosphere, Open Voices slowly builds from a low Dflat in the piano (m. 143) to a high C in the cello (m. 153) only to shrink back to the low D-flat in
m. 154 and crescendo once more, this time culminating in a climactic cluster chord, played by
the piano, in m. 165 (7:42). Throughout this buildup, the cello and violin exchange the
disquieting jeté sounds that were linked to smoke in the previous section. These textures, and –
the repeated crescendos present within this section as a whole – are a musical representation of
how all the tensions present in the material seen before culminate in this part of Manhatta.
Open Voices abruptly slams to a halt at the start of the fourth “movement,” however,
which commences at “shapes of the bridges, vast frameworks, girders, arches” (m. 184, 8:31).
Here, the music returns to the dissonant, pensive, and slow material of the second segment. The
images of motion and transportation are gone, and the film once again features stationary
structures towering over miniscule pedestrians: in this case, the Brooklyn Bridge, dramatically
shot head-on.74 When the film cuts to a bird’s eye view of the New York harbor, the piano
musically represents the ripples on the surface of the water with rolled chords (for example, in m.
190, or 8:52 in the film) and the violin echoes the height of the shot with high harmonics,
suggesting a sense of vertigo similar to that of the “seagull” glissando that accompanied the
second section’s shots of tall buildings (mm. 189-194). The dissonance is again tempered with
optimism as the day approaches dusk, however; here, Whitman extolls the beauty of the sunset,
and the film nears its conclusion. The music of wonder and awe first played in m. 91 (a C major
74
See fig. 13.
29
third oscillating with an F-sharp in the piano) returns once more in m. 202 (9:17), and as Open
Voices increases in tempo ever-so-slightly, the strings rise (see mm. 218-227), expressing a faint
glimmer of hope for the eventual unity, not yet realized, of human beings and their city. As such,
the harmonic language remains vaguely dissonant; like Manhatta, the score ends on a tonally
ambiguous note, with the cello jeté returning one last time (m. 232, 10:32) to remind the viewer
that a wholly satisfactory resolution to the film, and the score, is impossible.
Despite Horak’s claim that “The striking similarity between the first and fourth
movements [of Manhatta] implies that some kind of narrative closure may have been intended,”
I chose to structure the first and third and second and fourth parts of Open Voices in parallel, as
opposed to cycling back to the opening material during the film’s final section.75 This was my
way of musically representing the feeling, after viewing the film, that despite the trajectory of
morning to night and of commuting to work and returning home, Manhatta hardly feels cyclical.
Horak notes that “Manhatta…merely approaches closure […] This harmonious subtext is
mitigated by and in conflict with the film’s overall modernist design, its oblique and disorienting
camera angles, its monolithic perspectives of urban architecture, and its dynamic juxtaposition of
movement, light, and shadow.” The various sections of Open Voices do indeed interact with each
other, but they do so in a way that is not wholly in accordance with the cyclic nature of the film’s
progression from sunrise to sundown, an acknowledgement that even though days come and go,
the divisions between worker and skyscraper, progress and pollution, immigrant and xenophobe,
remain. The muffled, concealed hope embedded within the musical language of the conclusion
also indicates, however, that we can bridge this gap between humanity and city, difficult as it
may be to do so, a sentiment I believe is echoed in Sheeler and Strand’s work.
75
Ibid., 277.
30
I draw my technique of soundtrack composing from that of Max Steiner and the so-called
“classical” film scoring model. While developed around ten years after Manhatta was made and
specifically intended for sound film, this technique carries a unique communicative power that
continues to influence film composers in the modern era. Steiner sought to “scatter dramatically
pertinent sync points throughout [the film] to stick his music to the action, whether physical,
emotional or dramatic.”76 As a result, Steiner’s scores featured limited points of synchronization
between music and action onscreen at key moments. Between these “sync points,” he wrote
music that attempted to emotionally evoke the action onscreen. I, too, scattered “sync points”
throughout Open Voices: for example, when the gates to the Staten Island Ferry open and the
commuters rush out, the musical texture changes (m. 44, 1:43), and when workers hammer into
rock during the construction scenes that populate the second portion of the film, the piano
mirrors the motion of the sledgehammer by hitting a low C repeatedly (mm. 81-84, 3:27-3:37). I
also endeavored to musically acknowledge particularly important cuts, such as the shift from a
high shot of Trinity Graveyard to a street-level view of cars and trolleys in the fourth section of
the film, which I highlighted with a high G in the piano that punctuates the otherwise sedate
musical material (m. 217, 9:56). My goal in employing this technique was to bind the music to
the picture while not distracting the viewer with excessive “sync points” that are overly
descriptive of the events onscreen. During my recording session with Longleash, I employed a
click track to ensure that these moments of synchronization lined up with their associated filmic
material.
76
James Buhler and David Neumeyer, “Music and the Ontology of Sound Film: The Classical Hollywood System,”
in The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer (London: Oxford University Press, 2013), 19.
31
7. Concluding Thoughts
Manhatta unfairly fell through the cracks of history, suffering a fate that befell numerous
less sophisticated “scenic” films, but one that was undeserved for such a rich work created by
two key figures in the world of 20th century American art. And yet, catalyzed by Bruce Posner’s
impressive restoration and the Museum of Modern Art’s 2008 exhibition, Manhatta has found
new life in the 21st century, drawing the attention of spectators, critics, and respected composers
alike. As an aspiring film composer trained in classical piano and composition, I was eager to use
this honors project to synthesize my passions for both art and movie music in a silent film score,
a medium which would allow me to write a piece unhampered by any diegetic sound within the
film. Composing for silent film would also force me, however, to remain cognizant of the ways
in which my music could elevate the material onscreen as opposed to distracting from it, a
crucial skill for any composer of soundtracks to possess. Although I stumbled upon Manhatta by
chance, I was immediately struck by its representation of New York as a simultaneously
welcoming and alienating place, a sentiment with which I intimately empathize after having
lived in Manhattan for four years. After watching Manhatta through without music, I
immediately knew that I had to score it.
As I researched Manhatta in the weeks following my decision to use it for my honors
project, I was shocked at how many of its ambiguities remain relevant in the modern era –
specifically those of man’s relationship to mechanized labor, the environmental toll of
industrialization, and the continued presence of and debates over immigrants coming to
American cities. I was also disappointed that scores composed for the film did not seriously
engage with these ambiguities. Early screenings supplied Manhatta with contemporaneous
popular or classical music. Later, Michael Nyman and Donald Sosin took clear perspectives on
32
the film’s ostensible message, which is at odds with the film’s equivocal view of
industrialization and its dualistic exploration of romantic and modernist ideals. Open Voices is
my response to these concerns, an effort to harness my dual passions for concert and film music
in order to bring Manhatta into the 21st century so that a new generation of spectators can
appreciate and discuss its many complexities. Silent film as a whole receives little popular
attention, and early avant-garde film receives even less, but it is my hope that Open Voices will
help to intensify the recent surge of interest in this formerly forgotten gem of cinematic history.
33
Appendix
Fig. 1: Charles Sheeler, Church Street El, 1920, oil on canvas, Cleveland, OH,
Cleveland Museum of Art.
Fig. 2: Paul Strand, Wall Street, 1915, platinum palladium print, New York, NY,
Whitney Museum of American Art
34
Fig. 3: Paul Strand, The Docks, 1922, gelatin silver print, Washington, D.C., National Gallery
of Art.
35
Fig. 4: Elevated train from Manhatta. Cf. Church Street El, above. This and all
following figures are taken from Manhatta, dir. Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand
(New York: Anthology Film Archives / Image Entertainment, 1997), DVD.
Fig. 5: Shot of Wall Street from Manhatta. Cf. Wall Street, above.
36
Fig. 6: Second intertitle from Manhatta – an example of Whitman’s
personification of the city.
Fig. 7: Ant-like people overshadowed by buildings in Manhatta.
37
Fig. 8: Trinity Church graveyard in Manhatta.
Fig. 9: Worker and machine in Manhatta – an exploration of benefits and pitfalls
to the mechanization of labor.
38
Fig. 10: One of many instances of smoke rising in Manhatta – an image that
brings to mind modern environmentalist concerns.
Fig. 11: The RMS Aquitania in Manhatta, provoking questions of immigration
and the immigrant’s experience in America.
39
Fig. 12: A construction worker precariously perched on a steel girder in
Manhatta.
Fig. 13: Shot of the Brooklyn Bridge that opens the fourth “movement” of
Manhatta.
40
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