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Read about this some years ago in some book (Chaplin fan here...) As far as I remember, Chaplin was a talented amateur musician. He did not formally study music and was not the most proficient composer/performer from a technical point of view, but he had a good ear and knew what he wanted and could find his way around a keyboard. It was not just him "humming" tunes and others doing the rest. The scores were his creations, even if he did not personally jot down every single note, and he was correctly listed as "composer".
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Posted: |
Dec 9, 2016 - 10:55 AM
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By: |
SchiffyM
(Member)
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I don't think we'll ever really know. Timothy Brock vigorously defends Chaplin as a musician, others are not so generous. To me, Brock seems maybe a bit oversensitive in his defense sometimes, stating that Chaplin (with his busy schedule) simply didn’t have time to learn to read and write musical notation. That’s fine, and obviously Irving Berlin never learned those things and I would not question his compositional skills. But authorship isn't always black and white. To me, the score for "Modern Times" stands somewhat apart from the rest. It is so detailed in its orchestration, how much of the flavor of the music could Chaplin really be responsible for if he couldn't write it down? “City Lights” is much simpler, more steeped in the tradition of dance hall music (the kind that Chaplin had grown up with), and while that carries through in the later film, the “Modern Times" score is much more intricate and architecturally more sophisticated. Without being able to notate music, could Chaplin really have been able to compose full, orchestrated pieces with counter-melodies? And it is these orchestrations and counter-melodies that make the score work for me. Chaplin's subsequent scores revert more to the music hall sound. Of course, "Modern Times" was orchestrated largely by a very young David Raksin, to whom Chaplin dictated the melodies. The liner notes for the recent recording are, again, very defensive, pointing out that when Raksin returned with the full sheet music and performed it, Chaplin would insist “no oboe here!” or the like. Fair enough. But Chaplin also had a production designer working for him. When he would tell that designer “no door here” or “let’s add a window,” did that make Chaplin the production designer? I would say no, despite his inevitable creative contributions. I have no doubt that Chaplin is, in many ways, the author of his scores. But as with all of film, it’s very collaborative, and I guess I think the liner notes for "Modern Times" protest too much.
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Philip Sainton walked (or "resigned" as some cources say) from the film "A King in New York", after Chaplin wanted to take credit for the score. I presume Chaplin took the credit from whomever was next.
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He came up with the melody for "Smile" at a minumum
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I can't stand any of Chaplin's schmaltzy film scores so I can only assume he did indeed compose all of them
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