Ludwig van Beethoven, if not exactly a modernist, offers ample fodder for modern artists looking to defend – or expand – their turf. While producing City Lights (1928), Charlie Chaplin responded to the newly popular ‘talkies’ by proclaiming that ‘Moving pictures need sound as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics’ (qtd in Crafton 1999: 296). It might be tempting to retort that Beethoven’s last symphony did have lyrics – and still turned out okay – but taking Chaplin’s maxim seriously is more useful (if less instantly gratifying) than the easy dismissal. Chaplin, who composed the score to City Lights, understood the supple relationship between image and music even in the ‘silent’ picture (which, as film historians repeatedly note, was never truly silent). Music in 1920s film was increasingly tasked with sustaining the narrative development, on-screen action and extra-diegetic affect of films such as City Lights, itself part pantomime and part melodrama (literally, ‘music-drama’). Chaplin’s later score for Modern Times (1936), a sort of semi-talkie, enhanced these tensions: the main love theme, influenced by Puccini’s Tosca and written to narrate the Tramp’s refuge from technology in the arms of sentimental domesticity, attached to the popular imagination two decades later as the popular song ‘Smile’. From operatic melodrama to silent film melodrama to melos without drama, this music was churned through a dialectical factory-wheel to which lyrics added considerable exchange value.

Emerging alongside Chaplin’s melodramatic pantomimes were ‘city-symphonies’ by Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), Walter Ruttmann (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, 1927), Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1927) and Alberto Cavalcanti (Rien que les heures, 1926), as well as avant-garde experiments such as Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique, which features Chaplin (‘Charlot’) in puppet form. Even without the noisy accompaniment of George Antheil’s score, composed and performed independently for pianolas, sirens, electric bells and percussion, the film’s gestures to Chaplin invoke the rhythmic physicality of a ‘mechanical ballet’ and disrupt any pretence to pure formal abstraction. Films had sound, whether they ‘needed’ it or not: the presence of music and speech was not silenced by film but reanimated by it and helped to act on the sensorium in unexpected ways.

This chapter examines how modernist radio and film remediate musical expression, not only leveraging music’s appeals to sentiment but representing music as a media technology in its own right.