Jan 25, 2020 2 min read

Fresh from completing a doctoral dissertation on how music was created for silent films a century ago, Washington & Jefferson College associate music professor Kyle Simpson decided to create a couple of his own.

Armed with experience composing orchestral works and music for short films and documentaries, Simpson decided to create scores for “A Trip to Moon” and “Kingdom of the Fairies,” two groundbreaking silent shorts made at the turn of the 20th century by the French moviemaking pioneer Georges Melies. He will be presenting them Saturday with an 18-piece ensemble at the Andrew Carnegie Free Library and Music Hall in Carnegie. It is part of the library’s “Listen Locally” series.

“I really love writing for a larger ensemble,” Simpson said. “There’s just something about writing for a grand orchestra that appeals to me. I love that challenge.”

He also said writing music for movies “really, really appeals to me as a composer.”

“It’s a very unique challenge for a composer,” he said. “It’s really about collaboration. … It has some self-imposed guidelines and structure to it. It’s a unique and specialized challenge I really like.”

Back when the cinema was taking baby steps, composers had to come up with scores for silent films to keep audiences engaged in what was happening on the screen, to complement the images and, perhaps more pressingly, drown out the sounds of the projector and the audience. Charlie Chaplin, one of the most esteemed figures in silent cinema, composed music for his films along with writing and directing them.

“I really admire those early composers,” Simpson said. “A few sounds can add so much beauty and subtlety and complexity to a film.”

There are hints of Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky in Simpson’s scores for the two films, he said, and he counts himself a fan of Ennio Morricone, the composer who has written music for films ranging from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” to “The Hateful Eight.”

Now in his 12th year at W&J, Simpson is also working on a score for an independent film called “Every Night and Every Day,” and a documentary on Pittsburgh’s steel industry.

The concert starts at 7:30 p.m. For additional information or to purchase tickets, go online to carnegiecarnegie.org.