Knowing that musical accompaniment for Hitchcock's The Pleasure Garden was played by Stephen Horne alone, I was puzzled to no end Sunday evening in the Castro Theater when I heard a flute join the piano, to be followed by a piano-accordion duet. I couldn't possibly tell in the dark, but Horne confirmed later that he was playing the instruments simultaneously.
"There is a way to play the accordion with one hand and the piano with the other," he explained, "and five notes on the flute can also be played using one hand."
Consider that playing multiple instruments (including the glockenspiel and planning to add theramin — "a very difficult instrument") is the least of the magic Horne performs days after day. (During two days of the "Hitchcock-9" festival weekend, he played music for four different films.)
Going around the world, from his London home-base to Italy's famed Pordenone Giornate del Cinema Muto, Bologna's Festival di Cinema Ritrovato, and special events in Cannes, Horne plays accompaniment for silent film. He always plays without a score, improvising while watching the screen, and usually without light over the keyboard, "playing by touch." And also playing the flute, accordion, etc.
At one point, during a suspenseful ghost scene of The Pleasure Garden in the Castro, Horne even provided some heavy-breathing special effects on the accordion, using the bellows without keys.
Born in Essex, Horne received a music degree from Nottingham, and played piano in pubs and for ballet school classes and rehearsals (something he still does). Silent movies entered his life with a bang almost 30 years ago. (I questioned that because he looks late 30-ish/early 40-ish, but he says he turns 50 in October.)
A woman running a small film society in London asked Horne to play for a screening in Essex of Carl Theodor Dreyer's famed 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc — and there was only one reel available to show to Horne before the screening. So there he was, his first silent-film gig, for a great, difficult film he had not seen before the event — a kind of of triple improvisation.
He says today that he regards Joan of Arc as a great challenge, and he managed the music back then "only because I didn't know what I was doing."
He got into silents accompaniment in a big way when getting assignments for the British Film Institute's frequent screenings of old classics, something he is still doing.
This is the seventh year for Horne's San Francisco performances, and he is returning this summer to play music in the Castro for SFSFF's Augusto Genina's 1930 Prix de Beauté (July 18), Miles Mander's 1928 The First Born (July 19), John Canemaker's biography of Winsor McCay (July 20), Boris Barnet's 1928 The House on Trubnaya Square (July 20), and Emory Johnson's 1925 The Last Edition (July 21) — five films in four days.
At times, Horne is commissioned to write, perform, and record a score. He did so for some BFI restorations, using a quintet; himself playing piano, flute, and accordion, others playing oboe, oboe d' amore, fiddle, viola, lever harp, and percussion.
As he explained before the Hitchcock festival, his accompaniments are "a combination of planned improvisation and compositional elements — what I like to call an improvised score."
His most experimental score came with Downhill, a film which Horne characterizes, rightly, as "a gloriously strange combination of the kitsch, ridiculous, and downright weird."