Movies and music are inextricably linked — think Star Wars, or Psycho, or Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti westerns. Music helps tell the story you’re seeing onscreen.
Even more so with a silent film, in which most dialogue is inferred. Accompanying and dramatizing a silent movie with live, original music is somewhat of a lost art, but Katie Condon is keeping this niche tradition alive.
Condon, an accomplished Twin Cities musician and educator who is also Education Project Manager at Classical MPR, composes and performs the accompaniment for silent films in screenings around the metro area. It’s been the ideal means to meld her love of both art forms.
That love started early, growing up in Watertown, Minnesota, on the far western fringe of the Twin Cities metro area. “I just loved music as a child — I always gravitated toward it, it was always on in the house,” Condon said. She started playing piano in elementary school and took up percussion in middle and high school. But there was another influencing factor.
“My mom owned the video store, so I worked there starting as a young teenager,” Condon said, which fostered her fondness for cinematic scores. “I’d put the monitor on and pick [movies] with good music — that started my love of movies and movie music.”
After earning a piano performance degree from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul and a masters degree in musicology from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, she found herself drawn to the cinema — particularly, the now-defunct Oak Street Cinema, which fed on its proximity to the University of Minnesota campus to concentrate on unconventional programming, including silent films with live scores.
“I remember seeing the late, great Butch Thompson and [A Prairie Home Companion pianist] Rich Dworsky do it, and I just thought, ‘I want to do that, I think I can do that,’ ” Condon said. “I just had a sense it would be something that I could do.”
Fortuitously, her sister was a programmer at Oak Street. “I talked her into letting me try it. [She] did, and that was it.” Condon performed there for the first time in 2006. After taking a roughly 10-year break — “My career was pretty busy, and I had other musical outlets” — she picked it up again. “I kind of reached a point of, where do I want to put my performance and composing energy?”
And it does involve energy. When Condon gets sent a copy of a film, usually several months ahead of a screening, she prepares rigorously and builds up her stamina to be able to play constantly for the entire runtime.
“I’ll watch it as an audience member, a spectator, and usually take notes,” she said. “What I’m looking for is the general tone of the movie, the feel, key characters, and the structure.”
She diagrams the movie into chunks, deciding on a theme or sketch for each section. “I let the scenes play and mess around with some ideas” with her laptop at the piano, she said. For a typical 90- to 120-minute movie, she creates between 8 and 15 musical themes.
“I’ve learned to look for key moments, a dramatic arc, something very specific,” Condon said. “Sometimes I just vamp on a theme; it’s not note for note.” She emphasized that besides playing the music, she keeps her eyes on the screen to make sure the music is synchronized with the action.
“Katie’s scores are incredible,” said Peter Schilling, who runs the “Syncopated Silents” program at Twin Cities-area venues including the Heights Theater in Columbia Heights. “I can’t imagine how long it takes her to compose them, and how many times she watches each film, and individual scenes in each film, to get the score just right.
Condon mainly uses the piano for her scores, but for The Fire Brigade, a 1926 film with two scenes shot in two-color Technicolor, she decided percussion was necessary. “It is an over-the-top melodrama,” Condon explains. “The effects of the hand-colored orange flames, long before color, made it really fun to get to elevate what maybe would have been a forgettable movie otherwise, to capitalize on some of these things that make people take another look.”
“Though I love all of her scores,” Schilling acknowledges, “I was most impressed by the one for The Fire Brigade,” screened in 2022 at the Heights. “I found [the film] pretty mediocre, but I was so stunned by her score — there were two mostly, if not entirely, percussion sections during two tense scenes that totally changed the film.”
Condon also applied this multi-instrument approach to Haxan, a 1922 Scandinavian film that is acknowledged as the first horror movie. “There was an unpleasant torture scene, so too much melody didn’t seem right,” she said. “I used autoharp, just sound effects. I used to do more of that – then I challenged myself to do more on piano.
“I do like bringing in other sounds” than piano, she said. “But you want it not to sound too disjointed, to take too much attention away from the movie. I love the fact that the movie is the main attraction.”
John Moret, a programmer at Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis, recalls a time when piano played a big part in Condon’s performance, although it was an unconventional application of the instrument.
“My first time watching Katie Condon perform was an accompaniment she wrote and performed to a new restoration of Fritz Lang's Destiny,” he said. “It was a stunning experience. The film changes landscapes regularly and Katie had written different themes for each one.
“At one point, I remember her standing up and opening the top cabinet to pluck at the piano strings inside. It was incredible.”
Bringing new life to forgotten films is a particular delight for Condon. “There are some that re-released because they were lost and rediscovered, or represent the advancement of the time,” such as the Technicolor of The Fire Brigade.
And she often finds herself in discovery mode. “Generally, when these movies are offered to me, I don’t know about them in advance,” Condon said. “I know tons about movies from the 1990s, but not very much about silent film as a genre. I’m getting to be exposed to fantastic movies I wouldn’t have known about, and [I’ve] become very attached to characters.”
One such experience occurred at Trylon Cinema last November, when she accompanied 1929’s Pavement Butterfly, starring the iconic Anna May Wong. “She was just magnetic,” Condon said. “I’d never seen one of her movies, but I just loved the challenge of trying to portray her character and everything that happened to her character.”
Audiences respond powerfully to that dedication. “People came out of Katie’s performance [for The Fire Brigade] stunned,” Schilling said. “A few said it was the best silent film they’d ever seen.
“She really goes into the emotion onscreen and matches that with her music.”
Next up for Condon is an action-packed weekend July 25 to 27, playing at both the Heights and Trylon. She’ll accompany three screenings of Get Your Man, from pioneering filmmaker Dorothy Arzner, on July 25 and 26 at the Trylon, and the gender-bending classic Beverly of Graustark on July 27 at the Heights.
“At the Trylon,” Moret says, “we do our best to show cinema in all of its forms and silent films are the foundation that all other films are built on.
“Katie is exceptional at capturing the emotions that are happening in the films. Sometimes, watching a silent film can be a bit like encountering a foreign language, and what Katie does is translate the story and tenor for an audience that might otherwise be kept at arm’s length.”
Event info
What: Katie Condon accompanies Get Your Man (1927), starring Clara Bow and directed by Dorothy Arzner, and Beverly of Graustark (1926), starring Marion Davies.
When and where: Get Your Man, 7 p.m. July 25-26, 3 p.m. July 27, Trylon Cinema, 2820 E. 33rd St., Minneapolis; Beverly of Graustark, 7:30 p.m. July 27, Heights Theater, 3951 Central Ave. NE, Columbia Heights.
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