Attending a movie about bubonic rats and vampires certainly fits the Halloween moment, but Murnau’s Symphony of Horror is much more than a horror movie. It rather offers some of the most penetrating and artistic depiction of madness ever seen on film. The chance to witness it with Arpeggione Ensemble’s historically informed chamber arrangement of the scoring materials the director himself heard in 1922 comes to Cinema Salem on Sunday, September 21^st  at 2 pm and 8 pm [tickets HERE], to the Majestic Theater in Conway New Hampshire on Thursday, October 11^th  [tickets HERE, and at Lesley University’s Marran Theater in Cambridge on October 30^th at 8 pm tickets HERE

The Ensemble’s clarinetist and impresario for the event Thomas Carroll primes expectations:

Audiences can expect to hear and see Murnau’s Symphony of Horror in a completely new sound and light. I’ve been living with the Hans Erdmann score in my brain for more than two years now, and I was still blown away conducting it in rehearsal for the first time with the film and seeing how much I could play around with the musical material to highlight the action on the screen. There’s also something so vibrant and organic about feeling the vibrations of live music as you’re watching a film. I feel that as a society we’ve been fed packaged and perfected music all our lives, especially when it comes to broadcast media, so listening to live music in cinema where anything can happen really feels like a shock to the system. Lastly and most importantly, I’d say audiences can expect a really good time! It’s such a brilliant film and a beautiful score, and it really does feel like a world premiere every performance. 

We want people to treat these performances as film screenings with live music, rather than concerts with a film element. These silent films are meant to be experienced as completely as possible, and whether that means that we hear gasps from the audience during the staircase scene or hear laughter during the dialog cards in the middle of the second dinner scene, we welcome that kind of audience participation as it heightens the experience. It is also worth noting that the 1922 premiere of the film was held in the Berlin Zoological Garden with guest encouraged to dress in early 19^th-century attire for the event. Prana Film wanted to make the event immersive and encourage audience interaction with the film, and we very much follow in that vein. 

The score Arpeggione is using blends a pastiche of sources. The only published material from the Hans Erdmann score is a keyboard reduction of the various themes and motifs with the designation “Für Film und Schauspiel” but with very clear directions on how each theme was to be played to fit certain moods, and in some cases with instrument suggestions or stops on the organ penned in. Interestingly, Hans Erdmann and Giuseppe Becce, whose music is also borrowed for the score, literally wrote the book on film music in 1927. We’re very fortunate that a digital copy of their Allgemeines Handbuch der Film-Musik is scanned and available through the Library of Congress.  This book has information on how to score a film or improvise a performance of a film, what type of music should be used to play to certain dramatic and emotional moments, and a long list of motifs and excerpts that could be used in various situations, so I learned a lot poring through the book and getting inside Erdmann’s head and then comparing the keyboard reduction of Nosferatu to his own dramatic suggestions. We also consulted a 1995 reconstruction of the score, but very quickly realized that the reconstruction had been written for a large modern orchestra rather than the smaller theater orchestras that would have been in use at the time. There were numerous orchestration issues with instrument choices and an almost complete omission of the Harmonium/Organ which was the primary keyboard instrument of such an ensemble. With that in mind, we peeled back the layers and tried to strip it down to a much more 1920’s sounding ensemble, which means there are a lot more parts being covered on the keyboards in addition to the winds and strings. You might also catch a glimpse of various members of the orchestra doubling on percussion at certain points in the film!

The reed organ we’ll be using for our performances is a 1906 Mason & Hamlin owned by our Harmonium specialist George Wiese. This particular Mason & Hamlin was built to match Theodore Mannborg’s 1903 specifications for the Normalharmonium that were codified in Germany during the International Harmonium Builder’s Conference that year. In keeping with the tradition of early 20^th-century German tastes, suction-wind reed organs were more prevalent than pressure harmoniums, and much of the research points to this type of an instrument being the most common at the time Nosferatu premiered in 1922. We actually just finished recording our first Arpeggione Ensemble CD using this same harmonium. In addition to being an excellent restorer of these instruments, George is also a very thorough music historian and organologist, a trustee for the Estey Organ Museum in Brattleboro, VT, and an incredible performer. He recently co-hosted a harmonium symposium at the Historical Keyboard Society of North America with Artis Wodehouse and is one of the true 21^st-century champions of the instrument [along with Anne Page, whose celebrated recordings of Franck’s L’Organiste on historical instruments can be heard HERE]. 

The rest of our orchestra (flute, 2 clarinets and bass clarinet, string quartet plus bass, piano, harmonium) is performing on equally appropriate instruments and setups that would have been in use in Berlin at the beginning of the 20^th century. The string players are performing on a mixture of gut and steel strings, totally appropriate for the time before orchestras switched to all metal strings later in the century, and the winds are all performing on original instruments from the end of the 19^thh century and beginning of the 20^th. I’m a clarinetist who finds something special about being able to use an instrument from the 1920s to play music of that time period because the instruments do respond differently. The fingerings are slightly different, which opens up a new world of tone color, especially on ‘forked fingerings.’ The mouthpieces are made of wood and not hard rubber like the ones today, so there’s a more lyrical and organic sound that can be colored and shaded more, and the instruments all seem to blend together more easily.

Historical performance draws me in because just like spoken and written language, music has evolved and changed over the years and certain rhetorical elements and stylistic traits have changed dramatically over the centuries. I find that achieving fluency in all of those stylistic eras adds depth to performances where the composer and their musical language are highlighted in addition to the skills of the performer. I find that historical performance allows me to use all of my skills as a musician in a very natural way; as a performer, musicologist, organologist, and composer-arranger. The modern music world has often shoe-horned performers into certain roles and said “this is the right way,” but HP gives me the freedom to ask “Why is it the right way and who says it is” and then the musical exploration begins. We often refer to instructional methods and treatises on performance practice that say “It is not correct to perform in this manner” which at face value is an instruction on how to perform. But if we consider that those treatises were often written in reaction to what was happening around the author at the time, we could infer that in fact many performers were doing the opposite of what the author suggested; this opens up a grey area of interpretation that goes beyond the books. In that grey area some of the most interesting performances live, and in the world of silent film where every new picture was a pioneering experiment in the craft, the nature of discovery associated with HP feels like a perfect fit to bring the sonic world of the 1920s into the present day. 

About the ensemble:

Founded in 2022 by flutist Andrea LeBlanc and clarinetist Thomas Carroll, Arpeggione Ensemble builds community through joyful, accessible, and immersive chamber music performances. Taking inspiration from the 19th Century Mendelssohn Quintette Club of Boston, Arpeggione musicians are a collective of specialists in performing music of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries on historical instruments, both with original instrumentation and in period and newly penned transcriptions of larger works for small ensemble. 

The ensemble also creates new works of performing art with and for our community, presenting 3–4 interdisciplinary programs each season in schools, libraries, senior centers, and public venues throughout the North Shore and beyond. Each performance is an educational encounter, inviting audiences of all ages and abilities into the artistic process.

Arpeggione co-founder and flutist Andrea LeBlanc says, “Accessibility is at the heart of our structure and programming. We collaborate with local and regional partners to ensure our work is responsive to the many ways people engage with music.” Arpeggione’s recent collaborators include the Beverly School for the Deaf, Northshore Education Consortium, Beverly Public Library, Seacoast Science Center, and Manship Artists’ Residency. In 2024–25, Arpeggione offered 28 performances throughout New England and can’t wait to expand our reach even further in the future!

Writer Thomas Carroll, a “sweet and agile” (New York Times) period clarinetist and instrument builder, holds degrees from Oberlin Conservatory, Indiana University, and The Royal Conservatoire of The Hague.