Heitor Villa-Lobos, (1887-1959: Brazilian pianist and composer) had a job playing the organ in a silent movie theater.
My husband’s grandfather remembered the silent movies first coming to his village in Belgium: This guy named Bucsan had the first reel in town set up in a room full of chairs. It was a western flick with no plot: a recycled affair of cowboys and Indians galloping in circles around a spinney of trees, put on repeat. Bucsan, poor man, was the proud owner of this new form of entertainment, and the ready-to-be-entertained public expected him to fill his shoes completely by narrating in detail the full of the drama. Bucsan delivered… at first. Then, as the Indians disappeared around the same corner for the sixth time and the repeatedly revived cowboys held their guns ready to shoot the (same) Indians dead for the seventh time, Bucsan wavered. The townspeople demanded he keep up with the story, but he was having a hard time maintaining his personal sense of drama and his imagination flagged. Finally things got ugly. “Bucsan, you lazy lout!!” they shouted. (That saying has since become a family proverb.)
That digression having been consummated, I will say, that Villa-Lobos’s job description would have included inventing dramatic music for the silver screen (or was it still brown?).
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