Alloy Orchestra

Alloy Orchestra is a musical ensemble based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, that performs its own accompaniments to silent films of the classic movie era. Percussionists Terry Donahue and Ken Winokur and keyboardist Caleb Sampson founded the group in 1990. After Sampson's death in 1999,http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-musicians/alloy-orchestra-biography the band was joined by keyboardist Roger Miller, better known as the guitarist of post-punk band Mission of Burma.
==History==
Since its first performance on December 31, 1990, in Boston, the Alloy Orchestra has developed an extensive repertoire of music and sounds that it performs during the projection of silent films. Its three musicians use an array of found objects and electronics as well as traditional percussion, wind and keyboard instruments. In 1999 Entertainment Weekly put the ensemble on its "It List" of the 100 most creative people or groupings in the entertainment world. Terry Gross on National Public Radio called the trio "one of the pioneers in composing new music for old movies" and Lloyd Schwartz discussed their recording of scores to a pair of Buster Keaton films: "Most silent movie music just fills the void. Some of it even gets in the way. But the Alloy Orchestra really helps us see what we're watching and often the music, whether driving or fanciful, is worth listening to on its own."National Public Radio: Lloyd Schwartz, "The Alloy Orchestra: Silent Movie Scores," March 16, 2004, accessed June 7, 2010
The ensemble has performed at film festivals and a variety of cultural events worldwide. It also performs on tour throughout the United States at local movie houses such as the Colonial Theater in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, the Oriental Theater, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, and the Rose Theatre, in Port Townsend, Washington. University appearances have included Clark University, Webster University, St. Louis, New York University, Cornell University, and Brown University.
They revise their scores as better and more integral prints of films become available. For instance, they performed a new score to accompany the recently restored version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis at the TCM Classic Movie Festival in April 2010.WBUR: Andrea Sea, "Retro 'Metropolis:' Boston Trio Re-Scores A Sci-Fi Classic," April 23, 2010, accessed June 7, 2010
Alloy also works in collaboration with film archivists and collectors, such as George Eastman House and the British Film Institute, to present audiences with the very best available prints of some of history's greatest films. For example, Alloy acquired its own new print of Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera from the Moscow Film Archive (Gosfilmofond) and wrote its own score based on Vertov's notes for the film’s 1928 premiere. In 1995 the group took that copy of the film on a tour that included performances at the Telluride Film Festival, the Giornate del cinema muto in Pordenone, Italy, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the National Gallery of Art, and the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Finland.
==Recordings==
*Music CDs
**New Music for Silent Films (1994)
**Lonesome: New Music for the Classic Silent Film (1995)
**Silents (1997)
**The General - Original Soundtrack - Buster Keaton (2004)
*Film
**Man with the Movie Camera (1929, soundtrack)
==Notes==
==Sources==
*Independent Film and Video Monthly, vol. 25 (2002), 15ff.
*New York Daily News: Mary Talbot, "Alloy Orchestra's Brand of Heavy Metal," August 9, 1996, accessed June 8, 2010
==External links==
*Alloy Orchestra
*eNotes
*Roger Clark Miller
Category:Musical groups established in 1990
Category:Musical groups from Boston, Massachusetts
Category:Silent film
Category:American film score composers
Category:American orchestras