Tribute to Charlie Chaplin, the Composer
Michael Cooper www.nytimes.com michael-cooper
An often overlooked aspect of Charlie Chaplin’s creative output, the music he composed, is being explored this weekend in New York.
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A CENTURY after his Little Tramp character first appeared on screen, Charlie Chaplin is remembered for many things: as the derby-hatted, mustachioed comic symbol of the silent screen; as one of the first true international superstars; as an actor, writer and director who helped elevate film to a respected art form even as he enjoyed enormous popular success.

But it is another, often overlooked aspect of Chaplin’s creative output that will be explored this weekend in New York: his work as a composer.

Chaplin, who was reared in English music halls and played several instruments by ear but could not read music, composed the music for his films, beginning with “City Lights” (1931), relying on musical assistants to help him translate his ideas into scores and then soundtracks. Music played an especially outsize role in his first sound features, which were essentially silent films set to music, and he and his collaborators later won an Oscar for the score of “Limelight.”

The New York Philharmonic will play Chaplin’s score for “Modern Times,” his 1936 satire on mass production, on Friday and Saturday while the film is screened in Avery Fisher Hall, the ensemble’s latest foray into the kind of cinema karaoke that many orchestras have embraced in recent years to try to draw new, more visually oriented audiences to concerts.

And Chaplin, who conceived “Modern Times” in part as a comic commentary on the dehumanizing aspects of the mechanized, industrial world, might have appreciated the path his film music took to 21st-century live performances. Timothy Brock, who will conduct the Philharmonic’s performances, restored the score in 2000, doing painstaking research to transform a recording into something real people could play on real instruments.

Mr. Brock, a composer and specialist in silent-film music, was asked by Chaplin’s heirs to reconstruct the score of “Modern Times,” which contains some of the most familiar music that Chaplin ever wrote. Its love theme was later given lyrics and became the popular song “Smile,” which has been performed by singers including Nat King Cole and Michael Jackson.

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