Description
The ‘Mo Collection’, housed at the Milan Conservatory, is the legacy of Ettore Mo, who worked as a cinema pianist between the 1920s and 30s. As is often the case with atypical musical sources of uncertain epistemological status, this collection of thousands of pieces of stock photoplay music from over fifty Italian and foreign publishers has been overlooked until now, with parts of it being never catalogued in the Italian National Bibliographic System.
This corpus of texts offers us an insight into a (largely forgotten) system of theoretical and practical knowledges behind the use of musical accompaniments for cinema. The collection demonstrates significant potential as a source of cultural in-formation: it resonates with musical motifs internationally associated with stereo-typical diegetic situations, including social settings, exotic characterisations, and the codification of gender roles. Its investigation allows us to map the circulation of topoi within a film-music common practice across the silent and sound film era.
