Every Saturday Shannon Roberts' music is heard by around 35,000 fans at that weekend's University of Utah football game, where he serves as assistant director of the U. Marching Band. On Monday, Dec. 11, by contrast, it will be heard by an audience of around one-one hundredth that size, which will thrill to the exploits of a considerably less likely gridiron star - Harold Lloyd, in his classic 1925 silent-film comedy "The Freshman."
The place? The Museum of Fine Arts, just east of Rice Stadium. And the sponsoring organization is perhaps even more unlikely - the Nova Chamber Music Series. It will be the second program of the season."We got the idea of doing something a little different for the holidays," says Nova board member William Sargent, who is in charge of this week's presentation. "So I proposed they let me find something in a nice silent film and said I'd try to find a score written for it."
That quest led Sargent to local silent-film buff Hunter Hale, who offered him his choice of either "The Freshman" or "Seventh Heaven." Sargent unhesitatingly plumped for the former.
" `Seventh Heaven' had all kinds of random classical pieces and would have presented all kinds of problems deciding on arrangements and orchestrations," Sargent explains. "On the other hand `The Freshman' came with a collection of piano tunes - one can't really call it a score - things like `Tea for Two,' `The Entrance of the Gladiators' and other sentimental songs, waltzes, rags and polkas. But then the problem was finding someone who could arrange that, tailoring it to the mood and pace of the film."
Someone at the U. directed him to Roberts and, as he looked at the piano score, Sargent says, "you could see his eyes sparkle. He said, `I'd love to do it.' "
Despite the time pressures - around a month and a half to create a score that could easily have taken four times that long to put together - Roberts says he was intrigued by the challenge.
"It was like being turned loose in a museum," he says, "and being asked to arrange the artifacts in a new way." Not only that, but after five years at the U., where he also directs the Jazz Band, he was interested in a film project.
The result, he says, is "an instrumentation that fits the turn of the century, using violin, trumpet, trombone, alto and soprano sax, tuba, piano and drums. It's like a '20s cabaret orchestra, providing a tremendous variety of color combinations."
Essentially, Roberts says, his score is an "adaptation of the original cue sheet that came with the film" - which is pretty much what a theater organist or pianist of the day would have offered, only improvisationally - along with some original music of his own. Not, however, any of his Marching Band pieces.
"I'm sure there's an influence there," he says, "voicings and such, but nothing direct."
That's surprising in a film so heavily dependent on its climactic football sequence. Indeed, there are people who have never seen "The Freshman" - one of Lloyd's most famous films - in its entirety who can remember having seen that. (Legendary filmmaker Preston Sturges was so enamored of it that he repeated it as the opening sequence of his own 1947 film with Lloyd, "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock," which supposedly picks up on the same character 20 years later.)
In it we follow the travails of one Harold Lamb (Lloyd) who, newly arrived at Tate College, tries everything he can think of to impress his classmates, only to become the object of their derision. He is duped into making a speech with a live kitten inside his sweater. He becomes a live tackling dummy for the football team. His new tuxedo comes apart at the Fall Frolic. Finally, with no more players left on the bench, he begs to be put in the Big Game and, through a series of comically razzle-dazzle plays, ends up saving the day.
Sargent, who first saw "The Freshman" nearly 40 years ago at New York's Museum of Modern Art, sees the film as reflecting "early American optimism." Roberts, from a slightly later generation, thinks it will be a "wonderful discovery" for young people today.
"This is not only the history of cinematography - it's also the history of our culture," the latter says. "And we have a lot to learn from the past, not only from the films themselves but from the music."
Roberts himself will conduct the orchestra at Monday's screening, which begins at 8 p.m. in the Museum of Fine Arts auditorium. Tickets, at $5-$8, are available in advance at Discriminator Music, Waking Owl Books and the Utah Symphony box office, or for $7-$12 at the door. (If accompanied by an adult, children 6-12 will be admitted for $1.)
For information call 328-8827.