THESE SUNDAYS WERE THE_____ OF HUMAN CONTACT IN THE DESERT OF MY LO...

50.These Sundays were the_____ of human contact in the desert of my loneliness.

Read the following passage and choose the correct answer to each question.

Accustomed though we are to speaking of the films made before 1927 as “silent”, the film

has never been, in the full sense of the word, silent. From the very beginning, music was

regarded as an indispensable accompaniment; when the Lumiere films were shown at the

first public film exhibition in the United States in February 1896, they were accompanied

by piano improvisations on popular tunes. At first, the music played bore no special

relationship to the films; an accompaniment of any kind was sufficient.

Within a very short time, however, the incongruity of playing lively music to a solemn

film became apparent, and film pianists began to take some care in matching their pieces

to the mood of the film.

As movie theaters grew in number and importance, a violinist, and perhaps a cellist, would

be added to the pianist in certain cases, and in the larger movie theaters small orchestras

were formed. For a number of years the selection of music for each film program rested

entirely in the hands of the conductor or leader of the orchestra, and very often the

principal qualification for holding such a position was not skill or taste so much as the

ownership of a large personal library of musical pieces. Since the conductor seldom saw

the films until the night before they were to be shown (if, indeed, the conductor was lucky

enough to see them then), the musical arrangement was normally improvised in the

greatest hurry.

To help meet this difficulty, film distributing companies started the practice of publishing

suggestions for musical accompaniments. In 1909, for example, the Edison Company

began issuing with their films such indications of mood as “pleasant’, “sad”, “lively”. The

suggestions became more explicit, and so emerged the musical cue sheet containing

indications of mood, the titles of suitable pieces of music, and precise directions to show

where one piece led into the next. Certain films had music especially composed for them.

The most famous of these early special scores was that composed and arranged for D.W.

Griffith’ s film Birth of a Nation, which was released in 1915.