Gaylord Carter

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Gaylord Carter was born in 1905 in Wiesbaden, the son of a church organist and a singing teacher. The family moved to Wichita in Kansas, where his father opened a music conservatory. Gaylord sang in a church choir as a boy and from the age of ten played the organ in a church. When the Jazz Age began, he tried jazz on the church organ, until the minister reprimanded him. At fourteen he was already playing in a local cinema, where he accompanied silent films for children's matinees.

Music and breakthrough

In 1922 the family moved to Los Angeles. He played piano and later organ in a cinema and studied at UCLA. In 1926 he accompanied a Harold Lloyd film in Inglewood, where a member of Lloyd's staff heard him. Lloyd recommended him to Sid Grauman, who offered the twenty-one-year-old Carter a permanent job as organist in his picture palace in downtown Los Angeles. In this way he grew into one of the best-known organists of the silent film.

Influence

Later Carter wrote a great deal of film music that was added to silent films released on video and record. Records such as The Golden Age Of Silent Movies from 1962 preserve that sound. He died in 2000. The cinema organ imitates a whole orchestra with its stops and makes sounds such as bells and percussion. In School of Rock he is mentioned in connection with music for The Phantom of the Opera from 1925 and Intolerance from 1916, films in which the music had to carry the whole story.

Listening

• 
  The Phantom of the Opera · Gaylord Carter, 1925
• 
  Intolerance · Gaylord Carter, 1916

Discography

Studio albums

• 1962The Golden Age Of Silent Movies
• ?The Mighty Wurlitzer: Music For Movie-Palace Organs

In School of Rock

The chapters, maps and magazine stories of School of Rock are currently available in Dutch only.

• The Dream Factory: Film Reel 1^NL Reader

See also

• Live accompaniment: cinema pianists, organists and cue sheets