Join us at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for a live orchestral performance of D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920), to take place on 29 July 2026 at 7:00 p.m. ET. Way Down East (1920) Directed by D. W. Griffith: Full Orchestral Score Synchronized to the Film, edited by musicologist Gillian B. Anderson, is a forthcoming volume of the American Musicological Society’s Music of the United States of America (MUSA) series. Anderson has recreated the original orchestral score, composed and compiled by William Frederick Peters and Louis Silvers under Griffith’s intimate supervision, which will be performed by a ten-piece orchestra conducted by Anderson.

The famous actress Lillian Gish stranded on a piece of ice on the ice-clogged Connecticut River heading for a waterfall. That is how Griffith chose to shoot the climax of his wildly successful Way Down East (1920). Its success was also due in no small part to its live accompanying half-original, half-compiled orchestral score by Silvers and Peters. Adapted from Lottie Blair Parker’s melodrama of the same name which highlighted the conflicts between good and evil and rural countryside versus city life, Way Down East utilized well-orchestrated preexisting music drawn from an American rainbow of tunes that solidified the audience’s identification with the characters and the story (and still does today). Nursery rhymes, parlor ballads, hymns, fiddle tunes, Broadway show tunes, pop songs by Roslyn/Kahn, Berlin, Gershwin, and Gebest as well as classical numbers by Cadman, Schubert, Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, and Wagner present a veritable variety show of the music heard and performed in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Griffith chose all the music to enhance the drama, and he insisted on their close synchronization. As a result, this wild medley unites seamlessly with the movie, described years ago in a performance at the Barbican in London as a “homerun.”