Holy Cross Professor Makes Significant Finds in Music and Film

WORCESTER, Mass. – On June 29, Professor Bruce I. Miller of the music department at Holy Cross will be co-presenting a paper at the 11th International Conference on 19th-Century Music at Royal Holloway, University of London.  He and his colleague, Helga J. Perry, a Gilbert & Sullivan scholar from England, will be disclosing a discovery in the Gilbert & Sullivan canon.

This significant find is of the first trace of music for the previously lost "De Belville Song" in the operetta Iolanthe, one that has been sought after by scholars and will be of great interest to Gilbert & Sullivan fans.  Previously, on April 15, 1999, Miller and Perry announced the discovery of a lost duet in H.M.S. Pinafore, the ballad "Reflect, My Child."

In addition, on August 5, Miller will be present at the UCLA Film Preservation Festival for the first public screening of a restored subject for which he provided the sound track.  The subject is the promotional trailer for "The Rogue Song," a 1930 two-tone Technicolor movie for which most of the film has been lost.

Miller found the missing sound track at a record auction in 1989.  This discovery is significant in that it enabled the restoration of this trailer, which contains footage of both opera star Lawrence Tibbett and comedians Laurel & Hardy that has been lost for 70 years.

The film is listed by the American Film Institute on its "Ten Most Wanted" list of lost films.  Until this recent discovery, only three minutes of film element had been known to survive. Robert Gitt of UCLA has made the restoration.