The Club Foot Orchestra score

i found the score, if anything, distracting. i don't know if it's just because that style of music connotes '60s cop films or what, but at times i found myself more interested in the music than in the film: the two just didn't mesh. That said, I'd be interested in hearing the music by ITSELF, as it is very professionally done and generally interesting to listen to. I'm not generally such a historical purist that I demand everything be so "authentic" or anything, but generally it gave the scenes a seedy connotation or, at least, a more calculating tone when, nearest I can figure, so much of the essence of Keaton's character is his naivety and the anarchy of his environment. Sleazy guitars during chase scenes call to mind a concept of "Will Good Defeat Evil?" when Keaton is so oblivious to his current predicament that he cannot possibly intentionally outwit a villain. Does anyone know the reasoning as to why this score has become the accepted one? Are there prints available with other scores, and are there other silents with similarly mismatched scores that I should be aware of?

I do something like that too. Since his movies are public domain, I've downloaded them. A lot of his shorts (at least the versions I've downloaded) have bad music, but what's worse is when they have whistles or horrible sound effects. There's some versions of his short films that when he falls or does something funny it plays this loud and obnoxious whistle. It's awful. So, I pick a random movie of his with just a simple piano and play it while I watch the other one with the sound off. Even if the music doesn't match it's infinitely better.

I'd have to agree that the score on the kino copy is terrible, at least for this movie. I wouldn't necessarily mind listening to it by itself, but as others mentioned I found it distracting. Kinda like listening to Bitches Brew while watching it. At least in the theater scene they could've used the instruments that were actually in the scene (i.e. piano/organ, violin, etc). Next time I'll just mute it and listen to something else. Thought the movie was great otherwise.