Judith Rosenberg has been able play piano by ear since she was 4.
“If I hear something on the radio,” the Oakland resident says, “I can reproduce it.”
Rosenberg is also a classically trained musician, and she has been the musical director in the dance department at Mills College in Oakland since 1973.
But it’s her skills as a music improviser that seem to draw the most raves, especially when she’s playing the piano as an accompaniment to silent films — something she does regularly at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont.
Rosenberg, 62, usually watches a silent film first and then sketches out one or two small themes. Then she develops the material during the film.
“Playing for silent films is a lot like playing for dance and composing for opera,” she says. “There are moments of recitative [spoken dialogue], moments of aria [emotional expression] and moments of pure action.
“The most important thing a composer does for a film is to establish the overall mood. The music should become so much a part of the film that one cannot feel the separation between sound and image, but rather one achieves a synthesis of the two.”
In addition to providing music for silent films, Rosenberg, who grew up in Brooklyn and was trained in Rochester, N.Y., has a strong connection to the Jewish community.
She has accompanied Bay Area cantors Itzhak Emanuel, Martin Feldman and Sharon Lipsman for various performances and ceremonies, and she also played alongside Emanuel at 1992 event when the Spanish government held a ceremony commemorating the return of Jews to Spain. The Israeli ambassador to Spain was in the audience.
“I am awed by her music and her ability to improvise,” says Lipsman, who does High Holy Days concerts at the JCC of the East Bay in Berkeley and has been a cantorial soloist at several Bay Area synagogues.
“A few years ago, she accompanied Cantor Emanuel at a regional gathering of cantors. She had no written music, just the melody line — and from that she accompanied him,” Lipsman added. “It’s kind of unfathomable how she does what she does.”
Rosenberg took her talents for improvising into the cinema eight years ago after she attended a screening in the Italian Silent Film Festival at the PFA and heard the pianist accompanying the film.
“I can do better than that,” she recalls telling the friend who was with her, Omar.
So Omar pushed her to speak to the PFA’s curator. “Are you looking for pianists? I can improvise,” she asked.
“We’re always looking for people,” the curator said.
“Really?” Rosenberg replied — and the curator gave her her first opportunity.
Since then, Rosenberg has scored and played the piano for dozens and dozens of films, including many by the most famous stars of the silent-film era, such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, who was Jewish.
Web sites and printed movie schedules for silent films in the Bay Area often include the phrase “With Judith Rosenberg on piano.” She has even played in several festivals, such as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival at the Castro Theatre.
Rosenberg waxes enthusiastic about her religious and cultural roots when talking about the history of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, which has a weekly screening of silent films and also honors the burgeoning silent-film industry that existed in what was then the town of Niles (now part of Fremont) from 1912 to 1915. It was where Chaplin developed his Little Tramp character and where he made several films.
“The Essanay Film Studio was started by two men, one of whom was Jewish,” Rosenberg says. “Max Aronson changed his to Gilbert Anderson. His screen name was ‘Broncho Billy’ — the Kosher Cowboy — and he was the first cowboy in American cinema and the prototype for John Wayne.”
Rosenberg recently scored a silent Yiddish film, “Jidische Glickn” (“Jewish Luck”). Produced in Moscow, the 1925 film, about a Russian Jew going after his dreams despite being oppressed, is based on Sholem Aleichem’s story “Mendel the Matchmaker.”
“There was a very famous Jewish actor [Solomon Mikhoels] who starred in the film and was later assassinated by Stalin,” Rosenberg says. “The film was extraordinary for me. I called upon all the Jewish music I’ve ever played.”
Rosenberg’s next silent-film gig (at the PFA on Feb. 8 at 2 p.m.) also involves a Jewish component. Although nothing about the film is Jewish, it’s the 1925 classic “The Salvation Hunters,” the first feature of Josef von Sternberg, an Orthodox Jewish immigrant from Vienna who was raised in New York.
A big audience is expected for that Sunday matinee, and contrary to popular misconception, most of the crowd won’t be elderly.
Silent-film audiences, Rosenberg says, are made up of people of all ages, and she says she often sees children scrambling to the front row during comedy screenings at Niles Essanay.
“Little kids laugh just as hard at the Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton movies as they would any modern movie,” Rosenberg says. “They laugh until they can’t stand anymore.”
Judith Rosenberg will play the piano to accompany “The Salvation Hunters” at 2 p.m. Feb. 8 at the Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Durant Ave., Berkeley. $5.50-$9.50. Information: (510) 642-0808. For Rosenberg’s full schedule: www.judyrosenbergsilent.com