Having music-hall parents and learning many songs in the wings of theatres as a child, practising violin and cello on every theatrical tour of his own, Chaplin initially “had great ambitions to be a concert artist, or, failing that, to use it in a vaudeville act, but as time went on [he] realized that [he] could never achieve excellence, so [he] gave it up.” He composed his first songs in 1916 for the Charlie Chaplin Music Publishing Company and his first full film score for City Lights in 1931. The film scores, not written in Chaplin’s hand but by different arrangers under contract, are part of the Chaplin Archives but have not been scanned so cannot be seen on this site.
