Philip Carli began accompanying silent film at the age of 13, with a solo piano performance for Lon Chaney's 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. During his undergraduate years he programmed and accompanied an annual summer series of silent films. Since then, he has continued his studies of the film, music and culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries earning a doctorate in musicology at the Eastman School of Music. He has at the same time toured extensively as a film accompanist throughout North America and Europe, performing at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Film Theatre in London, and the Berlin International Film Festival. He is the staff accompanist for the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and performs annually at film festivals in the United States and at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Italy. His most recent tour was to Japan. His full film scores include Herbert Brenon's Peter Pan(1924), Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) a restoration of the score to Chang (1927) and many accompaniments to video and DVD releases.

In matters of musical style, Phil Carli's central dictum for film accompaniment is that the score and performance should serve the film above all, regardless of the particular genre of the music. In an ideal performance, the audience should be caught up in the excitement - or humour, or pathos - of the drama without specific awareness of the accompaniment, even while it is helping to intensify the film's emotional message. For his own accompaniments, he draws on his deep knowledge of "period" musical materials, including both popular dance forms of the 1920s and the highly chromatic music developed for nineteenth-century opera. This helps the audience to bridge the cultural gap between their everyday lives and the film images produced and edited generations ago. An exciting score in an idiom that would be familiar to the original audience for the film leads the modern viewer to accept dramatic conventions that might otherwise seem stilted or even unintentionally comical, rather than highlighting these as more "modern" scores can do. The musical translation pulls viewers deeply into the world of the film, more than the mere intellectual engagement of an introductory lecture can do, by engaging their emotions in musical terms that are still familiar and strongly compelling today.