Getting a Life, part #474a
Tuesday, February 11th, 2003 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthI had fun at the Borders SF night last night - guests Ellen Datlow and Stephen Baxter - with many of the usual suspects. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sbisson, marypcb: who is going to kick off the Campaign for Real SF, a.k.a. Lost Worlds? First 'mainstream' novel to be reclaimed: Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons. (Personal aircraft, videophones and the Anglo-Nicaraguan War of 1947). That nice Mr Baxter (Son of God and Bastard Offspring* of Arthur C Clarke) looked quite keen on being a figurehead after you mentioned photo opportunities with Kate Beckinsale ...
Am still debating Mr Baxter's assertion that multiple point-of-view is a 19th-century story-telling device.
Guest for March is very probably Cherith Baldry, who some of you will know - her new novel The Reliquary Ring (SF, adult) is out 21st February so go and buy it. It really is very good!
*That's what 'natural heir' traditionally means, isn't it? In which case it must be true. It's on the front of his latest book, Evolution
The concert was four hours long, with plentiful intervals. Part One was The Lost Music of the Gaels: a pleasant-enough new composition using traditional instruments and rooted firmly in the Celtic folk tradition. This might have been better without the video showing a hairy man trampling over Celtic-looking countryside.
Part 2 was Bloody Stravinsky. L'Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier's Tale) was a charming folk tale about the perils of dealing with the Devil. It was charming until Stravinsky got to it. And someone made an animated film to fit the music (which might have been nice if it had been somewhat shorter, say about half the length). The film came complete with epilepsy-inducing strobe effects. According to the programme, 'cartoon animations are right for the scale of this piece - in the same way that live action film suits The Lord of the Rings'. What, you may well ask, has Ralph Bakshi ever done to the South Bank Centre?
I found part 3 of the concert fascinating: dervish dances. The music was loud, Arabic, repetitive, played by musicians dressed all in billowing white. The dancers whirled like spinning-tops, an illusion heightened by the bright colours of the huge stiffened circular skirts they wore and discarded. It was hypnotic enough to watch: I could easily get caught up in a dance like that. Though the music's very different on the surface, it's structurally more or less the same as your standard ambient trance track. Gorgeous.
Part 4. Howard Shore conducting The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring for Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (UK Premiere).
... It wasn't the music of the film. It was a fully-textured orchestral composition (or rather the first 2/6 of Shore's projected composition based on the scores for all three films – which will presumably be 3 hours long) based on the music from The Fellowship of the Ring. Echoes of Orff, Dvorak, Vaughan Williams etc etc: there's so much more depth to this version of the music, and it's surprisingly easy to listen to it without immediately thinking of the relevant scenes in the film. (There was a screen at the back of the stage, but most of the time it was blank, and the rest of the time it was showing stills). It was much easier to spot motifs and themes winding their way through the music, reappearing differently scored. 'The Shadow of the Past' seemed slower, and lacked a little momentum, and the soloist in 'Lament for Gandalf' was a little off-key to start with. But those two main themes - the gentle, bucolic hobbity one (think Shire, green, sunny) and the stirring, heroic one (er, Moria?) - are there throughout, varied and re-scored, and they are damned powerful as subconscious signals.
As an orchestral piece it works pretty well. There's enough of the original texture and orchestration that emotional moments from the film are brought to mind by the themes that accompanied them. The ending seemed a little weak - no clear finish - but then it'll have The Two Towers music orchestrated onto it, and the music from Return of the King bolted onto that.
Howard Shore, plus the London Philharmonic, London Voices choir and the London Oratory School Schola, got a standing ovation for this. It was well-deserved. There's a lot of passion in the film, which was highlighted and emphasised by the music: now the music stands on its own, and it's as passionate and evocative as I expected. And it's not simply a tidied-up version of the soundtrack. I wonder if there'll be another of these concerts next year? If so ... go.
sbisson, marypcb: who is going to kick off the Campaign for Real SF, a.k.a. Lost Worlds? First 'mainstream' novel to be reclaimed: Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons. (Personal aircraft, videophones and the Anglo-Nicaraguan War of 1947). That nice Mr Baxter (Son of God and Bastard Offspring* of Arthur C Clarke) looked quite keen on being a figurehead after you mentioned photo opportunities with Kate Beckinsale ...Am still debating Mr Baxter's assertion that multiple point-of-view is a 19th-century story-telling device.
Guest for March is very probably Cherith Baldry, who some of you will know - her new novel The Reliquary Ring (SF, adult) is out 21st February so go and buy it. It really is very good!
*That's what 'natural heir' traditionally means, isn't it? In which case it must be true. It's on the front of his latest book, Evolution
The concert was four hours long, with plentiful intervals. Part One was The Lost Music of the Gaels: a pleasant-enough new composition using traditional instruments and rooted firmly in the Celtic folk tradition. This might have been better without the video showing a hairy man trampling over Celtic-looking countryside.
Part 2 was Bloody Stravinsky. L'Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier's Tale) was a charming folk tale about the perils of dealing with the Devil. It was charming until Stravinsky got to it. And someone made an animated film to fit the music (which might have been nice if it had been somewhat shorter, say about half the length). The film came complete with epilepsy-inducing strobe effects. According to the programme, 'cartoon animations are right for the scale of this piece - in the same way that live action film suits The Lord of the Rings'. What, you may well ask, has Ralph Bakshi ever done to the South Bank Centre?
I found part 3 of the concert fascinating: dervish dances. The music was loud, Arabic, repetitive, played by musicians dressed all in billowing white. The dancers whirled like spinning-tops, an illusion heightened by the bright colours of the huge stiffened circular skirts they wore and discarded. It was hypnotic enough to watch: I could easily get caught up in a dance like that. Though the music's very different on the surface, it's structurally more or less the same as your standard ambient trance track. Gorgeous.
Part 4. Howard Shore conducting The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring for Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (UK Premiere).
... It wasn't the music of the film. It was a fully-textured orchestral composition (or rather the first 2/6 of Shore's projected composition based on the scores for all three films – which will presumably be 3 hours long) based on the music from The Fellowship of the Ring. Echoes of Orff, Dvorak, Vaughan Williams etc etc: there's so much more depth to this version of the music, and it's surprisingly easy to listen to it without immediately thinking of the relevant scenes in the film. (There was a screen at the back of the stage, but most of the time it was blank, and the rest of the time it was showing stills). It was much easier to spot motifs and themes winding their way through the music, reappearing differently scored. 'The Shadow of the Past' seemed slower, and lacked a little momentum, and the soloist in 'Lament for Gandalf' was a little off-key to start with. But those two main themes - the gentle, bucolic hobbity one (think Shire, green, sunny) and the stirring, heroic one (er, Moria?) - are there throughout, varied and re-scored, and they are damned powerful as subconscious signals.
As an orchestral piece it works pretty well. There's enough of the original texture and orchestration that emotional moments from the film are brought to mind by the themes that accompanied them. The ending seemed a little weak - no clear finish - but then it'll have The Two Towers music orchestrated onto it, and the music from Return of the King bolted onto that.
Howard Shore, plus the London Philharmonic, London Voices choir and the London Oratory School Schola, got a standing ovation for this. It was well-deserved. There's a lot of passion in the film, which was highlighted and emphasised by the music: now the music stands on its own, and it's as passionate and evocative as I expected. And it's not simply a tidied-up version of the soundtrack. I wonder if there'll be another of these concerts next year? If so ... go.
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Date: Tuesday, February 11th, 2003 06:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, February 11th, 2003 09:43 am (UTC)