This album represents some of my forays into composing for Ballet and Film. These forms are very different disciplines to write for. Ballet music stands on its own (alongside the choreography) and ‘tells the story’ shifting through different emotions and really setting the scene. Most films I have scored involve a careful ‘dance’ between the composer and the screenplay writer. The music can soar and take us to same amazing places but the dialogue must always be clear. I have chosen these two film scores to accompany my Ballet score as they are both written for silent films. The music changes with each new development and highlights nuances of character that would normally be expressed through the spoken word. In this world music is King!

Brách Namhaid (Eternal Enemy)

In my theatre career, I have created many pieces of music for dance and worked with some fantastic choreographers. For this project though, I was required to write music for a piece that had no dialogue or songs. The story would need to be told by music and dance alone.
This Ballet was originally commissioned by York City Council as part of the 8 New Moves project. The project teamed up eight composers with eight choreographers and the pieces were first shown on the stage at the York Barbican. The choreographer for Brách Namhaid was Sandra Watson. The title, subject matter and story and were her suggestion and the score was written in my studio and also developed by attending rehearsals where I was astounded by what this talented young company were capable of. The dancers were all from Red Shoes Dance Studio and they, under Sandra’s direction worked incredibly hard at crafting a complex and challenging piece. We initially created a one movement Ballet about a man struggling with alcohol dependency and the impact that it had on his family and his physical and mental health.

I really enjoyed the creative process of writing for Ballet and Sandra and I decided to extend the Ballet to three movements and to take the story on a wild journey through struggle, crisis and redemption. The longer Ballet also gave us the opportunity to experiment with different dance styles and music genres. The resulting score is a combination of virtual orchestral composition and soundscape. This three - movement version of the Ballet was performed at the Grand Opera House in York.

The Balloonatic

This score was a commission funded by Arts Council England. I was approached to write a new virtual orchestral score for an existing silent movie. There followed a long search for the right film. I had already composed orchestral scores for Two Alan Resnais movies, Smoking and No Smoking, which is what sparked my love of all things orchestral and the desire to create similar complex compositions using the technology available to me in my studio. I looked at the entire works by Georges Melies and for a while was going to score his La Voyage Dans la Lun or Le Royaume des fées. These are both excellent films, but ultimately it was the comedic genius of Buster Keaton that caught my attention. The Balloonatic is a masterpiece of early cinematography and comedic timing. Keaton and Phyllis Haver work brilliantly together to create a funny and very human story involving outdoors adventures, mishaps and misunderstandings. The Balloonatic’s slightly longer running time of 22 minutes also gave me the opportunity to explore more themes and textures within the score. It is presented here in two parts, the natural break coming when Keaton takes to the river in a precarious leaky kayak.

G.M.

For this score, I was approached by film director Martin Pickles. He too had a fascination with the work of Georges Melies and he had a notion to explore how Melies would have approached film making if he were around in the digital age. Melies achieved some amazing results through a combination of clever filming and post production techniques alongside amazing costumes and sets built in his giant Greenhouse like glass studio in Montreuil, Paris.
Martin is also an expert animator and he wanted to make a film that looked like it had been made in 1903 using computers and contemporary editing. The film was funded by The London Production Fund in association with Portable Hole. G.M. received its World Premiere presentation at The British Film Institute on the South Bank.