An evening of clips and live music from some of Michael Caine’s films…
Blow the Bloody Doors off! http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?id=15584
Music by Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones, John Barry and Roy Budd from Michael Caine’s most iconic films
6 February 2014 / 19:30
Hall
Tickets: £17.50-25
“A celebration of the music featured in the films which cemented Michael Caine’s reputation as iconic movie star.
The four films singled out for concert performances here are classics with music composed by an exceptional quartet of musicians – Alfie (Sonny Rollins), The Ipcress File (John Barry), The Italian Job (Quincy Jones) and Get Carter (Roy Budd).
The evening places the music centre stage, intercut with excerpts from the films.”
See also
If you’re a fan of John Barry’s work you might also like this event at the BFI on 23 January 2014. Film composer David Arnold is introducing You Only Live Twice – you need to be a BFI member to apply for the ballot for tickets though.
(preceded at 2.45pm by tea and followed by a reception both in the Informatics Hub)
All welcome (especially students), no pre-booking required
The lecture will situate recent research on performance studies within musicology before surveying the work of two research centres – CHARM (www.charm.kcl.ac.uk) and CMPCP (www.cmpcp.ac.uk). This will culminate in case studies drawn from John Rink’s research on the music of Fryderyk Chopin. The overall aim is to identify new ways of understanding and developing the potential links between ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ in and through the act of musical performance.
[ For a taste of the material to be presented, please see the Youtube video on the Online Chopin Variorum Edition project]
Biosketch: John Rink is Professor of Musical Performance Studies at the University of Cambridge, Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at St John’s College, and Director of the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice. He specialises in Chopin studies, performance studies, music theory and analysis, and digital applications in musicology. He studied at Princeton University, King’s College London, and the University of Cambridge, where his doctoral research was on the evolution of tonal structure in Chopin’s early music and its relation to improvisation. He also holds the Concert Recital Diploma and Premier Prix in piano from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He has published six books with Cambridge University Press, including The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation (1995), Chopin: The Piano Concertos (1997), Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding (2002), and Annotated Catalogue of Chopin’s First Editions (with Christophe Grabowski; 2010). He is also General Editor of the five-book series Studies in Musical Performance as Creative Practice, which Oxford University Press will publish in 2015.
Sorry in advance for some daft ad below. I’m too cheapskate to pay for the advanced blog 😉
I spotted a tweet yesterday from @Neuro_Skeptic which introduced me to the word ‘misophonia’ which refers to a hatred of certain sounds. I’d assume everyone has sounds that they dislike (chalk on a blackboard seems to be universally disliked, it’s also used to good effect in the film Jaws when a man who wants to go off and capture the shark needs to get the attention of everyone in the room) but the article linked in the tweet below is talking about situations where annoying sounds are more problematic and anxiety-inducing for people, even when the sounds are not present. The authors wonder if more extreme responses to these sounds, and anxiety about them, are indicative of other issues.
Is "misophonia" – a hatred of certain sounds – a disorder in its own right, or a sign of other issues? http://t.co/VwbVUKmk98
While there are many sounds that drive me to distraction they rarely drive me to violence, tempting as it is when some idiot is on their phone and texting with the keyclick sounds on (dear god, why? why?!) – I actually find the keyclicks more irritating than the key-beeps. The noise irritates but also the fact that the person hasn’t worked out how to shush their phone and doesn’t appear to care that they might be annoying other people. I am surprised there have been no punch-ups to be honest, if not from me from others who are less restrained 😉
I was once officially annoyed by someone playing a game on their phone, quite loudly, with no thought to other passengers. However the music and sound-effects being emitted from the device were so pleasant that I didn’t say anything (I don’t usually say anything, I just quietly tut, Britishly).
Sounds I really dislike include microwaves that beep for too long after they’ve successfully heated food, the unpleasant warning sounds emitted by bus doors as they close, car alarms or house-sited burglar alarms that go on for too long. The piercing yells of small children. But annoying as these are I don’t think my response to them warrants psychiatric evaluation… yet.
I’m currently hoovering up the back catalogue of a journal which is all about music in film: Music, Sound and the Moving Image. Luckily I work in an academic institution so can access the content fairly easily but I highly recommend emailing authors to get copies of papers they’ve written.
This one is by Dr Miguel Mera – I heard him speak at a recorded BBC Radio 3 panel event at the Royal College of Music during the Prom season, so it was nice to come across his paper here.
Miguel Mera (2009) Invention/Re-inventionMusic, Sound, and the Moving Image, Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring, pp. 1-20
In the snippet below he’s referencing another paper by Karen Collins, but the different perspective on the Terminator films made me smile.
“Karen Collins discusses the sonic aesthetic of the first two Terminator films, finding that recurrent elements (the use of Phrygian and Aeolian modes, low bass sounds, urban signifiers, and the use of metallic percussion) help reinforce narrative and plot symmetry. However, Collins excludes Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines from her analysis ‘due to its differences from the first two interlinked films’ (2004: 165).”
Karen Collins (2004) ‘“I’ll be back”: Recurrent sonic motifs in James Cameron’s Terminator films’ in Philip Hayward (ed.) Off The Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema, London: John Libbey, 165–75.