I was struggling to remember this one and then Andrew Parker comes through...
the electronics in the movie came from Rupert Hine, whose long winding career in the biz I find fascinating (quirkfusion novelty hit "The Lone Ranger" with Quantum Jump; a motley panoply of productions; fake pop group Thinkman with all the music by him solo but actors hired to play the band for publicity shots and videos, including then-emerging comedian Julian Clary aka the Joan Collins Fan Club)
a vehicle for Brit rock'n'roller Adam Faith, with some satire of bohemians and modern art going on, abstract painting and abstract musicking (as in the scene near the end of this clip)
other suggestions of cinema concrete welcomed!
the electronic sounds in the movie were supplied by Desmond Leslie, whose Music of the Future was reissued by Trunk some years ago
Could also have titled this post 'musique concrete at the theatre', because Leslie provided noise bits for these recordings of the Bard's great plays in the Living Shakespeare series
i am nutty enough to have bought a couple, although I'm not sure I ever listened to either all the way through
The elder brother of one my friends had this album, its contents are all too familiar to me
It was pretty ubiquitous for a moment there in the British late '70s, now completely forgotten (even more so than Sky)
"The music was composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and performed by his younger brother, the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber. The Lloyd Webber brothers were always very close but their two different careers (a rock musical composer and a classical cellist) meant that a collaboration seemed unlikely. It was not until Julian beat his brother in a bet on a Leyton Orient football match that Andrew was forced to write his cello work. As his subject, Andrew chose the theme of Paganini's 24th caprice and added 23 variations for cello and rock band. The work premiered at the 1977 Sydmonton Festival with rock band Colosseum II, featuring Gary Moore, Jon Hiseman and Don Airey being joined by Barbara Thompson (sax, flute), Rod Argent (piano, synthesizer, keyboards) and Julian Lloyd Webber (cello). It was subsequently rearranged and recorded in 1978. It reached Number 2 on the UK album charts" - Wiki
The theme ended up as the perennial intro to the South Bank Show, its perfect home really
because when SBS deal with rock, it had an unerring instinct for finding the upper-middlebrow - Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, that sort of artist (did they do Kate Bush? Must have done, eventually).
one exception would be the episode they did on Rough Trade at the peakprime of postpunk
but generally yeah
rock that exhibited intelligence, craft, seriousness... a colour supplement idea of artistry
not knocking it particularly
much of my favorite stuff ends up upper-middlebrow, by acclamation and audience if not intent
Variations though i would categorise as lower-middlebrow - a vulgar attempt to 1/ "elevate" rock 2/ loosen up classical, jettison the bow-tie, help it "get down" a bit
transparent pretensions, laughably falling short of everything either kind of music validly offers
"Here we have another sound-poetry compilation that was assembled by the Italian sound-poet and artist Enzo Minarelli. He created a series of these compilations that were each dedicated to the exchange of sound-poetry between Italy and other countries and their languages. Spagna - Messico - Italia was the second record in this series and focused on neo-latin roots in modern sounds combining elements and intersections of the Italian and Spanish language through sound-poetry and music.
Although the compilation was published in 1988, the pieces come from different periods. The oldest piece, composed by Mexican poet and actor Guillermo Villegas, is from 1974 while other pieces are from around 1988. It's remarkable that some pieces have a more theatrical aspect and that others have a more musical approach resembling home-taping sounds from the 80's. An artist like Luca Miti on this compilation can be seen as a bridge between those worlds as he also made cassettes.
One of the highlights on this compilation is a piece by Mexican artist Laura Elenes who composed a computerized poem that translates itself into repetitive Casio patterns based on color schemes. Not only can it be seen as an example of sound-poetry, but also as an important piece of Mexican electronic music. The last piece on this compilation is done by Minarelli himself where he creates an intense poem based on different patterns with the words of the four seasons (spring, summer, autumn, winter) and other associative words.
"The method of sound poetry, apart from the single, specific characters, can associate acts of research, I dare say international, towards the exploitation of voice and oral word, which are the true protagonists in the poetical progress at the end of this century. The geographical distances are put at zero, as each author, feeling the weariness and strain of the written poetry, composes his own phonic style by similar co-ordinates (orality, musical involvement, signifying rumour, electronics), with different outputs due to different levels of probing and sensitiveness, but belonging to the same effort of getting over the written page for a pure sonority." - Enzo Minarelli, 4th of April 1988, Cento, Italy
