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"Wire contributor, semi-mythical pop svengali, erstwhile thespian, sampler troubadour and untidy kitchen user" - Owen Hatherley of Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy

"Your songs are pretty little paths - take us somewhere nice." - Elodie Amandine Roy, Applejack Zine

Varèse : The Hollywood Years

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For all his smouldering looks, the composer Edgard Varèse never had the most fruitful relationship with the silver screen. Despite persistent attempts, he never wrote a feature soundtrack. Even today, while contemporaries like Bartok and Webern, responsible for equally forbidding bodies of work, can lay claim to a string of posthumous cinematic credits, only Woody Allen has found a use for Varèse. In the sombre Bergman tribute Another Woman, he matched the sweeping theremin and strident brass of Ecautorial to one of Gena Rowlands’s more unsettling fantasy sequences. Adam Harvey, in his book about the music of Allen’s films, makes a point of insisting that this must be a rare insistence of Allen using music “purely for its effect” and surely not because he enjoyed listening to the music himself.
But in the early twenties he did act, largely uncredited, in a number of silent films. Most notably, his heavy brow appeared in the role of a policeman, alongside John Barrymore, in John S. Robertson’s (1920) Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. The musician Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, has cut scenes from the film to some of Varèse's own music and put it on YouTube. It gives you a startling idea of just how effective and expressionistic a soundtrack composer he might have been, had he ever been given the chance.


The composer’s overtures to the studios reached their peak in the 1930s, a decade during which he seems to have completed more press interviews than actual musical works. Finally, having hawked his wares round the backlots and hobnobbed at as many parties as he could bear, at the end of the decade he even penned a manifesto of sorts, entitled 'Organised Sound for the Sound Film'and published in The Commonweal. Here  he wrote of music as an “art-science”, with a brief mention of “all the recent laboratory discoveries which permit us to hope for the unconditional liberation of music” (hinting, perhaps, at what may have been his real motivation for working in cinema - the chance to investigate recent progress in graphical sound techniques). None of which seemed to do any good, however; until several years later, when an old acquaintance first met through The Commonweal’s editor Walter Anderson, finally got back in touch. 

Boris Morros, Hollywood producer, music director, and Russian spy, was, in 1946, working on a romantic comedy called Carnegie Hall, involving the New York Symphony Orchestra and such notables as Leopold Stokowski and Artur Rubinstein. He asked Varèse to compose a short piece for a particular scene and the composer immediately began work on a kind of musical skit involving quotes from his own work and a few famous pieces from the repertoire emerging haphazardly out of a bed of improvisation around the note A.


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Morros, a former Paramount music director and producer of Laurel and Hardy’s Flying Deuces and Julien Duvivier’s Tales of Manhattan, had been named as a KGB agent in a letter sent to J. Edgar Hoover three years earlier. In December of that same year, 1943, the writer Martha Dodd and her husband Alfred Stern met with Morros in order to invest $130,000 in a music publishing company that would serve as a front organisation for a Soviet spy ring.

By the time Morros got in touch with Varèse in 1946, things were perhaps not going so well for Morros. The Boris Morros Music Company had collapsed and the KGB had come increasingly to view its putative boss with suspicion. In June of 1945, after a series of minor indiscretions, the Soviet secret service had ordered Morros be deactivated, only for the latter to come back to them, a year or so later, with a suggestion to start up a film distribution venture - if they would just be willing to invest a few hundred thousand dollars. In fact, this proposal was an FBI sting operation, the Feds having approached Morros in early 1947 and recruited him as a double agent.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, Morros had cooled to the idea of hiring Varèse, a composer somewhat notorious for his never-completed so-called “Red Symphony”, Espace. His music never appeared in Carnegie Hall (which went on to be quite a success) and the work he had begun for it remained unfinished. Until many years later, that is, when his student and protégé, Chou Wen-Chung completed a performing score for the piece which now holds a place amongst Varèse’s complete works under the title, Tuning Up.

6 years ago
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filmphilo:

Bresson (on Cinema)

6 years ago
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Wim Delvoye at The Louvre

Wim Delvoye at The Louvre

6 years ago
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fourth interior

6 years ago
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The New Sound (1979) features Paddy Kingsland, Rick Wakeman and Peter Zinovieff (via @jonnytrunk)

6 years ago
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Librarians Wanted: Banana and Louie album launch, with A Little Orchestra, Lisa Bouvier and Model Village. *Free*

librarianswanted:

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Librarians Wanted are extremely happy to host our friends Banana and Louie’s magnificent Alphabet Soup album launch, at the Victoria, Mile End Friday 7 September.

Who’s Banana and who’s Louie is a secret, but the band consists of Matthew and Sharon from one of our favourite bands, A…

(Source: librarianswanted-blog)

6 years ago
2 notes
Commonplaces: CRITICAL MASS & POLICING

piercepenniless:

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On Friday, police arrested 182 people en masse for participating in the Critical Mass bike ride. With their usual indifference to decency, the Met managed to assault participants (2), keep at least twenty of them on a bus overnight, and detain arrestees at far-flung stations, releasing…

6 years ago
21 notes
By Strategy: Julian Assange - Also Neoliberal Utopian

by-strategy:

Anarcho-capitalist flag

This week as been a especially depressing time to be on the left. I do not wish to spill any more bytes on the question of Assange and rape and the terrible reaction of the wider left to this where others have made the point so well. What I do want to question a fundamental assumption made by…

(via )

6 years ago
53 notes
mycinemania:
“ Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, dir. Philip Kaufman)
”

mycinemania:

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, dir. Philip Kaufman)

(via scifi-women)

6 years ago
5 notes

A Knife, A Fork and A Spoon Will Beat Out a Happy Tune

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Kanye West, we are told, will dine only with the very finest of cutlery. “Everything is the best quality.” His knives and forks, apparently, are made of gold. I wonder, does he play the spoons with his golden spoons?
When, in 1967, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were asked to create a new signature tune for Radio Sheffield, David Cain, thinking of the city’s steel industry, called for knives and forks. His thirty-second jingle was composed from the plucked tines of steel forks, recorded onto tape and sped up or slowed down for different pitches.



Perhaps Peter Sinfield, former lyricist to King Crimson, ELP, and Bucks Fizz, was thinking along similar lines when he composed this - a “music for impossible cutlery”:


More often, however, the relationship between notes and knives, or tunes and tines is less harmonious, betraying moreover a certain anxiety best illustrated by two famous quotations.
Wagner is supposed to have said that when he hears Mozart he sometimes fancies he can hear the clatter of the Emperor’s dinnerware interfering with the music (“Contemporary attitudes towards the musical inheritance suffer,” claimed Adorno, “from the fact that no-one has the confidence to be so disrespectful.”)
Erik Satie might almost have had this slur in mind when he turned to Fernand Léger one evening over dinner and stated the need for a “furniture music, that is to say, music that would be a part of the surrounding noises and that would take them into account. I see it as melodious, as masking the clatter of knives and forks without drowning it completely, without imposing itself.”
I saw anxiety because both of these quotations suggest that there are at least certain circumstances when music might be forced to compete with other, more pressing activities. Wagner’s remark might be regarded as the symptom of a time when feudal patronage was waning as a source of income for composers. Satie’s of the burgeoning of another time, when mechanical reproduction and increased time for leisure was making music both more ubiquitous and less venerated than it had been. 
The irony, perhaps, is that when Satie went ahead and created his musique d'ameublement the audience refused to ignore it and listened in silence; while Wagner’s music would become the template for the unheard melodies soundtracking a thousand Hollywood films.
Whatever Satie may have had in mind when he made his comment to Léger, I’m fairly sure it wasn’t this …

6 years ago
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wildcat2030:
“ Iamus, classical music’s computer composer, live from Malaga The first music composed by computer considered good enough for top-class musicians to play is to be performed to mark the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth
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As soon...

wildcat2030:

Iamus, classical music’s computer composer, live from Malaga

The first music composed by computer considered good enough for top-class musicians to play is to be performed to mark the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth

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As soon as you see the title of Iamus’s composition Transits – Into an Abyss, you know it’s going to be challenging, modernist stuff. The strings pile up discords, first spooky, now ominous. But if your tastes run to Bartók, Ligeti and Penderecki, you may like it. At least you have to admit this bloke knows what he’s doing. But this bloke doesn’t know anything at all. Iamus is a computer program. Until the London Symphony Orchestra was handed the score, no human had intervened in preparing the music. “When we tell people that, they think it’s a trick,” says Francisco Vico, leader of the team at the University of Malaga who devised Iamus. “Some say they simply don’t believe us. Others say it’s just creepy.” He expects that when Iamus’s debut CD is released in September, performed by top-shelf musicians including the LSO, it is going to disturb a lot of folk. (via Iamus, classical music’s computer composer, live from Malaga | Music | guardian.co.uk)

(via wildcat2030)

6 years ago
28 notes