The most influential composer ever to draw English breath, Benjamin Britten did more for music in three active decades than all of London’s musicians in three centuries. … “So many of the great things in the world have come from the outsider,” he reflected, “and that lone dog isn’t always attractive.” Like J.K. Rowling (and…
Tag: music
“The muses will carry us along”: John Williams on composing music and the creative process
In a 2011 interview for The New York Times‘ ArtsBeat site, John Williams, the man who has provided the glorious musical soundtrack for an enormous portion of the world’s collective cinematic experience for the past four decades, talked about his creative process and the way he deals with incipient block by trusting his impulses and…
Dead Can Dance: “Opium”
Anastasis is the first new album from Dead Can Dance in 16 years. The legendary musical duo consisting of Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard (backed by numerous accompanying musicians) has covered a lot of ground, both musically and geographically, since they formed DCD in Melbourne in 1981, and the appearance of a new album by…
Recommended Reading 24
This week we bring you an exceptionally rich list of excellent reading and, in two cases, excellent listening. Topics include: the inherent — and ongoing — problem with financial institutions that are “too big to fail”; the siege of higher education in its traditional form by tech startups and the exploding online college movement; the…
Seven minutes of improvisational genius from Vangelis
A major part of my life’s soundtrack has been provided by Vangelis, and if you, like me, have found your soul resonating with his beautiful, dark, lush, deep, futuristic, exquisite, transcendent music, then you’ll surely find this video to be as gripping as I do. It presents “Rare footage of Vangelis performing an improvisation on…
To escape into twilight realms
(The above music was retitled “Escape” when used in the soundtrack for the film The Hours.) “They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where magic moulded…
In praise of horror movie music, from Bernard Hermann to Goblin to Ennio Morricone to John Carpenter
A recent engaging article from the Guardian pings on a number of my most cherished horror film themes and composers by examining the contributions of, among others, Bernard Hermann, Howard Shore, John Carpenter, Goblin, and Ennio Morricone, and by invoking the cinematic legacy of such directors as Dario Argento, Umberto Lenzi, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, and William Friedkin.
Jimmy Webb says Ray Bradbury and SF taught him how to write beautiful lyrics
How very unexpected, and how absolutely fascinating: songwriter Jimmy Webb, who’s responsible for a boatload of modern pop classics (and much more; he hates being branded as a “middle-of-the-road pop-music writer”), is a deep-thinking science fiction fan who says he learned a lot of his lyric-writing panache from Ray Bradbury. I’ve long felt like I…
Praise for the music
I’ve just received some excellent praise for my “Curse of the Daimon” album from Sanford Allen. In addition to being a cool-cat Texas author of horror and dark fantasy, Sanford is a long-time guitarist/vocalist for Boxcar Satan, the “three-piece band from San Antonio, Texas, that deconstructs American roots music and pours a particularly venomous brand…
There are no words
I mean that both literally and figuratively, the former because the “lyrics” to this song consist mostly of jolly, wordless vocalizing, and the latter because . . . well, just have a look. I’m speechless and giddy all at once, and also strangely aroused and disturbed by delirious visions of a reality I’m not sure…