Film, Theatre and Installation Art

>> Integrating music with other media can be one of the most stimulating and creative projects, especially where challenging concepts underpin the work, like Neurotic.

One of the most quirky of my compositions was for John Sarsfield, a graphic desinger. His concept, shown at Camberwell School of Art, was to create a font from musical symbols or representations. I transcribed the alphabet into 'music' for a pianola where, essentially, the pianola played the lyrics . The result was a transcription of John Lennon's Imagine (the word 'imagine' can be seen on the pianola roll in the picture). The pianola played both the actual piano line and the words! The installation was very engaging. Viewers listened to the piano thump out Lennon's lyrics whilst reading the piano roll as it scrolled through the piano. Reactions ranged from viewers creating their own narratives for the piece (for example, the violent piano was pouring out its internal struggle with being forced to 'recite' Lennon's peacenik lyrics) to simple appreciation of the simple beauty of the paper piano roll and the fonts that the transcription created. It was a terrible racket, either way, despite the poignancy of the piece!

In 2005, I wrote the music for Phil Mulloy's The Day the Earth Moved. Phil used minimal block colour techniques to create a feature film about a dysfunctional family, the Christies. The music for the credits was deliberately at odds with the challenging subject matter of the film. It is for double bass, harp and choir and slips from radical minimalism, picking up the film, to the trite via the ethereal. You can hear the credit music and a draft for a song (using minimalist, synthetic voices, cross rhythms and resultants in harp, and perky vocoded flute) for the film at www.myspace.com/andrewtweedie. The Day the Earth Moved has been shown at animation and film festivals across the globe.

© Copyright Andrew Tweedie 2008