Ingram Marshall

Fog Tropes

Fog Tropes was composd in 1982.  The first version of the work was a collage of recordings of fog horns around San Francisco Bay.  The composer later reworked it into the version for brass that we will hear this evening.  It was used by Martin Scorsese in the opening sequence of his movie Shutter Island.

Peter Maxwell Davies

Suite from The Devils

In 1971 Peter Maxwell Davies collaborated twice with the director Ken Russell.  The projects could not have been more different: one was a version of Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend starring Twiggy and Barbara Windsor, the other was an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s account of demonic possession and exection in 17th century France, The Devils of Loudun.  Fifty-five years after its release, The Devils remains a shocking and disturbing piece of cinema, and the score exhibits a bleakness that the composer developed further in The Lighthouse and other works.

John Adams

Chamber Symphony

The Chamber Symphony by John Adams was not written for a movie, but was partly inspired by a film genre. Adams writes, “I originally set out to write a children’s piece, and my intentions were to sample the voices of children and work them into a fabric of acoustic and electronic instruments. But before I began that project I had another one of those strange interludes that often lead to a new piece. This one involved a brief moment of what Melville called “the shock of recognition”: I was sitting in my studio, studying the score to Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, and as I was doing so I became aware that my seven year old son Sam was in the adjacent room watching cartoons (good cartoons, old ones from the ’50s). The hyperactive, insistently aggressive and acrobatic scores for the cartoons mixed in my head with the Schoenberg music, itself hyperactive, acrobatic and not a little aggressive, and I realized suddenly how much these two traditions had in common.”

Programme note excerpt reprinted with kind permission of www.earbox.com