Chosen Road from Fall From Earth – by Philip Sheppard – Clio Gould Violinist
For Clio Gould
This track was written in a single afternoon just before our Abbey Road Sessions for my album Fall From Earth.
I had just had confirmation that Clio Gould would be leading the orchestra for my recordings. I knew I had to write something special for her.
I’ve known Clio’s playing for most of my life – in fact, we first played together when we were 15 years old.
Even then, her sound was utterly and totally breathtaking and I’ve been in love with her playing ever since. Her sound is effortless, silken, chocolatey and quite unlike anybody else.
Chosen Road is about the paths that you take and the routes that you choose through life. Sometimes the going is hard, but the views can take your breath away.
Clio is the greatest violinist in the world. This is my way of saying thank you to her.
Order from Bandcamp
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Here’s a track from my recent album ‘Somewhere along the edge’
My friend the photographer Trey Ratcliff is a master of making poetry from light. His images are a constant source of inspiration for me. See his work here.
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This is a track from my new album – Somewhere Along The Edge. The album was recorded at Abbey Road Studios in September 2016 and is my first studio album away from a specific movies soundtrack for some time.
Each track is dedicated to someone who lives fully at the edge of life— whether explorers, artists, travellers, thinkers…
This is dedicated to the amazing artist, technologist, fellow cellist, drone pilot, underwater photographer and more importantly, great friend, Eric Cheng. His photography is exquisite – echengphoto.com/index
If you would like a free review copy then please comment below and I’ll send you a code by return.
Philip Sheppard October 2016
Somewhere Along The Edge on iTunes
https://exit.sc/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fitun.es%2Fus%2F1S4Teb Somewhere Along The Edge on Bandcamp
http://philipsheppard.bandcamp.com/…/somewhere-along-the-ed… Somewhere Along The Edge On Spotify
This morning I’ve been playing some Paganini from an early edition, viewing through an Avegant Glyph driven by an Amazon Kindle Fire.
So far, it’s pretty thrilling experience and somewhat exciting to consider the possibilities of accessing archive material without expensive printing, using music stands, and having a truly focussed environment whilst working.
My normal day job is composing and recording film soundtracks. This is where such technology will fly, especially once reduced into a lens. The software I use to sequence, record and mix will all be effectively projected at a low level into the eye and will occupy no real estate in my studio.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to mastering those octaves – technology won’t do that for me…
This year I was about to lead into introducing Andre Agassi onstage when I spotted a lady playing with her phone. I decided to make her a bit of a star for the day.
Here’s what I did after a long day of recording in Abbey Road one night last week. I’d been conducting the orchestra all day, and my brain was in another place.
I was speaking a language far from English, and things were swimming in front of my eyes. Rather than start heading home, I decided to decompress a bit.
There’s a deeply unusual documentary I’m writing at the moment, so I put the film on, Gordon, my fantastic engineer set everything to record and I got ready to play along. In the end, I ended up doing a 59 minute solo take on my cello – which is something of a record for me… It was a bit surprising seeing as my arms were really aching from conducting all day.
Anyway, here’s the result. (Don’t worry, it’s not 59 minutes).
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We’re going to release the soundtrack on iTunes, Spotify and many other digital music platforms shortly.
If you’d like to receive a one-off email when this is released, just leave us a short message below naming your favourite track.
You’ll get a free download of one of my other film scores by way of thanks.
And, you’ll really be helping us, as the most popular track will become the first track on the album.
Here’s a piece I’ve just written inspired by a fabulous photographer I know called Cole Rise. I love his air of magical realism… hyper-dreamy landscapes where gravity doesn’t quite work in the way it should…[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/86053920″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
There’s nothing like walking out on stage not knowing what you’re going to play. For many of us classically trained musos this a nightmare we’ve all had in troubled nights’ sleeps… and yet, when you get used to doing it, it’s the greatest drug in the world.
I’m lucky to work with the best improvisers I know, whether in Not So Silent Movies… or the extraordinary Impropera.
Impropera improvise operas on suggestions from the audience. It’s surreal and hilarious. We just had a performance last week which I wanted to share with you here. The pianist Anthony Ingle is a genius. I use the word literally & with no hyperbole. He is a genius. I’ve said it again.
Anthony Ingle – photo by Julian Macedo
On the night, we were asked to make a set of variations on a theme from the audience – La Vie en Rose, in the style of three different composers, Dufay, Mozart and Gershwin. Anthony is able to pull melody, harmony, phrasing and structure from thin air – I get to noodle around on top (that’s the easy bit!). The rush of goosebumps when it clicks is crazy. When it goes wrong, it goes properly wrong.
Being strong & wrong and being quite happy about it is (I’m convinced) the key to being totally comfortable on stage.
Well, here’s the improv. This is all on the fly with no preparation… so be kind! This is recorded from the end of the Dufay bit on an iPhone in the audience, so it’s not great quality, but you’ll get the idea..!
My solo performing setup generally includes loop pedals, pitch shifters and reverb units.
I’m doing a lot of experimentation at the moment with my live setup, using acoustic & electric cellos, new custom built units as well as some exciting new effects pedals from Boss, Boomerang & Line 6. Before I plan a programme I always draw a new circuit/ wiring plan and however much I try to simplify things around my feet, they always end up verging on the complex..!
The sketch above is the setup I have in my studio at the moment… Looking a little tangled for my liking…
Here’s a short improvisation from a set I performed in Mexico a couple of months ago. The guest speakers prior to me had mentioned whale songs, volcanos and one of my favourite pieces, La Folia. Needless to say, all of them found their way in.
It’s been great to see Andrew Bird storming Sundance with a live set where he built songs up from live loops on violin using a parallel setup of Line 6 delay modellers, one tightly locked, the other more for floating ambient lines. You can watch it here.
Andrew Bird
The great thing is that the gadgetry he’s using is rendered unimportant by the emotional punch of the songs. It’s easy to get hung up on gear for its own sake, but if you’re not making someone laugh, cry or get the chills, it ain’t worth it…
I’m on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row tonight to talk about music & journeys.
I’m with a total hero of mine – Adrian Utley from Portishead – both of us being interviewed by Mark Lawson.
Here’s a free track for you if you’d like to download it – click through to Soundcloud & it’s free.[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/5680720″ iframe=”true” /]
Last night saw the first ever collaboration between Impropera & Not so Silent Movies… at the wonderful Kings Place. We improvised a new score, and new operatic narrative to Nosferatu… well, it is nearly Halloween.
Our next event is on Sunday afternoon. Click here for more details.
Last month was great fun too – Jarvis Cocker, Dario Marianelli and John Etheridge joined our fabulous house band. Here’s Gramophone magazine’s blog about it.
If you’d like to get more free tracks, or news of gigs – click here.
There’s an oft quoted phrase that claims that architecture is frozen music. I like inverting that – music is liquid architecture. However, the blueprint above seems to have melted a little too much.
I just scanned an arrangement to email to a band and one of the sequences got a little fried as you can see. However, I’d like them to record it like this and see what happens…
Bobby Fischer Against the World, a film by Liz Garbus, has just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Here are a few tracks from my soundtrack composed for the film, plus… the title track as a free download. (Click to download & please leave a comment below).
I first heard about Bobby Fischer when I was a kid, heavily into performing classical music. Many of the great Russian virtuoso musicians and composers had a reputation for being chess fanatics, and I remember my mother’s violin professor Beatrix Marr, describing the friendly rivalry between Boris Spassky and David Oistrakh (one of the world’s greatest violinists). Beatrix regularly thrashed me in chess matches in her cottage, making no allowance for my age…
Music begins with an opening gesture, a phrase or a hook and runs along a temporal plane before reaching a cadence, resolution and ending. Great music lives on as an impression of an experience intertwined with emotion and context. You don’t need to be able to interpret what the blobs and squiggles on a musical staff mean in order to be enveloped in a mindblowing musical experience. You don’t need to learn the ‘rules’ of harmony to be profoundly moved by a performance. The great chess grandmasters inhabit a world we can literally never comprehend. A great chess match is a performance, a spontaneous composition of pure elegant counterpoint.
The supreme master of counterpoint in the entire history of music is J.S.Bach. Even as an experienced musician, I cannot begin to grasp how he processed vast amounts of mathematical musical data, rendering it into perfectly structured miniature cathedrals of sound. The inside of his brain must have had parallels with that of Bobby Fischer, but despite this vast intellect he (unlike Fischer) was able to live a life as a complete human being. (I mean, he had fourteen children for a start…).
Bach’s famous first prelude in C was my starting point for scoring Bobby Fischer against the World. I took the theme and turned it inside out – it begins as fragmented and hesitant gestures as if unsure before playing out to an inevitable endgame. (That’s the piano and string orchestra track above by the way).
The whole of the rest of the score is composed from Bach’s themes – from the Goldberg Variations to the keyboard concertos. This piece below is based on the D minor keyboard concerto, though it’s totally unrecognizable as it’s more like a romantic American/Russian prelude that descends into a shameless waltz. This piece runs underneath the famous match between Spassky and Fischer known as the Game of Placid Beauty. This track was written in New York, against the clock when we were rushing to finish the film, and was a piece that went through so many versions and changes before settling on what became ironically known as The Brooklyn Symphony (there’s always one cue in a film which is a major problem and this was it..!)
On a final note, one deeply sad aspect of the making of this film was the loss of the brilliant editor Karen Schmeer. I had already worked with Karen for two years on Greg Barker’s extraordinary film Sergio, and Karen was a joy to work with. We knew each other purely through emails, Skype chats and the odd phone call. We never met, and it’s a strange kind of mourning when the person you knew and liked existed purely at the end of another laptop. Karen had plotted to get me involved in this film by surreptitiously working my older pieces into the rough cut of the movie, without Liz Garbus (the director) fully catching on to what was happening. The day before Karen left us, she had confided to me that her cunning plan was working very nicely.
The film is naturally dedicated to Karen, and the music is wholeheartedly for her (well, the good bits at least…).
Here below is the score for the Brooklyn Symphony with her dedication at the top. Thanks for reading this – Philip Sheppard
The score for the Brooklyn Symphony from Bobby Fischer Against the World.
This is an image of what the skies may look like when our sun starts dying in the future… and it’s a striking scene in ‘Inside the Milky Way’ which airs tonight on the National Geographic channel.
I wrote the score for this beautiful-looking programme and it gave me a chance to play around with large clockwork-like swathes of music, mainly based on Bach and Handel.
In this second series of Key Matters, presenter Ivan Hewett explores the question of why certain musical keys have become associated with particular moods. For example, why is A major almost always employed by composers to write optimistic, even ecstatic music? And how has E minor become the key of choice for portraying menace and tragedy?
Cellist and composer Philip Sheppard defines the qualities of E minor on Wednesday with music ranging from Brahms, Elgar and Shostakovich to The Clash.
Here’s a free Easter gift for the first 100 of you who click this link. It’s a free mp3 of a piece I wrote called Penitential Psalm – hear it here:[Audio http://radiomovies.wordpress.com/files/2009/04/02-penitential-psalm.mp3]
As I’ve mentioned many times in previous posts I’m a great believer in mp3s being legally free to download where the artist/writer/publisher can give their consent, particularly where the recording is of an event for which concert/theatre/film-goers have already paid an admission charge.
This secondary exploitation is often exploited in the true sense of the word with charges being levied for something which has technically never left the digital domain.
I think a rebroadcasting of material can be free in many cases without exploitation, and can act as a way of spreading the word about a great performer, group or writer. I love it when authors upload some of their books as free pdfs in the fairly certain knowledge that (if the material is great) people will go and buy physical copies of their other work. In the case of performers, it’s a great way of getting people to come to gigs.
Here are a couple of great sites for interesting classical mp3s – all free:
The European archive of classical recordings has over 8oo pages of LPs in mp3 format on its site as free downloads. These are extraordinary recordings featuring some of the world’s most historic performers.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has a really high quality concert series which it condenses into a regular podcast. The whole concert series is archived, and it shows great foresight on the part of the performers and the museum itself to make this available to anyone.
This week’s events/broadcasts:
David Starkey’s Henry Mind of a Tyrant is on this Easter on Channel 4 in the UK.
11th April: 7pm – Channel 4. Episode 1 Prince
13th April: 9pm – Channel 4. Episode 2 Warrior
You can hear my soundtrack for the series here for free, and a free Henry VIII download here!
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This morning I’ve been playing some Paganini from an early edition, viewing through an 
I’m on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row tonight to talk about music & journeys.
