This weekend saw the premiere of Greg Barker’s new documentary ‘The Final year’ at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
The movie charts the astoundingly exhaustive efforts by Barak Obama’s diplomatic team to manage complex international problems. The unfettered access to Obama, John Kerry, Samantha Powers, Ben Rhodes and Susan Rice has created an incredible witness document to the often unseen and unappreciated efforts that operate below the surface of a successful administration.
Control Room at Abbey Road during our session. Photo by Nathan Azopardi
We recorded the string score in Abbey Road Studio One with an orchestra after not many weeks of writing. The soundtrack for this movie was one of the hardest challenges I’ve ever faced as a composer. Putting music under political figures is fraught with ethical and artistic problems. In documentary, the role of the composer is to frame the action, NOT tell the audience what to feel. I wrote entire soundtrack three times until I found a way in, that didn’t feel biased or dramatic.
The reviews from the Hollywood Reporter and Variety are here and I feel reflect the importance and peculiarity of this movie.
I’ve been working on the soundtrack to an incredible documentary called ‘Keep Quiet’ which has just been selected to premiere at New York’s prestigious TriBeCa Film Festival.
The film concerns a passionate anti-Semite, Csanád Szegedi who was a rising star in Hungary’s far-right party – Jobbik – until he discovered his family’s extraordinary secret…
His maternal grandparents were Jewish.
“I couldn’t believe it, I just couldn’t believe it,” says Szegedi, still perhaps shaken by the ultimate branding of Jewish hatred and persecution. “I thought, this is the worst thing that could ever happen – there couldn’t ever be anything worse than this.” –Daily Telegraph profile
This extraordinary revelation prompts an unlikely, but seemingly genuine and heartfelt conversion from anti-Semite to Orthodox Jew.
My soundtrack was largely recorded live at Abbey Road Studio 2 – with Gordon Davidson engineering fantastically. It’s written for solo cello and based around a scordatura technique – that’s when an instruments’ strings are tuned in an unlikely fashion rendering weird overtones and resonances.
The film’s director Sam Blair and producer Alex Holder were clear from day one that the score needed to be unsettled, fragile, airy and peculiar – in the best sense of the word. Editor Ben Stark did an incredible job at hearing beyond my sketches, and the results are a real departure for me. Some of the music from the film is below.
Director: Joseph Martin, Sam Blair Producer: Alex Holder, Danielle Clark, Nicole Stott Editor: Kim Gaster, Ben Stark Cinematographer: Márton Vízkelety Executive Producer: John Battsek Composer: Philip Sheppard Cast: Csanad Szegedi, Chief Chabad Rabbi Boruch Oberlander, Anne Applebaum, Eva ‘Bobby’ Neumann, Katalin Molnár Szegediné
CONTACTS
Press Contact
Susan Norget
Susan Norget Film Promotion
New York City, 10013 Phone: 212 431 0090 susan@norget.com
This is my notebook for the score of the forthcoming documentary film ‘Manhunt’ directed by Greg Barker. The film premieres at Sundance 2013 this coming week and tells the story of the CIA’s hunt for Bin Laden. It’s a great counterpoint to Zero Dark Thirty as it shows the frustrations, errors and dangers faced by the largely female intelligence officers, aka ‘the Sisterhood’.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/74934172″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/74933090″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Here’s a track or two from the soundtrack I’ve written.
Tonight sees the premiere on More 4 of David Sington’s excellent documentary about the credit crisis in the US called ‘The Flaw’. This is the trailer. I was commissioned to write a cartoon-like score for the film – quite a different mode from my normal style of music…
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.
From his birth in Rio de Janeiro in 1948 to his untimely and tragic death in Baghdad in 2003, Sergio Vieira de Mello led an extraordinary life.
Vieira de Mello joined the United Nations in 1969 and would devote his life to the organization and its ideals. Known to most as simply ‘Sergio’, Vieira de Mello worked in some of the world’s most volatile and distressed regions. His career spanned assignments in Lebanon, Peru, Bosnia, Sudan, Cambodia, Cyprus, Mozambique, East Timor and Iraq. Working mostly for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Sergio achieved some astonishing successes. These achievements were not easily won. Sergio grew up with the UN, developing several guiding principles along the way.
When Sergio died he was serving as the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary General to Iraq. He had managed to find a balance between pragmatism and idealism, principles and compromise. He was the UN’s ‘go to guy’, having spent decades refining his approach. In the words of his friend and colleague Dennis McNamara, Sergio was, “one of the bright stars, maybe the brightest. He was the master magician, mediator, manager, massager of egos.” This was the tragedy of August 19.
Olympic Documentary London Calling – screens this week
I’ve just heard that this Wednesday (4th March 2009) sees the broadcast of the BBC Documentary ‘London Calling’, which, according to the BBC website;
…follows the exploits of the Ceremonies Team as they prepare to mount the eight-minute show to mark the official handover of responsibility for the Olympic Games from Beijing to London…
I was the music director for the handover, which involved writing a score for the London Symphony Orchestra (based on several well-known traditional British songs as well as The Shipping Forecast and the Greenwich Time Signal) as well as re-arranging the UK National Anthem (in order to make it a bit more lyrical).
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/1592686]
The show had to culminate in a well-known song, so, together with co-producer Steve Robson, I recorded Jimmy Page and Leona Lewis performing Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin together with (the brilliant bass player) Guy Pratt and Geoff Dugmore (the most civilised, yet powerful drummer you’ll ever find). We laid down the backing at Olympic Studios with as near to an authentic setup as possible – even down to the risers for the drums and correct amps.
Hearing that riff played by that man in that room.
I Love My Job.
Guy Pratt, Jimmy Page and Geoff Dugmore at Olympic Studios http://radiomovies.wordpress.com
I suspect that the programme will make fairly nailbiting viewing as there were major highs and lows throughout the long development process for everyone, culminating in the adrenalin rush of the show at the Bird’s Nest Stadium – but followed by the revelation that the direct feed of music and sound (which we’d spent months preparing) didn’t appear to find its way from the stadium to TV sets.
For me there were several moments that still seem a little unreal –
At the Bird's Nest Stadium before the show
Firstly, being in Air studios conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, who were blissfully unaware throughout the recording session that the ‘James‘ I was on intercom with in the control room was a certain guitar player… Secondly, realising just how technically and musically accomplished Leona Lewis is as an artist. I’ve not worked with many singers in the pop world who can discuss coloratura technique, and operas by Purcell and Bellini. Actually, there was one… Jeff Buckley ! (Check this out…) But Leona can really sing with heart and soul, balanced with quite astounding technique.
But also… Chris Hoy, Jamie Staff and Victoria Pendleton (plus medals) coming to my place for a drink before the cast party. I think I’ll tell my grandchildren about that…
Here’s my version of the National Anthem performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and the singers from The National Youth Theatre.[Audio http://radiomovies.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/anthem-july-20th-1.mp3]
I’ve been working on the soundtrack to an incredible documentary called 
