STRIKE! (Sergei Eisenstein (1924) 89’)
with a new score by Ed Hughes
performed by the New Music Players
DVD box set of Eisenstein 1920s silent films
AVAILABLE NOW FROM TARTAN VIDEO
STRIKE! and BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN
New scores by Ed Hughes
New Music Players conducted by Patrick Bailey
In a double celebration of Russian cinema and culture, 2007 saw the world premiere live performance of a new score for Eisenstein’s first major silent movie, STRIKE!, and the release of a DVD box set by Tartan Video of three major Eisenstein films. STRIKE! and BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, one of the most influential films in cinema history, both feature new scores by Ed Hughes performed by New Music Players and conducted by Patrick Bailey, specially recorded in 5.1 surround sound (DTS).
Ed Hughes says ''I wanted to make music for Eisenstein's picture that was as dynamic and exhilarating as his editing'.
Professor Laura Marcus, Professor of English (film) at the University of Sussex, says:
‘‘Cinema music should sparkle and glisten’, wrote Adorno and Eisler in their book of 1947, ‘Composing for the Films’. Ed Hughes’ music for Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) and Battleship Potemkin (1926) brilliantly achieves this, in musical scores which fit the films perfectly, bringing out both their lyricism and the danger of the industrial and political conflicts represented.’
The world premiere live performance of STRIKE! at the Barbican Cinema on Sunday 17 June was part of Barbican Film's critically acclaimed Silent Film and Live Music Series. Live music and electronics combined to create a vast and impressive sound experience to match the epic scale of the film. The New Music Players, comprising eight of the UK’s finest chamber musicians, were transformed by state-of-the-art live and recorded electronics, and surround sound.
A UK tour of STRIKE! continued in summer and autumn 2007, with funding from Arts Council England.
Tour dates:
Sunday 17 June 2007 at 3pm
Barbican Cinema 1
World premiere performance
Saturday 14 July 2007 at 8.30pm
Cambridge Film Festival
Saturday 3 November 2007 at 8pm
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
Monday 12 November 2007 at 8pm
British Library, 96 Euston Road, London
Tuesday 13 November 2007 at 8pm
Turner Sims Concert Hall, Southampton
STRIKE! (1924) is the first major landmark in a series of iconic silent feature films made by Eisenstein in Soviet Union in the 1920s (BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN and OCTOBER followed).
The film traces the origins of unrest in a factory amongst Bolshevik workers. It is based upon strikes which actually took place in 1903, beginning in Rostov-on-the-Don and spreading to more than five hundred factories.
The film focusses in upon an injustice meted out on a worker by the management, which precipitates a resistance movement. A spontaneous protest becomes a strike. The workers are seen to assert Lenin’s lesson ‘the strength of the working class lies in its organisation’.
However, the strike hits the workers’ families hard. Feelings of bitterness intensify, and in a moment of stress, one of the strike’s leaders allows a spy to identify him (with a tiny camera hidden in a pocket watch).
The final section of the film, ‘Liquidation’, features justly famous experiments in montage. This is the culmination of the confrontation between oppressive state and workers, in which the workers flee the troops and are massacred. Eisenstein brings home the brutality of the police operation by intercutting graphic scenes from an abatoir. This experiment in dialectical montage has a radical impact.
The rhythm of the film and its unremitting pace and constant accumulation of tension lends itself to the score’s pounding musical rhythms and textures. Ed Hughes further aims to bring out the dialectical nature of the material in his new musical score, by opposing and then synthesizing electronic and acoustic ensemble sounds, especially in the final scene. The live score requires four channel surround and an ensemble of eight instruments including a large array of percussion.
Ed Hughes (b. 1968) is a composer and a lecturer in the Music Department at Sussex University. Commissions from 2004-5 included Memory of Colour (an acoustic/electro-acoustic score in response to Teruyoshi Yoshida’s installation Surface of the Lake) for the Brighton Festival and a satirical opera (The Birds) for the City of London Festival and The Opera Group. Memory of Colour was nominated for a British Academy Composers’ Award (New Media section). The Birds was awarded the Gresham College Prize and was profiled live on BBC Radio 3 with extracts performed by the cast. In 2006 he was the composer on an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project ‘Hearing Voices’ which explored the roles of the voice and electronics in music theatre and was performed at the World Music Days in Stuttgart.
Since 2004 his work has toured internationally to the Sydney and Salamanca Festivals and nationally to major UK festivals including Cheltenham Festival and Buxton Opera. He has written several live performance scores for films including Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Ozu’s I Was Born, But..., Mitry’s Pacific 231, and Ivens’s Rain, and has worked on Playing a Part: The Story of Claude Cahun (a recent documentary by Lizzie Thynne). He is working on a new live performance score for Eisenstein’s Strike! which will be premiered in full at London’s Barbican Centre on 17 June 2007 prior to an Arts Council of England funded UK tour. The first section of this work was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now programme during the 2006 Cutting Edge series in London.
Ed’s scores to Battleship Potemkin and Strike were released on DVD in 5.1 surround in August 2007. Available from Tartan Video.
His new work Auditorium (with photographer Sophy Ricketts) for Glyndebourne Education and Photoworks was premiered on Saturday 17 November 2007 at Glyndebourne. The work was also installed for three months at the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill on Sea (Oct-Dec 2007) and was performed at Tate Britain on Friday 8 March 2008. Further gallery installations include Modena, Italy from 19 April 2008 and Cardiff Ffotogallery from 25 April 2008.
For more information and sounds see:
www.edhughes.org.uk
Ed is represented by British Music Information Centre London www.bmic.co.uk
and University of York Music Press www.uymp.co.uk
with a new score by Ed Hughes
performed by the New Music Players
DVD box set of Eisenstein 1920s silent films
AVAILABLE NOW FROM TARTAN VIDEO
STRIKE! and BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN
New scores by Ed Hughes
New Music Players conducted by Patrick Bailey
In a double celebration of Russian cinema and culture, 2007 saw the world premiere live performance of a new score for Eisenstein’s first major silent movie, STRIKE!, and the release of a DVD box set by Tartan Video of three major Eisenstein films. STRIKE! and BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, one of the most influential films in cinema history, both feature new scores by Ed Hughes performed by New Music Players and conducted by Patrick Bailey, specially recorded in 5.1 surround sound (DTS).
Ed Hughes says ''I wanted to make music for Eisenstein's picture that was as dynamic and exhilarating as his editing'.
Professor Laura Marcus, Professor of English (film) at the University of Sussex, says:
‘‘Cinema music should sparkle and glisten’, wrote Adorno and Eisler in their book of 1947, ‘Composing for the Films’. Ed Hughes’ music for Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) and Battleship Potemkin (1926) brilliantly achieves this, in musical scores which fit the films perfectly, bringing out both their lyricism and the danger of the industrial and political conflicts represented.’
The world premiere live performance of STRIKE! at the Barbican Cinema on Sunday 17 June was part of Barbican Film's critically acclaimed Silent Film and Live Music Series. Live music and electronics combined to create a vast and impressive sound experience to match the epic scale of the film. The New Music Players, comprising eight of the UK’s finest chamber musicians, were transformed by state-of-the-art live and recorded electronics, and surround sound.
A UK tour of STRIKE! continued in summer and autumn 2007, with funding from Arts Council England.
Tour dates:
Sunday 17 June 2007 at 3pm
Barbican Cinema 1
World premiere performance
Saturday 14 July 2007 at 8.30pm
Cambridge Film Festival
Saturday 3 November 2007 at 8pm
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
Monday 12 November 2007 at 8pm
British Library, 96 Euston Road, London
Tuesday 13 November 2007 at 8pm
Turner Sims Concert Hall, Southampton
STRIKE! (1924) is the first major landmark in a series of iconic silent feature films made by Eisenstein in Soviet Union in the 1920s (BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN and OCTOBER followed).
The film traces the origins of unrest in a factory amongst Bolshevik workers. It is based upon strikes which actually took place in 1903, beginning in Rostov-on-the-Don and spreading to more than five hundred factories.
The film focusses in upon an injustice meted out on a worker by the management, which precipitates a resistance movement. A spontaneous protest becomes a strike. The workers are seen to assert Lenin’s lesson ‘the strength of the working class lies in its organisation’.
However, the strike hits the workers’ families hard. Feelings of bitterness intensify, and in a moment of stress, one of the strike’s leaders allows a spy to identify him (with a tiny camera hidden in a pocket watch).
The final section of the film, ‘Liquidation’, features justly famous experiments in montage. This is the culmination of the confrontation between oppressive state and workers, in which the workers flee the troops and are massacred. Eisenstein brings home the brutality of the police operation by intercutting graphic scenes from an abatoir. This experiment in dialectical montage has a radical impact.
The rhythm of the film and its unremitting pace and constant accumulation of tension lends itself to the score’s pounding musical rhythms and textures. Ed Hughes further aims to bring out the dialectical nature of the material in his new musical score, by opposing and then synthesizing electronic and acoustic ensemble sounds, especially in the final scene. The live score requires four channel surround and an ensemble of eight instruments including a large array of percussion.
Ed Hughes (b. 1968) is a composer and a lecturer in the Music Department at Sussex University. Commissions from 2004-5 included Memory of Colour (an acoustic/electro-acoustic score in response to Teruyoshi Yoshida’s installation Surface of the Lake) for the Brighton Festival and a satirical opera (The Birds) for the City of London Festival and The Opera Group. Memory of Colour was nominated for a British Academy Composers’ Award (New Media section). The Birds was awarded the Gresham College Prize and was profiled live on BBC Radio 3 with extracts performed by the cast. In 2006 he was the composer on an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project ‘Hearing Voices’ which explored the roles of the voice and electronics in music theatre and was performed at the World Music Days in Stuttgart.
Since 2004 his work has toured internationally to the Sydney and Salamanca Festivals and nationally to major UK festivals including Cheltenham Festival and Buxton Opera. He has written several live performance scores for films including Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Ozu’s I Was Born, But..., Mitry’s Pacific 231, and Ivens’s Rain, and has worked on Playing a Part: The Story of Claude Cahun (a recent documentary by Lizzie Thynne). He is working on a new live performance score for Eisenstein’s Strike! which will be premiered in full at London’s Barbican Centre on 17 June 2007 prior to an Arts Council of England funded UK tour. The first section of this work was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now programme during the 2006 Cutting Edge series in London.
Ed’s scores to Battleship Potemkin and Strike were released on DVD in 5.1 surround in August 2007. Available from Tartan Video.
His new work Auditorium (with photographer Sophy Ricketts) for Glyndebourne Education and Photoworks was premiered on Saturday 17 November 2007 at Glyndebourne. The work was also installed for three months at the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill on Sea (Oct-Dec 2007) and was performed at Tate Britain on Friday 8 March 2008. Further gallery installations include Modena, Italy from 19 April 2008 and Cardiff Ffotogallery from 25 April 2008.
For more information and sounds see:
www.edhughes.org.uk
Ed is represented by British Music Information Centre London www.bmic.co.uk
and University of York Music Press www.uymp.co.uk
