Something we’ve been working on since the beginning of the year is a particularly exciting new project- The Bird’s Eye Film Festival have commissioned us to write a new score for Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1929 classic silent film Pandora’s Box.
We’re very excited about the work we’ve done so far- due to the restricted space of the cinema, only 5 of us are able to work on the show and, as a result, we’re breaking out as many instruments as we can, and doing our level best to vary things over the course of 2 hours. As well as violin, ‘cello, double bass, drums and guitar, we’ll be playing musical saw, toy organ, glockenspiel, prepared recordings and all manner of percussion- we’ve found some interesting sounds coming from an old wok, for instance…
We’ll be performing this newly-written score live, accompanying a screening of the film at…
BFI SouthBank
Wednesday 11th March 2009
For tickets, visit the BFI website. And be quick, it looks like they’re selling well.
For videos, photos and more information about the festival, follow some of these links…
Bird’s Eye View on Facebook
Bird’s Eye View on MySpace
Bird’s Eye View on Bebo
Bird’s Eye View videos on Daily Motion
Bird’s Eye View Videos on YouTube
Bird’s Eye View photos on Flickr
I would like to know whose idea it was to have Monroe Transfer do the musical accompaniment to Pandora’s Box and whether there any other silent film music tracks planned.
Tristram Powell
Hi Tristram; we were contacted by the Bird’s Eye View Film Festival, who had seen us play a few times, and wanted to get us on the programme for the 2009 festival. As far as we know, that was the only planned performance of the score, and they’ve not asked us to do anything else yet. There’s always next year’s festival, though, and we’re always enthusiastic about finding new projects…
I was lucky enough to be at this performance and I thought it was just fantastic. On the basis of this I’m going to come and see you play in London when I can.
Well done. Brilliant night. Any plans to release your score?
Following on from Barton’s comment above – can you confirm if the Pandora’s Box score
will be released?
Hi Dave, and Barton. At the moment, I’m afraid there aren’t any plans to release the score for the show- we’re hoping to edit the performance recordings into a short video at some point in the near future, and there are some plans to arrange some other screenings of the film with our music, but they’re far from concrete at the moment. If anything happens, we’ll be sure to let you know…