Pete Townshend - Prelude 970519 - Iron Man Recitative скачать видео бесплатно

From Pete Townshend's 2001 compilation Scoop 3.

Pete on Prelude 970519: "This was recorded on my birthday 1997, the location was 'The Cube', my home studio from 1985-1997. I had in there a six-foot Yamaha Conservatory Grand piano that was equipped with a MIDI send. So many of the pieces I recorded to cassette or DAT tape in that period had pseudo-orchestral sounds mixed in with the piano. The piano part was later tightly edited by me (early in 2001) and I then added synthesised strings and flute.

This piano 'prelude' was intended to evoke serenity, calm, and ultimately- in a very short space of time-readi-ness to sleep. Soft is intentionally soporific and light. Occasionally, for a month at most, I would try to record at least one piece every day as part of what I called my 'Daily Project'. This idea was inspired by my reading of THE ARTIST'S WAY, and the course work I did on the 12-week programme of creative stimulation the authors recommend. If I didn't record any music I might instead try to write a short essay or poem of some kind. "

Pete on Iron Man Recitative: This was recorded around October 1993 on the studio Synclavier I still use for the majority of my composing work. With a few tricks one can record a MIDI keyboard track and live vocal tracks at the same time. I could work in short sections and then edit them together later on. (This is something modern sequencing software manages easily today). I read from the first two or three pages of Ted Hughes's book of THE IRON MAN and simply made the chords and melody up as I went along. The string sounds are synthetic of course, mainly from the Denny Jaeger library for Synclavier. Around this time the studio I was using was a converted Dutch barge called 'Grand Crue'. It had once carried live eels) which I thought was amusing because my company is called 'Eel Pie'). The mixing desk was an old Neve which was later sold and is now somewhere in the USA. The barge is still berthed out-side my large studio in Twickenham, and is used at the moment by my old mate Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds. (Ian was the guitar player of The Original Mirrors who-with The Clash - were my favourite group during the '80s.

Early in 19921 contacted the Youth team at The Young Vic theatre in London, to ask whether they would help me put up a children's version of my complete opera The Iron Man. When we came to work on it the first problem was that it was not quite complete. In my own working script I had arranged for a Prologue to set the scene for a woodland gathering of various animals-an Owl, Fox and others who witness The Iron Man first rising from the sea. I had not yet written this Prologue when I presented the songs to the Director David Thacker instead I had recorded narration by the radio actor Fraser Kerr who read the actual text of the necessary pages. David suggested that I prepare music to run underneath these chunks of narration, and during an early creative meeting it occurred to both of us that it might be possible to use Ted's prose as recitative. We thought I would have to make many changes to the text to make it musically rhythmic. In fact when I first sat down to try it, I sang right the way through the first few pages line by line without a break. Ted's prose - probably because he was a poet-had musical rhythm that was perfect for an operatic libretto.

I felt I was a natural at this, and had discovered a new talent. Lovers of my Scoop series will have become used to references to The 'Siege' Theme, a simple canonic bass fine which I later adopted as the leitmotiv for the Iron Man. I also composed a number of experimental harmonic exercises around this canon, which I will publish one day as part of a complete score and book for my own small operatic version of The Iron Man. In the play what immediately follows is the song Over The Top, sung by a phantom chorus of ghostly soldiers of whom The Iron Man had once been an ancient ally. The Iron Man had been designed to fight in some now forgotten field of battle, but somehow programmed only to fight alongside foot soldiers against machines built to destroy man. In this respect he worked according to Azimov's Laws of Robotics."

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