From Ariel....

Following on from an earlier blog post , I asked Philip Lane, well known for his reconstructions of film scores, what it was like to work on Alwyn's scores... How did you first become involved with the film scores of William Alwyn? And what can you remember about working with them? PL: The first Alwyn films I worked on were The Crimson Pirate and A night to remember for which I had no material other than the soundtrack. As with all projects the first job is to extract which passages of the film score are strong enough musically to stand up meaningfully without the pictures.  In the case of  Crimson Pirate , the record company concerned, Silva Screen, chose the extracts they wanted and put them on a cassette for me. The result, recorded in Prague, I played to Mary Alwyn (aka composer, Doreen Carwithen) at her home in Blythburgh.  The garden at William and Mary's home in Blythburgh. Painted by William Alwyn. She was suitably pleased and encouraging in ...

A snippet from a film score sketch by William Alwyn. When I tell relatives, friends or colleagues that I have been reconstructing old film scores, a polite if somewhat blank expression usually passes over their faces. I am sure they are conjuring up images of scissors and sellotape, and although I do use such things occasionally, they are not pivotal to my endeavours. What I do requires much more than pencil and rubber and a cassette machine, since what I am involved in is a series of extended aural tests. Since the first question tends to be "Why?", I'll start there. When music was recorded for film no-one, not even the composer thought it would be required again, so the material was usually collected up and binned. There were obviously exceptions. Composers from the concert tradition, as opposed to those primarily involved in commercial music, sometimes saw their film music as just another composition and saved evidence of their work in terms of sketches, shor...