taken from VERTOV SOUNDS - The Composers Cut Series - Volume IV

Michael Nyman has now completed scores for the three major films that the pioneering Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov made in the late 1920s.

To ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ he has added ‘The Eleventh Year’ and ‘A Sixth Part of the World’ and as a unique experiment for MN Records he has created a new Michael Nyman Band work - by making a montage of material from both of the soundtracks into a single, continuous piece which runs for 77 minutes.

"I wrote the score for Man with a Movie Camera in 2002 and now, with A Sixth Part of the World and The Eleventh Year, I am in the privileged position of having written soundtracks for the three major films that Dziga Vertov made at the end of the 1920s and on which his reputation is based in the west. In the same way as I avoided reading Vertov’s background notes to the music he designated for Man with a Movie Camera when I wrote my score, so with A Sixth Part and The Eleventh Year research was deliberately limited and most of my interest seemed to focus on the similarities and differences between those two films and Man with a Movie Camera (and had me musing on an interesting trio of self-borrowers -Handel, Laurence Sterne and Vertov, with whom I have a strong affinity!) My reaction was to Vertov’s images and the process of their organisation - to the two interrelated, but dissimilar worlds that he presented and promoted in these two films.

Subsequent research, with the help of Barbara Wurm and other archivists from the Austrian Film Institute (which has released a DVD of the two films with the new soundtracks), has allowed me to appreciate differently the content and the context (both cinematic and political) of these two films. And my discovery of the book ?Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, edited by Yuri Tsivian (2004) has thrown up some wonderful supplementary texts like the critic Izmail Urazov's appraisal of A Sixth Part of the World. He writes very powerfully about the musicality of Vertov’s film, which instinctively had influenced my score:

‘Vertov edits sequences like a composer’

That is the cause of the emotion which the film arouses. You cannot relate it; there is no plot, no intensification of the action, but there is an intensification of emotion. Like in music. That is where the emotion comes from. Vertov leads the 'melody', returning to it, playing with dissonances, using the exoticism of the polar snows and the burning hot sands, almost like something beyond sense, almost like a composer using the texture of the sounds.

And within Vertov’s sequences there is a rhythm, with which he infects the viewer: 'a Negress with a child on her back, hammering into your consciousness the tempo and rhythm of the montage of dancing legs, linked to the rhythm of a dance, of the movement of machines...' (Tsivian, p 187)

VERTOV SOUNDS represents a very different approach to the way of processing a soundtrack album: since the music for both films is sectional but continuous and, like Vertov, constantly refers back on itself, there are no ?named tracks' that can be separated out in the way that, say, ?Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds' from The Draughtsman's Contract has become an independent concert work. So the music for the films is presented as a non-stop montage of alternating sequences (sometimes quite complex in themselves) from each film."

Michael Nyman
August 2010
Reviews

"The Michael Nyman Band has never played better than they do here and the sound quality is excellent. If you only buy one Nyman disc, this is the one to get." Haskins (American Records Guide)

Buy from MN Records

A Sixth Part Of The World Part 5

https://mnrecords.greedbag.com/buy/symphony-no-11-hillsborough-memo-0/ 

Symphony No. 11: Hillsborough Memorial represents the culmination of Michael Nyman's thinking around the tragedies connected with Liverpool Football Club. 25 years after the Hillsborough disaster, he says that he hopes it will make a small but significant contribution to the healing process still necessary for the families of the lost fans.

Trailer for Michael Nyman's Symphony No. 11: Hillsborough Memorial

Two pieces by Michael Nyman
From the concert of 2 July 2014 at Carpenter street in Providence

Chris Erway -- electric piano
J. P. A. Falzone -- Rhodes piano, triangle
Brendan Glasson -- Hohner Cembalet, bells
Liz Isenberg -- Wurlitzer piano
Sakiko Mori -- Crumar Roadrunner 2, percussion
Scott Reber -- Casio, percussion
Florence Wallis -- Hohner Pianet

Michael Nyman - Bell Set No 1 (Live)

Artist:  Michael Nyman
Song: Memorial
Film:   The Cook,The Theif, His wife and Her Lover


Michael Nyman - Memorial(The Cook,The Theif, His wife and Her Lover)

Nyman/ Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs

'Sometime Like Apes' from 'Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs'

Nyman: Prospero's Books CD2

'Miranda' from 'Prospero's Books'

'The Masque' from 'Prospero's Books'

PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED
Recently rediscovered from the archive of Robert Worby, this demo is from the late 1970s and features some previously unreleased Nyman compositions as well as early versions of 'In Re Don Giovanni' and other music that would later be heard in 'Prospero's Books'.
The Campiello Band later became the Michael Nyman Band, who are celebrating their 40th anniversary in 2016.  
Hear the complete Demo tape on Youtube: http://bit.ly/2fqA0Ns

Undated Demo (late 70s)

PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED 'In Re Don Giovanni' from 1970s Demo

Michael-Nyman-Rochester39s-Farewell(muzofon.com)

Michael Nyman's Official Soundcloud channel

A Sixth Part Of The World Part 5

Michael Nyman

Related tracks