Neil Brand: The Open Fund for Music Creators
For:
The People's Guide to the Orchestra
This is a new composition for orchestra and actor in which the actor plays a film composer scoring four sequences for a fantasy film we don’t see but he (or she) describes. As he ‘writes’ the music, trying out ideas, auditioning instruments, styles and rhythms, we hear the orchestra playing what he is ‘writing’, until at the end of the piece he has four consecutive pieces that form a suite of music, and we have heard every instrument and department of the orchestra. There will also be an education pack with the piece with further information on orchestral instruments, film music and Benjamin Britten‘s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, which this is influenced by.
Neil Brand is well-known as a silent film composer, writer and presenter on Radio 4‘s Film Programme and the BBC4 series’ Sound of Cinema and Sound of Song. He has spent years analysing film scores for the BBC as well as composing symphonic scores for radio, TV and classic silent films such as Hitchcock‘s Blackmail and Chaplin‘s Easy Street. He is a recent recipient of the BASCA Gold Badge, teaches regularly at the Royal Academy of Music and is one of the world’s finest improvising silent film accompanists.
Neil Brand was one of PRS Foundation’s recipients of the David Bedford Music Education Award in 2016.
The David Bedford Music Education Award is given four times a year by PRS for Music Foundation to exceptional education projects involving composers and new music which they have funded. You can read about the most recent David Bedford Music Education Award recipients here.