It's been a while

since I rattled on at length about a favourite cultural influence. I've been at home trying to recuperate from a mild dose of the flu. Yeah, that'd be right; I travel all over the world for more than a year and never contract so much as a cold but when I go to Australia for a couple of weeks I come down with the flu. My wife, understandably, wants to keep me at arms length while I recover. Even the dags at the office agreed that perhaps it would be better for all concerned if I took my virus infected exhalations elsewhere.

So I've been alternating between sleep, Sherlock Holmes and some favourite movies[^]. Yeah, that one again. This is the third time I've mentioned it. But this time I want to talk about the man who wrote the soundtrack for the 2002 (or thereabouts) DVD release. You understand that the original release in 1929, though nominally a 'silent film' probably had a piano accompaniement; what that accompaniement might have been is something I don't know and is probably lost forever. The version I've grown to love over the past two months has a soundtrack written by Michael Nyman[^]. Fascinating music.

I first heard Michael Nymans music in 1990 one cold July night as the woman who became my second wife and I were driving to 'The Green Lantern', a coffee shop in which we had a half interest. We were listening to ABC FM and there was this strangely exciting mix of string music and operatic voices but in a distinctly 'modern' mode. A sung discussion of a chess game no less. We arrived at the coffee shop just as the chess game came to an end and the music changed to a discussion, in song, of abstract art. I was hooked. My girlfriend was somewhat less than impressed when I said I had to sit it out to the end; I had to know who had written this music and what it was.

It was 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat'. Wonderful music. Once I had the answer (and a note to buy the CD the next morning) I went into the coffee shop and enjoyed the live music. One of my favourite regular performers was Ian Paulin[^] who did a song called 'Terra Antarctica' on 12 string guitar that was awesome. He came to hate it when I appeared :-) He knew I'd ask for Terra Antarctica!

I've been a fan of Nyman ever since. His string writing is amazing. I've always admired the way that Wagner could send a shiver up and down the spine with the 'Liebestod' from 'Tristan und Isolde'. The second movement of Kalinikkov's 2nd symphony with it's almost unique string writing, or the second movement of Rachmaninovs 1st symphony; Ernst Tubin's Violin Concerto. But Nyman outdoes them all for subtlety. Not bad for a man who plays the piano!