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March 19th - Alice in Wonderland by Danny Elfman

I'm really enjoying Danny Elfman's Alice in Wonderland at the moment. It must surely rank alongside Edward Scissorhands, Batman and Nightmare Before Christmas, and I am looking forward to seeing the movie sometime soon! On another topic I came across a link to a video - a young Korean girl with only 4 fingers between her two hands whose skills at the piano put many of us to shame - inspiring.

March 16th - Aram Khachaturian biography

One of our contributors on mfiles Artur Akshelyan comes from Armenia, and he has drawn our attention to a fascinating biography of the Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) on youtube. Like Shostakovich and other composers, Khachaturian composed under the oppressive soviet regime. Yet he composed some memorable music including symphonies, concerti and his popular ballets Gayane (with the energetic Sabre Dance and the slow Adagio used in the movie 2001) and Spartacus (used in The Onedin Line). There is also an online museum to the composer at www.khachaturian.am.

March 11th - Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Never Dies

Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Love Never Dies" has opened in London. The sequel to "Phantom of the Opera", the new musical is set 10 years later, with all the main characters now relocated to New York's Coney Island. As you might expect: there are issues to be sorted, revelations to be revealed, and tragedy to unfold amid much emotional turbulance. Apart from a couple of brief references to the original "Phantom", the music for "Love Never Dies" is all new and sees Andrew Lloyd Webber on top form. Details of the soundtrack albums are given in our updated Andrew Lloyd Webber profile.

March 5th - The Wizard's Apprentice

Here's a free web game called The Wizard's Apprentice which uses some classical midi tracks, used with permission from mfiles. The game needs a plug-in from YoYo Games which is easy to install, and then you use the cursor keys and the spacebar to select menu items and play the game. The YoYo Games website has many more free games to browse and play - just don't get addicted!

March 1st - Chopin Bicentennial

This year marks 200 years since the birth of Frederic Chopin in 1810. A number of events are planned in celebration of the composer's work, in Poland the country of his birth and around the world. One unusual Chopin project is that an animated film is in production called "Project Chopin: The Flying Machine". The film's soundtrack consists of the composer's Etudes and the pianist Lang Lang is involved both on the screen and behind the scenes. Here is the IMDB page for the film. Click the image to enlarge.

February 26th - The new improved Toccata and Fugue in Dm

The 10th birthday of mfiles is this year! Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor was one of our earliest sheet music publications. Using the new features now available in Sibelius 6, we can control playback of the Toccata's inverted mordents and arpeggios. For those of a technical nature, I exported 3 tracks of midi output from Sibelius into FL Studio, where one or two note lengths were tweaked before using the Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 organ sounds to render a WAV file (32-bit floating point). Wavelab 6 was then used to apply reverb (using Altiverb 6 with the "St Joseph Church" preset) and then export an mp3 file at 128 kbps. Quite a long process but I'm sure you'll agree that the quality is much improved.

February 23rd - Music for the BBC Winter Olympics trailer

I keep hearing this dramatic yet familiar music as the BBC promotes its Winter Olympics coverage with a black and white animation. A few searches on youtube have solved the music question. Here is the longer version of the BBC trailer and here is Michael Buble singing Cry Me A River. Talking about the impact of adverts and their music, this advert from a Seat Belt Campaign is so powerful it will give you goosebumps.

February 19th - Ennio Morricone in London this April

I won't be able to attend the BBC Big Band's A Night at the Movies at London's Cadogan Hall, but I will be seeing Ennio Morricone at the Royal Albert Hall on April 10th, and I'm very much looking forward to that! I've not seen the programme but let's hope we have Ecstasy of Gold from "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly"!

February 17th - Johnny Dankworth (1927-2010)

The composer and jazz musician Sir John Dankworth died earlier this month at the age of 82. He played saxophone and clarinet with many of the great jazz musicians and singers, formed a number of jazz groups or bands, and composed music for several films and television programmes. He was married to singer Dame Cleo Lane for 50+ years, and the pair collaborated frequently on shows, appearances, recordings and other music projects. Here is a video of a televised jazz performance and here he accompanies Cleo Laine singing Oh Lady be Good.

February 15th - Art inspired by Music

The artist Scott von Holzen www.scottvonholzen.com has created a series of pictures inspired by music and musical notation. One of his recent creations used our arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon in D as a basis and the resulting artwork is shown alongside - click to enlarge.

February 12th - Animation Music by Jim Paterson

I did some music recently for a short corporate animation, and here it is on YouTube.

February 11th - Remembering Jerry Goldsmith

It was Jerry Goldsmith's birthday this week - he would have been 81. Here is a YouTube report of him winning his Oscar for "The Omen".

On a lighter note, listen to this 6-year old pianist.

February 4th - More Software Problems

Here's some tips which I discovered today:

• Uploading to YouTube - when my upload kept failing I initially blamed my Broadband connection, but when I swtiched off the progress bar on the YouTube upload screen it worked perfectly.
• Viewing Scorch Scores - I was having periodic problems in Firefox and today even in IE. Installing the latest versions of the Scorch Plug-In fixed this - note the browsers use different plug-in formats.

February 3rd - Award Nominations

Following on from the BAFTA announcement, the Oscar nominations have also been confirmed so we can now compare the full set of nominations for this year's major Film Music Awards.

February 1st - Video Editing Software

I've not posted any YouTube videos for a while (or the corresponding sheet music). I got a new PC and it takes some time to fully configure a new PC, install and register software, and copy folders across. The software installation and registration went well apart from the Video Editing Software from AVS4You. They simply didn't respond to registration emails. In desperation I googled the company and found out that the "lifetime" software they provide is only valid for the lifetime of your PC, but who reads license agreements in detail or expects to find such a clause buried in there? I have therefore decided to buy alternative software from a company with a better reputation (called "Power Director 8 Deluxe") - but I am posting this as a warning to anyone who might be considering AVS4You as an option.

January 30th - Jamie Cullum and the exploding piano

If you think of a grand piano as a work of art or a delicate instrument, then you might not want to view this, but an exploding piano stunt was put together for Jamie Cullum's video "Please Don't Stop The Music". Listen to this (and watch) on Jamie's YouTube Channel and find more info on his website at JamieCullum.com.

January 21st - Stars for Film Composers on Hollywood Boulevard

Among a host of stars from the world of entertainment, film composers Alan Menken and Randy Newman will receive "Stars" on Hollywood Boulevard in 2010. Newman is also well-known as a Song-Writer and a new musical is due to premiere in November 2010 based on his songs. The musical is called "Harps and Angels" after his latest album. To celebrate these events songwriter Gory Bateson sings this song on youtube: What If Randy Newman Stopped Writing Songs?.

January 21st - Golden Globes and Baftas

It's a big week for Awards - Michael Giacchino won the Golden Globe for the Best Music Score category, and the Bafta nominations have now been announced. We need to wait until 2nd February for the Oscar nominations - so watch this space for updates!

January 15th - Harold Faltermeyer (Axelf theme) is Back!

Apart from reuse of his songs, Harold Faltermeyer has been all but absent from film music for the past 20 years, until Kevin Smith persuaded him to score his new film "Cop Out" due for release in February in the US. The official trailer for the movie (starring Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan) can be seen here on IMDB and says "music by Harold Faltermeyer" among the credits.

January 12th - Field of Dreams by James Horner

Strangely we have not until now published any reviews for any James Horner soundtracks, and he is much in the news at the moment because of his work on the stunning "Avatar". It is good to put that right with a review for his 1989 score Field of Dreams and here is a suite of music from the film on YouTube.

January 7th - The Music of Video Games

The music of video games has always had a great impact on players, and we've always wanted to acknowledge games music and the composers who create it on mfiles. People can be even more passionate about games music than about film music - perhaps it's because you might hear the same music 100s of times. This also makes demands on the composer, who must create music which sets the right atmosphere without becoming tiring on the ear. So our first major article of 2010 is about the music of video games, and called appropriately enough 2010: A Video Game Odyssey.

December 30th - Scott Joplin and his opera Treemonisha

To tie in with our review of the book Scott Joplin and the Age of Ragtime by Ray Argyle, here is the overture for Joplin's opera Treemonisha in its original unorchestrated version for solo piano. The pianist in this video is Marco Fumo, and the music does indeed show a merging of ragtime with classical traditions.

December 24th - mfiles goes sweet for Christmas

A piece of mfiles classical music now accompanies a Dancing Gingerbread Cookie on this YouTube video. The video has been created by Sugarveil to promote their flexible icing, and the music is appropriately the Sugar Plum Fairy from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, a Christmas Ballet. Merry Christmas to all our users!

December 18th - Geoffrey Gurrumul's European tour

Geoffrey Gurrumul is a blind Australian singer with a unique voice. Though shy when it comes to interviews, he has been on tour across Europe and has an album on release. He appeared on French television programme Taratata where he sang a duet of "Every Breath You Take" with Sting as well as one of his own songs. You can see the programme at www.MyTaratata.com and the singer's own website at www.gurrumul.com has details about his music and tour dates.

December 15th - Mark Isham's Invincible

Mark Isham has been especially generous to fans this Christmas. Following on from his preview of "The Bad Lieutenant" he has released a suite from his much-requested score for "Invincible". Both suites can be downloaded from the Mark Isham page and they are both about 20Mb.

December 15th - Musical Advent Calendar

A little bit late in the month, but here is an attractive musical Advent Calendar by composer Peter Buffett.

December 10th - Bruce Broughton

Bruce Broughton has been on our "to do" list of composers for a long time, so when Sean Wilson offered Young Sherlock Holmes as his 2nd review for mfiles, this was a perfect opportunity to ask him to provide a biog page for Bruce Broughton at the same time.

December 7th - Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud!

Ian Wallace (1919-2009) was an Opera singer who transitioned into popular entertainment. He helped to popularise Classical Music, and (with Dennis Norden and Frank Muir) was one of the resident paritipants in BBC Radio's "My Music". However he is best known for singing the humorous songs of Flanders and Swann particularly "The Hippopotamus Song" which had the chorus "Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud". Here is a musical Tribute to Ian Wallace on YouTube.

December 3rd - The Wexford Carol

It's good to welcome back Glenn Jarrett. In a series of Christmas Carol arrangements for Guitar, Glenn has this year created this superb arrangement of The Wexford Carol. The Carol dates from Ireland in the 12th Century.

November 26th - Music is Fun in the Stockholm underground

To encourage commuters to take the stairs instead of the escalator, Volkswagen replaced the existing staircase with a musical keyboard which played the notes when someone stood on them. As a result the stairs became very popular and 66% more people took the stairs - see the video. Unfortunately the musical stairs were only in place for a short time this year, and have now been dismantled.

November 24th - Marc Shaiman will be Musical Director for the Oscars

For the second time Marc Shaiman will be Musical Director at the Oscars Ceremony. A great tunesmith (e.g. the Broadway musical "Hairspray") with a knack for writing musical pastiche (e.g. "City Slickers" and "South Park"), the composer himself has received oscar nominations for his film music but has not yet won the award.

November 23rd - John Williams documentary

An interesting documentary about John Williams' film music has appeared on youtube. The audio is poor at the very start but improves after this, so stick with it. The programme was made during the making of "The Empire Strikes Back" and includes clips from several films with comments from Lucas and Spielberg. The documentary is in 6 parts - start here with part 1 of Star Wars Music by John Williams and follow the links to related videos to see the other parts.

November 20th - I got rhythm

This fun video shows that a cockatoo has a sense of rhythm, matching the beat when the tempo changes. Researchers who examined such videos on youtube speculate that the sense of rhythm is linked to parts of the brain used to process and imiate sounds - a talent which many birds have.

November 18th - Bad Lieutenant by Mark Isham

Werner Herzog's movie "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" (starring Nicholas Cage, Val Kilmer and Eva Mendes) is due to be released on 20th November in US theatres. As a preview for the film score, composer Mark Isham has put together this 8-minute suite. It sounds really distinctive.

November 16th - Restoration by James Newton Howard

It's good also to introduce a new reviewer to mfiles - Sean Wilson - who has written a review of the relatively-unknown soundtrack Restoration by James Newton Howard. I haven't come across the movie before, but the soundtrack sounds great and I've ordered it!

November 16th - Videos of Erik Satie's music

Today we have uploaded videos of the 1st Gnossienne and the 1st Gymnopedie by Erik Satie. Following a suggestion made on YouTube I've filmed these from above, though I'm not convinced that my fingering is the best example to follow.

November 9th - Shirley Bassey's album The Performance

What a perfect pairing - Shirley Bassey's album "The Performance" was produced by David Arnold who has composed all the Bond films since "Tomorrow Never Dies".

November 8th - McDonalds adverts on TV use Elmer Bernstein's The Grifters

It's good to hear Elmer Bernstein's music used effectively on the current McDonalds adverts on UK TV. This is the theme tune from the film "The Grifters" as used in the opening track "The City".

November 2nd - Early music notation found in Scotland's Stirling Castle

An interesting news report that an early example of instrumental music notation was found on decorative carved wooden heads in Stirling Castle. The notation provides a sequence of chords as a basis for the musicians to improvise to, and would most likely be played on harps, viols, fiddles and lutes. See the BBC website which includes an example of how the music might have sounded.

October 27th - The life and work of Vic Mizzy (The Addams Family)

We've updated our Vic Mizzy biography page. As part of the research, we checked out videos on YouTube, and it is surprising just how much of the composer's music is available.

October 22nd - The piano music of Brahms played on Brahms' pianos

We are pleased yet again to publish a comprehensive article by Jeffrey Dane. This reviews a double album of music played on period pianos, and brings to life the history of Johannes Brahms and the instruments which he once played.

October 19th - George Fenton and David Attenborough for the BBC's Life series

The real stars of the BBC's latest wildlife series called simply "Life" are the animals themselves and the amazing camera work which has captured some them. Yet no BBC wildlife series seems completed unless we hear the authoritative tones of David Attenborough and the engaging music of composer George Fenton.

October 11th - Chopin Prelude arrangement for Woodwind

I'm between holidays at the moment so some bigger gaps in the Blog updates this month. The latest addition to mfiles is this arrangement by Artur Akshelyan of Chopin's Prelude No.6 for Woodwind Quartet.

Before October 2009

Older posts can be found on the Jim's Blog Archive.