From the screen to the score

in life instead of becoming the victor, encapsulated the fact that Yur Mum have more facets to their skillset than just their fierce and rapid hard-rock thrust; their ability to experiment with darker tones and calmer tempos ensnared the crowd’s attention well.

The might of Yur Mum’s superb showcase of punk, thrash and funk inspired Brazilian rock was exhibited with all of the fury and vitality that the set demanded. Kunz and Couto brought an excellent tropical punch to Cavern — one that rock and punk enthusiasts won’t want to miss out on in the future.

Henry Parker, Features Editor, reviews the transformative bond between film and its music

THEY say that film is a visual medium, but that hardly paints the full picture. Right from the beginning of film, and particularly in the earliest commercial cinema, the sound behind the screen was just as important. Perhaps it should really be called the sound before the screen, as in the beginning it was standard practice for a musician to play live music on a piano to accompany the film, mak ing the original version of a movie soundtrack, or score. The two are so intertwined that one of the oldest still-running film magazines is the BFI’s Sight and Sound , which attests to the essential nature of the soundtrack to film as a whole.

It is an audio-visual medium.

This special relationship between music and film is pos sibly most distilled in si lent films, where the tools the filmmakers have at their disposal are far more restricted, and yet the potential for artistic expression is still just as broad. Rather than looking back to a time when this was done out of necessity due to limited technology, in more modern films like the majestic The Red Turtle , there has been an active choice to make it wordless and effectively put the music in the foreground. In Laurent Perez Del Mar’s beautiful soundtrack, the emotions of the silent central character are told to us. It is often said that the emotional centres in our brains are unlocked by sound more than sight. You hear a piece of music and are immediately transported back to a different place in your life. Maybe it was a happier place, maybe a sadder one. The music preserves the emotion and that memory like a little snapshot, or like a frame in a film reel, played back through your mind. This miracle of connection between film, memory and emotion is made possible through the music. If music gives so much to film, then it can also be said that film gives so much back to music in return. Think for a second, who are the great composers of the last 50 years? It isn’t writ ers of operas or concer tos, but writers of film music: John Williams, Hans Zimmer and James Horner — these are the new household names of composition.

Away from the orchestral scene, some of the great songs of our time were only written because of a certain film. Without Romeo + Juliet there would be no ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’ Radiohead, and we wouldn’t have Bob Dylan’s iconic and forever covered ‘Knockin’ on Heav en’s Door’ without the 1973 western Pat Garret And Billy The Kid . The film industry has gifted us with so much amazing music, and it can bring new things to music that we already love. I could tell you about how The Shawshank Redemption uses Mozart’s

‘The Marriage of Figaro’ to show how a single piece of music can bring forth new hope, in even the darkest of places. Or how Kubrick brilliantly twists the hopeful longing of ‘We’ll Meet Again’ into a scene of ironic melancholy at the end of Doctor Strangelove in a way that is equal parts hilarious, absurd and tragic. ‘California Dreamin’’ in Chungking Express , ‘Tiny Dancer’ in Almost Famous , or, a new favourite of mine, Mads Mikkelsen dancing to ‘What A Life’ at the end of Another Round. There are too many examples to list them all, but even doing that wouldn’t serve justice to the relationship between film and music. After all, that is the whole point; the magic of music in film is hearing it and feeling it.