Sounds of the silver screen
4:33pm Thursday 8th January 2009 in Art & Exhibitions By Miriam Craig
On cue: composer Andrew Pearce writes film music and has penned a symphony inspired by the cinema
Out blasts an orchestral fanfare worthy of any iconic Hollywood sci-fi adventure, from Star Wars to Alien.
But it doesn’t come from any film you’ll soon be seeing in cinemas.
Rather, it’s from the first movement of Cinema Symphony, a work by composer Andrew Pearce, in a style recalling the beloved scores of Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams.
The album has even been released by a company that specialises in film scores — it is in the first non-soundtrack CD from MovieScore Media.
Mr Pearce, 33, says: “It’s really an orchestral work, but in a cinematic style. What I’ve done is a kind of homage to the great cinematic music of the Seventies and Eighties.”
Mr Pearce, who has lived in Barnet all his life, started writing music for the Barnet Schools Symphony Orchestra aged 17 and, later, for graduates of the London music conservatoires.
After an undergraduate degree in music he won a scholarship to study composition for the screen at the Royal College of Music, London.
He began writing Cinema Symphony in 2001 after graduating from the course.
“I’ve always wanted to write big orchestral Hollywood music and it was very hard to do at that time,” he says. “I decided I was going to write my own Hollywood film score myself, whether or not anyone paid me. At the time I was quite frustrated with the business, so this was a way of finding my solace in music.”
In 2007, two years after he’d finished writing the symphony, Mr Pearce was finally able to get the money together to put it on CD. It was recorded by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under the baton of Grammy Award-winning conductor José Serebrier, the 93 musicians playing on it including trumpeter Maurice Murphy and violinist Miriam Kramer.
By that time Mr Pearce had had more success. He wrote his first soundtrack in 2003 for the film 30 Miles and went on to compose the music for Dark Corners, starring Thora Birch, in 2006.
He has also worked on fifteen other films as an arranger or orchestrator, often composing additional music — sometimes called ghostwriting.
Mr Pearce says: “Sometimes the composer has so much to do, he farms out some of the music to someone else. The recording dates are set in stone so you have to get it done in time. The composer might give me an idea of the style they want, or they might give a melody, or some kind of theme which I’ll then develop.”
Now Mr Pearce hopes to see performances of the symphony in front of a live audience, and loves the idea of someone making the film to go with it.
In fact, maybe that’s the way it should always work: music first, film second.
“I think it’s a great idea,” he says. “I know lots of composers would prefer it that way round.”
Cinema Symphony is out now. You can buy it and listen to excerpts at MovieScore Media or find out more about Mr Pearce at his website
