Everything we learn, everywhere we turn, every love film we watch, each love song we listen to, in some way has influenced what we think about love and relationships. Some of our main musical influences for Three Words have come from the famous love films and songs we as a group have watched over the years. From Richard Curtis’ 2003 film Love Actually to Davis Lean’s 1945 Brief Encounter each film has influenced the way we view love. As a company, we want to put our own spin on he musical numbers we do also from my perspective the real challenge has come from translating famous songs and putting them into the piece. Some of which I have found difficult to learn I have decided to change a little.
Brief Encounter
The famous film, that comes with famous music. At the beginning of this process I did not think to myself at all, that I would be attempting to play Rachmaninov’s famous Piano Concerto No 2. However, I am. His concerto is the soundtrack to Brief Encounter. So when it was decided that we were going to reproduce the film live on stage, this only accounted for one thing in my mind, we would have to have live music in there too. Not going to lie I had a little panic to myself as my piano ability is not to the standard of Rachmaninov’s writing let alone, but I saw it out as a challenge.
The first encounter I had with the music was trying to find the correct piano music. Every other music score for this performance has been easy to get hold of, apart from this one. It took me many attempts to source the right one, I even had a go at producing the score myself, to which I got only 8 bars in and realised it was in a totally different key. Lucky though, I found the piano solo music in a book called Classical Heartbreakers (2011). Even then, it was difficult; the score originally written for two pianos and strings was all collated into one piano piece. At this point, I took it upon my self to simplify the left hand to simple notes. I did this by looking at the cord and taking the primary note as the main leading notes. To this, I then inputted it into Sibelius , a music writing software to make sure it sounded correct. From then, I had only taken a snippet of the music from him, I interjected two more songs into the scene. The first one is taken from Love Actually, called The Glasgow Love Theme. Composed by Craig Armstrong the music is subtle, soft and sounds so full of hope. The last song I combined with these two I found difficult to find. It was stated in the Work-In- Progress that I should try and find a contemporary pop song. I tried everything from Kylie Minogue to Robbie Williams, finally settling down with Adele’s Someone Like You. Which is a powerful yet beautiful song about heartbreak. Something similar to the heartbreak Laura faces when Alec leaves and she has to return to her husband.
I took apart the music and framed it around the dialogue. I wanted to mix it up , from classical, film, and contemporise pop songs. I just hope it works well within the piece.
All you need is Love
There are many different portrayals of this song from the original Beatles to the famous wedding scene in Love Actually :
Through discussion, ideas and possibilities, we wanted to do something spectacular to end the piece, so I got in contact with the university orchestra and the cathedral choir to see if they would like to join us in our performance, unfortunately they were unavailable at the time of our performance. Therefore, we had to think of something else to do with the song. There has been so many covers of the song, it is hard to find something new to do with it, but we decided to go back to basics. Back to the same way we started the show, and simply make it about us.
We have changed the structure of the piece around, so that are starts with a solo verse and then enters the song. This will give it a nice pick up from the last scene. Instruments wise, we also wanted to use all of the instruments so we have Becky playing the famous opening line, and then the guitar and piano riffs coming in and out of the song. From the pianos perspective I didn’t want to over power the song, therefore I am going to keep to just playing chords and riffs in the chorus.
The end song is not like what you see in the movies, it is something more hopeful, it is simply 9 very different people singing about one universal topic of love.
Works Cited:
Classical Heartbreakers for Solo Piano (2006) London: Wise Publications.
TheBeatlesVEVOHQ (2011) All You Need Is Love-HQ [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-pFAFsTFTI [Accessed 23 April 2014].
Tengizpoteri (2008) All you need is Love [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9siyJtoWRAU [Accessed 24 April 2014].