Uploaded September 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Recorded Live on 27th January 2012
PSAPPHA ENSEMBLE
Conrad Marshall flute
Dov Goldberg clarinet
Richard Casey piano
Tim Williams percussion
Benedict Holland violin
Jennifer Langridge cello
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I. Yakima Canutt and the Art of Living Dangerously
II. Burt Reynolds Cosmopolitan 1972
III. Bud Ekins and his Incredible Leap for Freedom
Enter the impossible. Stunt artists do what actors cannot, depending on a combination of extreme skill and movie trickery. Skill and trickery are involved, too, in these three acts: the skill of virtuosity from the instrumentalists (the regular sextet of flautist and clarinettist, percussionist, pianist, violinist and cellist), and the trickery of recorded tracks in which MIDI samples of the same instruments are heard doing things that are wildly unfeasible, but that may appear to be coming from the live players.
Each movement is based on one of the most celebrated stunts of the twentieth century, beginning with Yakima Canutt’s springing from horse to horse in the 1939 John Ford film Stagecoach. In a similar way, the galloping music seems to jump the gap between real and virtual instruments, and jump back again.
The middle movement is based on a stunt of a different kind: the actor Burt Reynolds’s appearance in Cosmopolitan magazine photographed in the buff (though with a decorously placed arm). A dance here hots up when the virtual ensemble breaks in.
Saluted in the finale is Bud Ekins’s vaulting on a motorcycle over a barbed-wire fence, substituting for Steve McQueen in The Great Escape (1963). Duets build up additively of live and recorded snare drums, flutes and clarinets, standing perhaps for the dangerous barrier, to be racingly followed and closely observed until eventually the moment will come to leap, in a musical disappearing act.
© Paul Griffiths
Recorded Live on 27th January 2012
PSAPPHA ENSEMBLE
Conrad Marshall flute
Dov Goldberg clarinet
Richard Casey piano
Tim Williams percussion
Benedict Holland violin
Jennifer Langridge cello
-----
I. Yakima Canutt and the Art of Living Dangerously
II. Burt Reynolds Cosmopolitan 1972
III. Bud Ekins and his Incredible Leap for Freedom
Enter the impossible. Stunt artists do what actors cannot, depending on a combination of extreme skill and movie trickery. Skill and trickery are involved, too, in these three acts: the skill of virtuosity from the instrumentalists (the regular sextet of flautist and clarinettist, percussionist, pianist, violinist and cellist), and the trickery of recorded tracks in which MIDI samples of the same instruments are heard doing things that are wildly unfeasible, but that may appear to be coming from the live players.
Each movement is based on one of the most celebrated stunts of the twentieth century, beginning with Yakima Canutt’s springing from horse to horse in the 1939 John Ford film Stagecoach. In a similar way, the galloping music seems to jump the gap between real and virtual instruments, and jump back again.
The middle movement is based on a stunt of a different kind: the actor Burt Reynolds’s appearance in Cosmopolitan magazine photographed in the buff (though with a decorously placed arm). A dance here hots up when the virtual ensemble breaks in.
Saluted in the finale is Bud Ekins’s vaulting on a motorcycle over a barbed-wire fence, substituting for Steve McQueen in The Great Escape (1963). Duets build up additively of live and recorded snare drums, flutes and clarinets, standing perhaps for the dangerous barrier, to be racingly followed and closely observed until eventually the moment will come to leap, in a musical disappearing act.
© Paul Griffiths
