An intriguing silent film score by British composer Frederick Laurence will receive its first public performance in over eighty years this evening thanks to funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The score was found in the attic of the grandson of Laurence thanks to research by Dr Julie Brown from Royal Holloway, University of London. Last performed in 1925 the score will be performed this evening at the Barbican Cinema as part of the British Silent Film Festival and AHRC supported ‘Sounds of Early Cinema in Britain’ conference.

Specially composed for the London run of Morozko (Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky, 1924), a delightful soviet film based on the well-known Russian fairy tale ‘Father Frost’, Laurence’s score is a significant find.

The score was discovered while Dr Julie Brown was researching silent film music in 1920s Britain for a book she is writing. She approached the family about the score, and although initially they didn’t think it survived, it was later unearthed in a box of Laurence’s scores safely tucked away in the attic.

Dr. Brown, who has reconstructed and resynchronized the music with the film, said: “The score is significant because it is the only original ‘special score’ for a silent film by a British composer or cinema music director known to survive from the 1920s. All the other British ‘special scores’ that I know of are compilation scores - that is, scores consisting of movements or sections from pre-existent music (classical, popular or “photoplay mood music”), put together in a kind of pot pourri, with or without specially composed short connecting passages. This one was composed from scratch, and is very interesting.”

The performance is supported by the AHRC-funded research network ‘The Sounds of Early Cinema in Britain’, which is part of the AHRC Beyond Text research programme.  The reconstruction and resynchronisation was funded by a £145,000 British Academy grant as part of a research project headed by Dr Brown entitled ‘Film Fitting in Britain, 1913-1926’

Although little known today, Frederick Laurence enjoyed some early successes as a concert composer in the twenties, and had a couple of Proms.

http://www.barbican.org.uk/film/event-detail.asp?ID=12067 (opens in new window)

http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/soundsearlycinema/index.php (opens in new window)

END

Notes for Editors

For further information, please contact:
Jake Gilmore – + 44 (0) 1793 41 6021, j.gilmore@ahrc.ac.uk

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): Each year the AHRC provides approximately £100 million from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from languages and law, archaeology and English literature to design and creative and performing arts. In any one year, the AHRC makes numerous research awards ranging from individual fellowships to major collaborative projects as well as over 1,100 studentship awards. Awards are made after a rigorous peer review process, to ensure that only applications of the highest quality are funded. The quality and range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK.

The Beyond Text research programme aims to support a multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners drawn from Higher Education, museums, galleries, libraries, business, policy, media, technology and the law to explore the ways in which communication is articulated, transmitted, received and controlled. It also aims to enhance the connections between those who make and preserve works, and those who study them.  Beyond Text centres on five thematic, interdisciplinary areas: Making and Unmaking; Performance, Improvisation and Embodied Knowledge; Technology, Innovation and Tradition; mediations; Transmission and Memory. These themes provide a framework to investigate the formation and transformations of performances, sounds, images, and objects in a wide field of social, historical and geographical contexts, tracing their reception, assimilation and adaptation across temporal and cultural boundaries. The programme has a budget of £5.5 million over 5 years and runs from 2007 to 2012. www.beyondtext.ac.uk