Carl Davis has pioneered the performance of silent films with live orchestral accompaniment. Now he's on his way to the University of Limerick for a week of teaching and performing, writes Arminta Wallace.
HAVE FUN - that's the advice from composer and conductor Carl Davis, who'll be arriving at the University of Limerick shortly to spend a week teaching and performing at Summer Music on the Shannon 2008. Davis is a man who knows fun when he sees - and hears - it, having made a long and successful international career as an purveyor of new music for theatre, film and television alongside a more conventional life as a conductor. He has pioneered a whole new genre - the performance of silent films with live orchestral accompaniment - as well as providing the score for countless television costume dramas, including Pride and Prejudiceand Cranford. He has co-written an oratorio with Paul McCartney.
He's the first composer ever to win a BAFTA lifetime award. He's also married to the marvellous Jean Boht, aka Nellie Boswell from the television sitcom Bread, whose Scouser fulminations against her husband's large-chested girlfriend, Lilo Lil, were in themselves a kind of soundtrack to the 1980s.
The injunction to have fun, however, is aimed at the young musicians who're assembling for the summer school-cum-festival on the banks of the Shannon - and especially at everyone who'll be taking part in rehearsals for a concert performance of Davis's opera Peace. The work is based on a play by Aristophanes, written during a war between the Greeks and the Spartans.
A bad start, in the fun department? "Oh, no, not at all," says Davis. "It's a comedy. Very bawdy, very funny, and as the title suggests it also has this fantastic ideal. The story is that the gods have abandoned the world for being so noisy and difficult, and war has erupted everywhere; so a farmer climbs up to Mount Olympus to see if he can make the war stop. Then he discovers that Peace is actually an idea - a statue. So he unites the armies of Greece to pull Peace out of a hole, where she has been buried, and they pull her down to earth." Wherever it's performed, Peaceincorporates the local populace in the shape of a community chorus.
Originally commissioned by Scottish Opera for its touring Opera-Go-Round project, the opera features five professional singers with a choir. "The choir can be made up of an entire secondary school, or an entire community, or an entire youth theatre," Davis explains, "so that the people of Greece and the armies of Greece are made up of whatever audience it's intended for. I've seen it with both schools and youth theatres, but it can be spread very wide - I've left it so that, musically, those parts are not so difficult." The piece will be rehearsed in a series of workshops, with Davis arriving just in time to supervise the final week.
BOTH AS COMPOSER and conductor, Davis has devoted much of his creative energy to the world of silent film - which, when you think is about it, is slightly weird. The sound of silence, you might say? "Yes, it is weird," he agrees. "People think, you know, that with a Chaplin film someone's just doodling on the piano playing very obvious things. But if you went to a West End cinema in the 1920s, you would have seen the film accompanied by orchestra. That, of course, was eradicated as soon as there was sound on film at the end of the 1920s. But you would have seen silent films with orchestral accompaniment. So what we're doing is not new, but the revival of an old practice."
While he's in Limerick, Davis will oversee performances as diverse as Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture- and two classic short films by Charlie Chaplin, with live accompaniment from the Summer Music on the Shannonchamber orchestra. "One is a film called The Immigrant, which today is still being shown to new immigrants to America - it's that strong," says Davis, whose voice, despite almost a lifetime of residency in Liverpool, still betrays his New York origins. The film, shot in 1917, begins on the boat to America, and is remembered most for its shot of the tramp - played, as always, by Chaplin - and his fellow immigrants as they get their first glimpse of the statue of Liberty.
After the poignancy comes the hilarity, in a classic silent movie set-up executed with consummate skill. "Charlie goes into a café, and has to cope with finding some money, losing the money, bullying waiters, and meeting the love of his life by accident. It's absolutely marvellous, and if I needed the perfect introduction to this form of entertainment that would be it," says Davis. The second Chaplin film, The Rink, is about a roller-skating rink and . . . well, you can imagine. "It's wonderfully funny," he says.
DAVIS'S ASSOCIATION with silent cinema began in the 1970s when, having written the music for a Thames television documentary series The World At War, he was signed up for a movie series, Hollywood. The latter was so successful that when Channel 4 was set up, the new chief executive, Jeremy Isaacs, decided to commission a series of reconstructions of the best of the silent movies. "That's how it began - and then it really mushroomed," says Davis.
"In the first decade of Channel 4, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, they commissioned a steady stream of these scores. And so I built up an entirely new and unheard-of career going round the world screening these films and accompanying them with orchestral scores of my own."
First to roll off the press, in 1980, was a film about the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. "What's the phrase about diving in at the deep end? It was, and still is, one of the most demanding of all the silent films," Davis recalls. The mammoth movie runs for five-and -a-half hours - longer, if you count the intervals. "We have to spread it out, otherwise the musicians wouldn't survive it. Nor the conductor," he says.
But if time seems to stretch in the face of such a large-scale film score, the opposite happens on the small screen - visually, literally and musically. "For television, you are generally working very fast," he says. "The look of it is also different. A feature film is meant to be seen on a large screen and in a theatre; certain kinds of shots, such as amazing long shots, just don't communicate on television." Davis is currently working on the score for a new series of Cranford, which will be good news for its many Irish fans. With such a project as this, based on the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, where does the composer begin?
"Well," he says, "you have a script and a book for reference. You have to see first of all what's needed in the way of songs, dances, church services, etc - which we call the source music - and then after the film is made comes another kind of job, which is to tell the story." Which reminds me. Why did Davis's information pack include a photograph and biography of his wife? Will she, too, be playing a role at Summer Music on the Shannon? "She certainly will - she'll be coming with me," comes the reply.
So if you see Nellie Boswell at a bread counter in Limerick this summer, don't be surprised. Just say hello.
