War Work: 8 Songs With Film

MICHAEL NYMAN BAND SUMMERS NYMAN

Eight Songs’ is essentially a song cycle presented in two groups of 4 songs, preceded and separated by instrumental music: the first set by 4 movements and the second by 6. The texts were written by mostly unknown World War 1 poets all of whom, apart from the English painter-poet David Bomberg, were killed during the war. The starting point for the cycle is the title of a poem by Gaston de Ruyter (a French poet who himself was shot down as late in the war as 7 October 1918): ‘Chansons vieilles sur d’autres airs’ (‘Old songs to other tunes’). The ‘chansons vieilles’ are the poems by English, French, German and Hungarian poets (all sung in their original languages apart from Geza Gyoni’s ‘Csak Egy Eiszkara...’) and the ‘autres airs’ were selected from compositions written by English, Belgian, German, Austrian, Polish and Italian composers of the 17th and 19th centuries. The ‘Film’ has been designed around footage made available from French, German, and American WWI film archives. The spirit of Dada also reigns over the film, sometimes in the image of Hugo Ball, as do Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism.

Price: $20.99