These clips illustrate Bob Morgan’s approach to creating music for picture. The images selected provide the challenge of creating both atmosphere and drama over a short time - scale. Various compositional techniques have been used to realise the original visual conception, but throughout, improvisation is the key to the dramatic intensity.

The mpeg files are very large but do present the work in the best possible quality.

Steam and Power
Dir: Charlie Paul

Quicktime
Windows
Mpeg

Improvisations by trombonist Alan Tomlinson are woven into a furnace of harmony. Industrial strength sounds power to a climax and give way to a brass band finish as Peter Howson’s vision of dark satanic steel mills becomes the stamp for which the painting was commissioned. (Advertisement for Royal Mail)


Halos (Madonna)
Dir: Charlie Paul

Quicktime
Windows

Mpeg

Ethereal combinations of tenor, male alto and boys’ voices float over Nick Stephens' double bass harmonics to produce a supernatural aural world, imbuing these strange circles of light with a spiritual quality. Carefully composed to accentuate the dynamics of the lights playing around the Madonna, subtle moments are picked out as a miraculous presence is invoked. Strange voices glide across an attic and a wild circus of double bass glissandi give an impression of a psychic disturbance in the stairwell of an old house.

Halos (Attic)
Dir: Charlie Paul

Quicktime
Windows
Mpeg
Halos (Stair)
Dir: Charlie Paul

Quicktime
Windows
Mpeg

Down and Outs
Dir: Charlie Paul

Quicktime
Windows
Mpeg

Brutalised and despairing characters captured by the flourish of paintbrush and saxophone. Each is given a different voice, a roar of anger or a wail of pity, from the same instrument. Although war artist Peter Howson’s first three characters are victims of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, they are no less convincing when transported to New York by Bob’s saxophone, where baseball–capped Neanderthals seem to jeer obscenities at their suffering.


Desert Dawn
Dir: Chas Rowden

Quicktime
Windows
Mpeg

A tense combination of traditional eastern and modern western instruments combined with sound effects imply a contemporary confrontation - but resolve into something unexpected!