Seminar: Dr Ian Sapiro (University of Leeds)

Friday, February 16, 2018 - 12:00
Bewerunge Room, Logic House

SEMINAR: "Simple, Medium, and Shebang": Trevor Jones and the Film-Music Toolkit

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Biography

Ian Sapiro is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Leeds specialising in screen music, musical theatre, orchestration, production processes, and the overlaps between them. His monograph Scoring the Score: the Role of the Orchestrator in the Contemporary Film Industry (Routledge, 2016), for which he interviewed over forty active orchestrators and composers of screen music based in the US and UK, is the first scholarly publication to focus on the orchestrators and orchestration of music for the screen. The book offers new definitions of the terms ‘transcription’, ‘arrangement’ and ‘orchestration’ within this context, and includes an updated version of Sapiro’s non-linear model of screen-score production, originally developed as part of his PhD and first published in his book Ilan Eshkeri’s Stardust: A Film Score Guide (Scarecrow, 2013). The model, which is the first of its kind, challenges existing presentations of the process, and reflects more accurately the reality and variability of score-production processes.

In 2013-2016 Sapiro was the co-investigator on the £570,000 AHRC-funded project The Professional Career and Output of Trevor Jones (principal investigator David Cooper), which drew on an unique collection of audio, video, textual and musical archival materials relating to the film, television and video game scores of Trevor Jones. The project gave rise to a new metadata schema for audio-visual and related materials and developed methodological tools for the study of screen music. A book on Jones co-authored by Cooper, Sapiro and Laura Anderson will be published later in 2018.

Sapiro’s other publications include further work on screen-score orchestration, the British musical and the pop industry, the music of the Michael Nyman/Peter Greenaway films, and the film adaptation of Les Misérables. Book chapters on the orchestration of John Williams, and adaptations of the stage musical Annie for the big and small screens are forthcoming.