"...musical organizations have taken this idea and expanded it into their own regular seasons"
In the mid 1990’s, I went on tour for Columbia Artists as a member of a chamber choir called I Cantori of Los Angeles directed by Edward Cansino with a composer named Richard Einhorn and a small chamber orchestra. Also with us was the distinguished female quartet of early music artists, Anonymous4. The tour was called Voices of Light and we performed a live "soundtrack" to the newly restored Carl Dryer movie, The Passion of Joan of Arc. What audiences saw were a lot of live musicians playing live music while a silent black and white movie rolled on a huge screen over head. The experience was absolutely gripping.
Since that time, musical organizations have
taken this idea and expanded it into their regular seasons. Outdoor summer festivals often feature soundtrack music and film clips. Sometimes
you might see Warner Brother’s cartoons with an onstage orchestra playing the music of Carl Stalling. Or you might actually hear Prokofiev's
film music for Ivan the Terrible played live while the film runs overhead. I and many of my colleagues believe that this trend is in fact not
a trend at all but the beginning of new tradition of multi-media performance practice.
The Geiger20 project is an assembly of some of my favorite
people in a similar effort to create and introduce new multimedia classical music to the American market. Our stated goal is to draw from and
add to the already rich corpus of classical and modern music in America with a new element of presentation which caters to the visual needs of
the average or even not-so-average concert-goer and DVD buyer. We shall see.
To listen to the audio clips, please upgrade your Flash Player Plugin for your browser. You should be able to find the appropriate player here. Alternatively, you may be seeing this message as a result of having Javascript disabled in your browser. If you wish to listen to the audio clips without the use of Flash, please visit our alternative audio page.
"...six to ten years, we plan to have at least a dozen completed projects"
At the moment, Geiger20 has about a dozen hopeful projects on the docket. The budgets for these projects hover
around the quarter-million dollar mark. These numbers are small in comparison to the feature length cinema market and smaller still alongside the
burgeoning video-game market. Over the next six to ten years, we plan to have at least a dozen completed projects available for purchase as DVD or
downloadable and maybe half a dozen different concert presentations jammed with interesting visual content.
Our hope is to be in many different
places at once, offering a truly artistic product to a market which is currently saturated with fluff and violence.
"...cannot even begin to calculate the number of animated features I have enjoyed, endured ‘and some other third thing’ as SpongeBob would say"
I am not your typical classical musician. In the ‘80s and ‘90s swing music was my gig and the way I paid for
my classical university education. I was also into more imaginative stuff like the music of Tom Waits. My wife and I spent a couple summers
taking in the fantastic theatrics of Cirque du Soleil. Anyone who saw those performers during that time might have realized as I did that they
were nothing like one might expect from a "circus". These people were performing an incredible ballet accompanied by a bizarre and a constantly
interesting soundtrack. On several visits I noticed that although the music stayed basically the same, many visual elements would change from
time to time. A trapeze artist one night would be replaced by a contortionist the next. This gave me an idea.
My children will tell you that I
am a huge fan of animation. I cannot even begin to calculate the number of animated features I have enjoyed, endured "and some other third thing"
as SpongeBob would say, with my kids over the last fifteen years. Obviously, animation has become more than cartoons. It is now a multi-billion
dollar genre and growing all the time with new technologies.
Our intention with the Geiger20 project in collaboration with my colleague David
McAdoo at Open Eye Studio (www.openeye-studio.com) is to create animated images to accompany our
musical presentations. These moving images will be able to change from one experience to the next. One night audiences might see a performance of
Menotti’s, The Unicorn, The Gorgon and the Manticore with one series of images and the next night there might be a completely different
presentation with new combinations of imagery. Our plan is to keep it simple and keep it minimal and contained at first; on a smaller, boutique
level for chamber music audiences in fine concert halls and for DVD and download as our audiences grow in number.