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“Tara Helen O’Connor is the greatest flute player on this planet,” attests Prutsman, “and she’ll get on stage with five different flutes and jump back and forth between them. He’s arranged A Trip to the Moon, a sort of surrealistic sci-fi tale, for piano and flute.
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“I’ve never encountered specific cues for these films,” says Prutsman, “which means either they’re lost, or they were never made.” On the MITV program, aside from the 45-minute Sherlock Jr., are two shorter films, A Trip to the Moon, directed by Frenchman Georges Méliès in 1902, and Russian director Władysław Starewicz’s The Cameraman’s Revenge, from 1912.
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From then till now, I’ve scored about 13 films.” Prutsman hadn’t thought about scoring for silents himself “until about 20 years ago, when there was a chamber music festival in Rockport, Maine, and they said, ‘Do you want to write a piece for this film?’ and I did that for them a few times. For a battle, you’d have some Beethoven thrown in, or Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ for a cemetery scene.” “You’d see Mendelssohn’s Rondo Capriccioso there, which might work for a scene with an airplane. “Most of the time there weren’t specific scores for movies,” Prutsman continues, “with the exception of late Chaplin, where he himself participated in making music, and some of the big Soviet blockbusters, like Battleship Potemkin.” He owns a book of “cues” which were additional reference points for accompanists. By Friday or Saturday, he or she would be well versed in the movie. I heard that people would intentionally not come on a Tuesday, when the screenings would start, because the organist was just getting to know stuff. Prutsman points out that “in the old days, when some of these films premiered and the studio would mail the reels out to the theaters, the reels would arrive on a Monday, and with them the studio might include a sheet of snippets of tunes suggested for the organist to improvise on. The music wasn’t necessarily tailored for the action you’d see on the screen.” He’d first fallen in love with the silent comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy as a kid, when they were screened at a playhouse in L.A.
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“I think Daria had seen some of my silent movie shows, and she and Michael said, ‘Let’s do an evening of them,’” recounts the composer. ” His interest in world music led to separate work with Asha Bhosle and Sigur Rós, and he contributed to the Silk Road Project.Ī couple of decades of service to The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, mostly as a composer, connected Prutsman with violinist Daria Tedeschi Adams and her violist husband Michael Adams, artistic directors of MITV. “I arranged music for their program with Tom Waits, and an arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s arrangement of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ And we developed music with interesting musicians from Afghanistan, Mali, and Turkey, projects with people who know music as an oral rather than a written tradition, which meant I had to put in interesting ways to signal back and forth. “Everything I did with them was a real treat,” attests Prutsman in a phone interview. Relocating to the Bay Area, Prutsman was recruited by the similarly eclectic Kronos Quartet, for whom he’s created over 40 arrangements and compositions.
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Trained classically at UCLA and the Peabody Conservatory, he began his performing career playing in jazz clubs and appearing on a nationally syndicated fundamentalist televangelist program, The King Is Coming, though he didn’t subscribe to the faith. Prutsman, brought up in Los Angeles and now a resident of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, is himself a master of many things. The evening of three silent films is set to music by Stephen Prutsman and accompanied by the composer (on piano) in collaboration with the Telegraph Quartet and flutist Tara Helen O’Connor. shows up as another instance of the festival’s variegated offerings, on Aug.