Alex DeGrassi in a different venue
Posted: Fri Oct 04, 2013 4:15 pm
Hey there TGers,
I'm putting this under IGC because it is somewhat related to that.
Last night (Thursday, Oct. 3rd), My husband & I, and Chan and his wife, Bonnie, all met up in Dover, Delaware to see Alex DeGrassi play the score for the 1934 silent film, A story of. Floating. Weeds by Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. Back in 2006 Alex had been commissioned to compose a score for this film and he has performed it live about 25 times. The focus is all on the movie, so Alex was playing in the dark and we couldn't observe his technique, but Chan recognized some of the things that he had talked about at the IGC session.
I am not a silent film buff, in fact I've hardly ever watched one. But this one seemed to have very sophisticated acting for the time, and the genre, and it became a very compelling story set against Alex's score. The film was 88 minutes long, and when asked if it was an arduous task to play for that long, he replied that though there were themes for each character, and for many other scenes and elements in the movie, there is certainly room for improvisation, so there are moments that are less demanding. He also said that each time he performs it, it is different.
We all probably would have stayed and asked a lot more questions, but we had each traveled 2 & 1/2 hours to attend, so we had a long ride home that night.
Still, it was an entirely different performance than I had ever experienced before and I feel really lucky that Chan found out about it and told me.
Lynn
I'm putting this under IGC because it is somewhat related to that.
Last night (Thursday, Oct. 3rd), My husband & I, and Chan and his wife, Bonnie, all met up in Dover, Delaware to see Alex DeGrassi play the score for the 1934 silent film, A story of. Floating. Weeds by Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. Back in 2006 Alex had been commissioned to compose a score for this film and he has performed it live about 25 times. The focus is all on the movie, so Alex was playing in the dark and we couldn't observe his technique, but Chan recognized some of the things that he had talked about at the IGC session.
I am not a silent film buff, in fact I've hardly ever watched one. But this one seemed to have very sophisticated acting for the time, and the genre, and it became a very compelling story set against Alex's score. The film was 88 minutes long, and when asked if it was an arduous task to play for that long, he replied that though there were themes for each character, and for many other scenes and elements in the movie, there is certainly room for improvisation, so there are moments that are less demanding. He also said that each time he performs it, it is different.
We all probably would have stayed and asked a lot more questions, but we had each traveled 2 & 1/2 hours to attend, so we had a long ride home that night.
Still, it was an entirely different performance than I had ever experienced before and I feel really lucky that Chan found out about it and told me.
Lynn
