'Microphones in Middle-earth: Music in the BBC Radio Play', Paul Smith

[davem]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

I've now listened to some of the radio drama, and it's interesting to do so after reading Smith's essay, as I find myself being particularly attentive to the music. So far I find Oliver's settings of the songs to sound very "authentic" - by which, I suppose, I mean that they sound very much as I have always imagined them to.

Lot more on the series (including contributions from Brian Sibley himself) in our unfinished thread http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showthread.php?t=14646 . Quite a bit on Stephen Oliver's music can be found there. There is a (very) limited edition recording (which a few of us have of a talk given by Brian Sibley, Michael Bakewell (the adaptors), Penny Leicester (the director) & a number of the cast, along with Stephen Oliver himself (& an excerpt from the tape prepared by Christopher Tolkien as a pronunciation guide for the actors) which was given at the Church House Bookshop back in 1981, which took place just a few days before the series was first broadcast.

Don't know if any of the following made it into the essay, but here's a bit from a couple of my posts on the thread:

The music was by Stephen Oliver (Morgan had originally wanted Sir Malcolm Arnold). Oliver decided that he didn't want anything that sounded 'too grand', as most of the audience would be listening to it on small radios. He chose to use almost exclusively Violas & Cellos (the only real exception being Boromir's horn). Oliver commented that he found Tolkien's lyrics 'poor' - except for the alliterative verse, which he thought brilliant. The approach he took to setting them to music was quite practical - if it was a walking song he would use a walking rhythm' dum-dum-dum.

&

I love that Church House recording - though I'm not sure Stephen Oliver's annecdote on the afternoon he spent teaching the Ambrosian Singers the song from the Field of Cormallen would be quite acceptable in these more PC times ('Like teaching disabled children to sing God save the Queen' as he put it!).

You might also like these pages from Brian's blog http://briansibleytheworks.blogspot....fadden-on.html & http://briansibleytheworks.blogspot....uction_23.html