Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Leeds School of Arts presents well-known composer, writer, pianist and broadcaster Neil Brand. He will use his own work to investigate how music works with film, how it tells stories and the history and development of the film score from 1928 to the present day.
Neil will take a deep dive into the musical toolbox of the movie score-resolution, modernism, the Big Tune, variations and the use of silence. Drawing on orchestral scores such as Hitchcock's 1929 silent film Blackmail and Asquith's 1927 thriller Underground. Neil will also consider clips from classics of horror, film noir, suspense, animation and modern action movies.
Neil will bring film to life through its music and whilst showing how the magic tricks are sometimes done, celebrate the work of the great composers whose work has so often been overlooked. He will illustrate his examples with live piano demos and will finish by playing a short sequence from a silent drama live.
Neil Brand has been a silent film accompanist for over 35 years throughout the UK and at film festivals around the world.
Neil now has a very fruitful relationship with the BBC Symphony Orchestra with his acclaimed orchestral scores for Hitchcock’s silent film Blackmail, Asquith’s Underground, Chaplin's Easy Street and Fairbanks’s Robin Hood. He followed these successes with two through-scored radio adaptations, The Wind in the Willows, A Christmas Carol, and most recently Echoes of the North with the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band, The Hound of the Baskervilles with Mark Gatiss as Sherlock as well as the BFI release of South – Shackleton’s Epic of the Antarctic.
Brand is well-known as a TV presenter with five hugely successful ‘Sound of …’ series on BBC4, is a regular presenter on Radio 4's Film Programme, Add to Playlist and Soul Music, a Fellow of Aberystwyth University and a Member and Visiting Professor of the Royal Academy of Music, was awarded the BASCA Gold Badge in 2016 and is considered one of the finest improvising piano accompanists in the world.
