Artistic Director's Notes June 2026 Concert

When I was learning to be a film composer, one of my mentors said: "The audience shouldn't pay attention to your music. They should feel the connection to the image"

This stays with me all of the time when I am writing for any media, but it also raises a somewhat problematic idea about concerts of Film music. Should the audience recognise the music? Also, almost all musical spots are only seconds long - they are short.

This problem is even greater for movies and television shows that use, what we call in the business "Drop the needle scores". Before the 1980s, almost all music that was used in visual media was written specifically for the show. It was created in close colloboration with the director, and sometimes the actors, to reflect what was going on - most of the time supporting the underlying emotion, but also sometimes pointing out a contradiction [A "happy" scene scored with "sad" music to foretell something that is about to happen]. For some reason these bespoke scores tended to be used more and more as directors chose music that was already in existence, and quite often, used music by famous artists to hopefully increase the audience reach. This happened to me as a very young composer who was asked to help writing a score for a new Peter Weir film. The three of us worked hard for a month, came up with a rather cool (at least to me) score, only to find out that Weir had decided to use music already recorded by Jean-Michel Jarre!

Putting all this "problematic stuff" aside, I had wanted to explore a concert of Film music for the orchestra for a little while, and when researching choices, I discovered an interesting fact: Although every orchestra presents concerts that use Film Music, none of them had concentrated on local content. This gave me the idea to curate a concert that only used productions filmed in our local area. My first exposure to White Rock was via The X-Files, although I didn't know that it was White Rock at the time. Many episodes from the first few seasons were filmed here (the opening sequence is filmed near the cemetery, houses are used in Stayte Road, and one episode was mainly filmed on Marine Drive, as well as Boundary Bay Airport is used many many many times!). There have been literally 100s of productions filmed here, so my main concern for this concert was to not used too many pieces! I also wanted to mix the styles a little - there are some classical pieces, and then there are some more popular pieces. I am very happy with the mix we chose.

The final thing I would like to say about this concert is that we are playing (almost...) all complete pieces, where in the actual film or television show, only seconds of the work would be used. Have fun going through your collection and trying to find out where exact episode or part I used, and where it was filmed!

II want to thank all my hard-working performing colleagues from the orchestra who turn up every Saturday for rehearsal. I also very much want to thank our Board who have worked together in creating a safe space for everyone

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And finally, I would like to thank all the volunteers who helped set the concert up, and ran the Front of House (It is nice to have our regular FoH manager back!) and handled the concessions and the raffle. Thank you all.