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Silent Era : Articles : Ehsan Khoshbakht : an Interview Wi Silent Era : Articles : Ehsan Khoshbakht : An Interview wi... http://www.silentera.com/articles/khoshbakhtEhsan/wolk... Silent Era Home Page > Articles > Ehsan Khoshbakht > An Interview with Silent Film Composer Ekkehard Wölk An archive of articles on the silent era of world cinema. Copyright © 1999-2013 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved. Select Language Powered by Translate An Interview with Silent Film Composer Ekkehard Wölk By Ehsan Khoshbakht Ekkehard Wölk is a pianist, arranger and composer from Germany. As far as cinema concerned, he is a Online Teacher composer and accompanist for silent films. His style consists of a personal interpretation of classical music from Courses the view of a jazz improviser. He has composed music scores for several films of the German silent cinema — most notably for F.W. Murnau films. Two of his works for German films have been released on DVD home video www.WGU.edu by Kino International: Secrets of a Soul (1926) directed by G.W. Pabst (released 2009), and The Finances of the Bachelor's & Grand Duke (1924) directed by Murnau (released 2008), which was also broadcast in Europe by Arte Television Master's Programs. in December 2008. NCATE Accredited. Wölk was born on 14 June 1967 in Schleswig, Germany, and began his piano training at the age of seven in the Low Tuition! classical tradition of Leschetitzky and his famous adepts Artur Schnabel and Edwin Fischer. Eventually, Wölk studied with emphasis on the major works of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Debussy. After graduating from high school, in 1987, he studied historical and systematic musicology at the University of Hamburg, and later studied Kino Lorber at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Films From 1988 Wölk studied classical piano at the conservatories in Hamburg and Lubeck, graduating in 1994 as a www.kinolorber.c… concert pianist and music pedagogue. Ekkehard wrote his first jazz compositions at the age of twenty-two, and at first, his primary jazz influence was Bill Evans, but he later also studied Bud Powell, McCoy Tyner, Thelonious Monk, Ahmad Jamal, Art Tatum, Indie, Foreign, and specifically Fred Hersch who, many years later, became his master teacher in New York City. Classic, and Silent film DVDs. Free In 1995, Wölk moved to Berlin and worked as a composer and bandleader, developing creative projects mostly in Shipping $50+. the jazz field. He has worked as a jazz and classical teacher, as an arranger, and as a flexible accompanist for many jazz singers, as well as in the classical and musical show genres. He has also worked in live theatre as an accompanist, notably, for the Brecht Theatre Berliner Ensemble. #PlayStation2013 Ekkehard Wölk has released five albums as a pianist and arranger in Germany and Italy: A Meeting of Two American Giants — Gershwin/Bernstein (JB Records, 2001); the trio album, Songs, Chorals and Dances (2005); www.playstation.c… a solo album, Reflections on Mozart (2006); Desire for Spring (Splasc(H) Records, 2007); and Homage to Nino Rota (2008) — (some of these albums are available at www.nabelrecords.de). He has performed with his trio for You want fun? This several live radio recordings, mostly original compositions under the title Pictures in Sounds, for well-known is fun. Be first to German broadcasting stations in Berlin and Munich. A June 2009 broadcast by the Wölk quartet was dedicated know on 2/20 @ to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. 6pmEST In 2005, Wölk was invited by the former director of the F.W. Murnau Foundation, Friedemann Beyer to compose and perform music scores for selected Murnau films. In addition to the two commercially-released titles from this period, Wölk composed music in 2007 for Murnau’s Faust (1926), a score that he considers his best work, which 2013 Art Classes has not yet been released on DVD. Among the other films he has composed and performed live piano accompaniment for are Murnau’s Nosferatu Near You (1922), The Last Laugh (1924) and Tartüff (1926), Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Moon (1929), Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann’s People on Sunday (1929), Ernst Lubitsch’s The Wildcat (1921), and also for some of the great American comedies by Buster Colleges.Campus… Keaton, Charles Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. See 2013 Art Classes Near You. Enter Zip & Find Khoshbakht: What is your conception of composing for or accompanying a silent picture? How do you fill the gap between a piece of art that Local Schools Now! has been made years ago and the second form of art that is trying to accompany, complete or add something new to the prior? Wölk: My ideal vision for the projected effect of a composer’s soundtrack for Silent Era Ads silent movies would be a gain of an immediately emotionally approachable Rudolph Valentino ‘presence’ of the old films in the will rub shoulders with perception of contemporary viewers modern lovers in when they are confronted with a newly The Nenagh Silent restored version and new music in Film Festival, cinema or on TV. 14-17 February 2013. Classic features and I strongly believe that a good musical contemporary shorts. accompaniment can bridge the gap Lectures, music, between many lost decades lying workshops and an international 1 of 5 2/18/13 10:37 AM Silent Era : Articles : Ehsan Khoshbakht : An Interview wi... http://www.silentera.com/articles/khoshbakhtEhsan/wolk... custard-pie massacre. in-between by providing a kind of All in the scenic heart emotional guide through an ancient of Ireland. Visit film which otherwise might not be easy our website or email to consume or maybe even totally for details. Like us on unapproachable for many modern Facebook for tickets viewers. and special deals. The golden days of silent cinema in Advertise on Silent Era Europe and the United States (roughly dating from 1913-1929) are, to me, undoubtedly the greatest and artistically most satisfying period in cinema history, judging, primarily, by the surviving masterpieces (two-thirds of the whole output of films from that time have been allegedly lost and destroyed during the wars). Unfortunately, cinema as an original art form had already reached its culmination as an artistic medium quite early after its invention (if we accept the first Lumières screening in Paris of December 1895 as the general start). Valued from a purely aesthetic point of view and considering the idea of a certain innocence of the medium which was young in those days and produced startling technical and artistic innovations from Georges Méliès and Griffith on, one can certainly argue that even the arrival of sound film in the late 1920s and the subsequent development already meant a sort of ‘decline’ of the medium in terms of pictorial qualities and mastery of storytelling without dialogue. Of course, there is no need for everybody to share my rather purist opinion, I concede, but modern audiences must be generally led to a different perception and a heightened evaluation of the great masterpieces of silent cinema which have come down to us some eighty years later. Here, there is a challenging task but also a rewarding privilege for talented and devoted musicians and composers who share their skills collectively with the efforts of good restorators, archivists, journalists, owners of cinematheques and TV art channels — all for the sake of fresh and exciting new screenings of the old cinematic treasures that can still open many additional modern eyes to the artistic miracles of the early 20th century. To give you an analogy from the wide field of arts: Though there has been a lot of interesting literature since that time, nobody can really seriously justify the idea that there have been any kind of ‘better’ books than those written, for example, by Gogol and Turgenjev around 1850 which still have readers all around the world today! There are only different approaches to the possible range and meaning of literature and its relationship to life nowadays delivered by books of modern authors. Similarly, there have certainly not been any ‘better’ films since 1930 (unless exclusively judged by the increasing perfection of technical special effect standards) than those classics produced before by giants like Murnau, Stroheim, Dreyer, Eisenstein, etc. Indeed, this is a wide field where more valid and convincing contributions by contemporary composers can help modern audiences, by the strength of their soundtracks, in getting to know these classics and their aesthetic values much more thoroughly! Khoshbakht: What is the role of improvisation in your silent film scores? Wölk: In live concerts, the amount of free improvisation is very high concerning my part as a pianist/interpreter/spontaneous arranger/ composer because I want to follow the action on screen as smoothly and varyingly as possible. Usually, before a concert, I only select four or five central musical themes that will reappear throughout the whole show as leitmotifs, but the harmonic connections between these thematic blocks and actually most of the music dealing with the narrative development inherent in the film’s plot are spontaneously improvised while going along with the projected film. But, while working on a compositional commission and/or preparing a studio recording for a DVD release or a television screening, the situation is entirely different for me. In this case, improvisation only plays a very minor part in the whole procedure. The arrangements and compositions for the film must be meticulously worked out in advance connected with the actual editing rhythm and dramaturgy of the various sequences and, first and foremost, their specific duration in minutes and seconds. This has all to be checked out very carefully by the composer while watching the film over and over again, sometimes even with the help of a stopwatch, to coordinate and structure the work on concrete themes and compositions.
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