Wednesday 15 April 2020

When I say they don’t write children’s television music like they used to, I mean that they literally don’t

When I say they don’t write children’s television music like they used to, I mean that they literally don’t. The songs we were exposed to were a marriage of convenience between, on the one hand, avant-garde library musicians, left-leaning folk enthusiasts and experimentally-minded classical musicians, and on the other, the commissioning editors who enlisted their services.

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Even if Freddie Philips – who believed that children should be raised on a diet of Boulez and Stravinsky – reined in his avant-garde instincts for his Trumpton and Camberwick Green music, others didn’t feel the need to try. Vernon Elliott’s music for The Clangers catapulted me to worlds which depicted outer space as a place where tiny curiosities happened against a backdrop of vast emptiness. Come to think of it, that wasn’t so different to the brief Elliott set himself in evoking rural Wales for his music in Ivor the Engine.

P. Paphides, Broken Greek (2020), kindle loc. 509 and 644

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