All in Music Performance

The First Gig Since 2019

I had a strange Friday night! I did something that at one point in my life was commonplace… And of course, I'm talking about going to gigs. Yes, I managed to get myself out for the first live music performance since the dreaded lockdowns began and as such, I felt the need to blog about it. I had always wanted to blog whenever I went to a gig or a concert, but it kind of never really happened, let's hope we can change that.

Hans Zimmer Revealed

I had heard Zimmer comment in an interview around the time of Chris Nolan’s Inception in 2010 that he had been contemplating taking some time off from movie scoring to take his music around the world with a bunch of his friends and an orchestra.

I had been intrigued by this but after another seeing one move after another being added to his IMDb page, including another Pirates of the Caribbean, Sherlock 2, The Dark Knight RisesMan of Steel12 Years A Slave and Rush to name a few, it seemed this was going to be unlikely.

This is not to say that I wanted to stop hearing Zimmer’s scores in new movies, far from it, I just wanted to see some of his scores performed live and knew I would be interested to study the stage placement and arrangement of the band, not to mention it would simply be an amazing event should it ever actually take place. 

Then I noticed that with the exception of Interstellar (Nolan’s upcoming 2014 feature, and one I’m really looking forward to), his schedule looked fairly light in comparison to the previous years. This was followed by one boring weekday afternoon sitting at my day job bored out of my mind and daydreaming about film as usual, I received an email from one of the many live event websites of which I am partied and they happened to be advertising an event called Hans Zimmer Revealed. I instantly looked into it and excitedly bought the best and most expensive seats I could afford at the time, the gig was finally actually going to happen…

Evelyn Glennie: How to truly listen

I have often thought about how we experience music and how this experience must differ from one person to another. Two people might be in the same concert hall, or even just sitting in a living room listening to music, but experience the sound in a totally different way. This could perhaps be down where the person is seated, maybe certain frequencies in the instrumental timbre are accentuated, or frequencies maybe in the bottom end (bass) of the sound example are dampened, therefore altering the persons experience or interpretation of the piece.


Either way, I believe that listening to music and indeed sound is a multi-sensual experience that is not only processed by our ears, but felt throughout our whole body which can influence how we feel about a certain sound or combination of sounds. I am sure many of us have been in a place where loud music is played and have felt the bass literally pumping through us, is this music? Or sound? It is perhaps besides the point, but it is a good example of how a sound is being felt rather than heard. In this soaring demonstration, deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie illustrates how listening to music involves much more than simply letting sound waves hit your eardrums. Glennie lost nearly all of her hearing by age 12 but rather than that isolating her from music, it gave her a unique connection to sound.


One interesting topic I began to think about while listening to Evelyn speak, is the difference between experiencing music through performance, live at concert, through speakers projecting sound-waves into a room, headphones projecting sound into your ear and ear-buds which emit sound literally straight to your eardrum. This would suggest that the latter two options remove a significant amount of emotive qualities from music. Food-for-thought…