Задания для самостоятельной работы
по учебнику Камяновой Т.Г. English. Практический курс английского языка, 2005. ‒ 384 с.
(одинаковые для всех)
1. Unit 6 Ex. 6.27; 6.28; 6.29.
2. Unit 7 Ex. 7.6; 7.7; 7.8.
3. Unit 8 Ex. 8.11; 8.12; 8.15.
4. Unit 9 Ex. 9.3; 9.4 (1-15 предложений).
5. Работа с текстом (см. ниже). Предложенный текст перевести устно, а задания к нему ‒ письменно выполнить.
Texte 3. LIGHTS, CAMERA, BATON
In a crowded control room at George Martin’s Air Studios, a dizzy bank of jumping orange LEDs registers the sound of a symphony orchestra in full flight. They are playing, not a sarabande or a symphony, but a 40-second sound cue from Band of Brothers, the $100m television spin-off from Spielberg’s epic Saving Private Ryan. Beyond the control room’s plate-glass window, the composer Michael Kamen leads his musicians for a fourth time through a sweetly elegiac passage for strings. The assembled sound engineers nervously drum their fingers, while a digital stopwatch carves time into milliseconds. And, on two plasma screens above the vast mixing desk, an American soldier staggers out of a bombed-out building. «He’s way too slow», mutters the recording engineer hunched over the mixing desk. «He’ll never make it». Ry Cooder is said to have recorded his haunting score for Paris, Texas in a single take, twanging away on a 12-string guitar as he watched a rough-cut of the movie. But today’s film music is rarely so simple, or so spontaneous.
The symphony orchestra is back in business. And while many concert hall composers – including Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Vaughan Williams, Walton and Takemitsu – have in the past moved into the film, unprecedented numbers of film composers are now beginning to find their way into the concert hall and the classical charts, and onto the playlists of Classic FM. The tide is turning. Film music is fast becoming the dominant classical music of today. In fact, the tide began to turn as long ago as 1977, when John Williams composed his landmark score for Star Wars. The Hollywood soundtracks of the 1960s had been progressively reporting to cheaper, funkier jazz, pop and – for sci-fi movies, in particular – electronic music. But suddenly, in place of the other-worldly bloop-bleep-blips we might have expected, Williams offered a grandly symphonic score that evoked Holst and Mahler, and has since been widely accepted as part of the mainstream orchestral repertoire.
More recently, the score for Gladiator has been perched at the top of the classical charts, jostling for pole position with James Horner’s music for Titanic. «Yes, we are playing more film soundtracks than ever before», admits Roger Lewis, the managing director of Classic FM, before adding defensively: «But it is still less than 10 % of our output». On the concert platform, meanwhile, Ennio Morricone is about to give his first live UK performance, conducting scores including The Mission and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as part of a Barbican series devoted to music and film. And Michael Kamen, better known for his work on Lethal Weapon, Die Hard and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, has been commissioned to write a grown-up symphony by Washington DC’s National Symphony Orchestra.
«The symphony was a very gratifying commission», says Kamen, a grizzled Peter Pan with the hint of the Old Testament about him, «because I thought, ‘Ooh, man, they’re taking me seriously!’. «This, lest we forget, is the man who wrote Everything I Do, the signature tune for the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, for Bryan Adams. Yet, whether he is composing film music or a symphony, the process of writing is, says Kamen, the same. «I make very serious attempts to tell a story in my film music, and to be as profound as I possibly can with an orchestra. I think it’s a great waste to play insipid little tunes with that kind of wealth of possibility», he declares.
This is not an argument about why we should take film music and composers far more seriously, nor is it about what does and does not constitute classical music. What is significant, as Robert van Leer, the head of music at the Barbican puts it, is that «We are seeing a more fluid environment in which classical composers are working, especially in moving between film industry and the concert hall». This scene of fluidity applies whether it to be a «serious» composer such as Tan Dun composing his first score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or the composer of Lethal Weapon writing his very first symphony. Recordings of film scores are not leading gullible audiences off the straight-and-narrow path of Birtwistle and Xenakis and Adns: they are opening up classical music to entirely new audiences. Sir Arthur Bliss attempted to argue that film music must work equally well in the concert hall to be worthy of critical attention. But this misses the point about film music’s role.
Such music has its own difficult and subtle work to do, without wondering how it may sound, naked, in a hushed auditorium. And what is easy to miss – dazzled by luscious cinematography – is the way that film music has evolved in terms of depth and nuance over the past 15 years, to the extent that it may yet aesthetically reinvigorate a classical tradition that, many would argue, long ago went astray.