Desktop		 ........
Peter Greenaway		 ...... [The Falls]
The Falls		......
Music in The Falls
In addition to the wealth of material contained in The Bird List Song Interview the following notes are offered.

'In 1964 I bought a job-lot of 78rpm gramophone-records from a shop in North London where there is now a sign saying 'The North'. That very diverse collection provided many musical ideas - not least the animal-lyric compositions in A Zed and Two Noughts.

Also in that collection was an old recording of Mozart's Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra (Sinfonia Concertante in E flat major, K.364). Eight bars from the slow movement became the basis for the musical structure of the 1978-80 film, The Falls. Michael Nyman took that short evocative section and broke it down to provide the title music for the 92 individual biographies that make up that film. Not until the 92nd biography had been completed did the full Mozartian section resurface in its entirety.

Biography 27 - the one devoted entirely to a pocket-history of the First Cissie Colpitts - was entirely accompanied by the Concertante slow-movement transferred directly from the old disc with its quickened speed, its scratched surface and its tinny pitch.'

Peter Greenaway, Fear of Drowning, p.125


'It was Peter Greenaway who first drew my attention to the brief but stunning melody with which Mozart closes the exposition of the slow movement of the Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra. He suggested I make 92 variations of these four bars (58-61) one for each of the 92 characters whose biographies make up his film The Falls: this I did by breaking the sequence down beat by beat and adding layers of new figuration. But this little symmetrical fragment has refused to lie down and die....'
Michael Nyman, extract from his notes to the accompany the CD release of 'Drowning by Numbers'