Joined: Mon Aug 10, 2009 10:49 am Posts: 622
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Yay! Something has surfaced finally! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AZ2m018tY4Refresh your memory: P.J. Harvey hits Broadway with 'Hedda Gabler' score
They’re both bold women — one wildly creative, the other bitterly violent.
Rock star P.J. Harvey and dramatic character Hedda Gabler share a keen interest in shaking things up, even if the former does so in an infinitely more appealing way than the latter.
“The character of Hedda is fascinating and horrifying at the same time,” Harvey says. “As an artist, I’ve always been drawn to what human beings are capable of, in how far you can push things. And Hedda pushes things to the limit.”
Small wonder, then, that Harvey leapt at the chance to provide the disruptive music that adds spookiness to the new production of Henrik Ibsen’s classic ode to the ultimate psycho bitch from hell. Starring the ideally “off” Mary-Louise Parker, this production of “Hedda Gabler” opens Sunday at the American Airlines Theater.
For fans of Harvey’s restless muse, the play provides an ideal extension of her brand. Though her eight albums show a flair for setting scenes evocative enough for theater or movie scores, Harvey had never worked in either medium. “I’ve wanted to do theater or film music since I first began writing music,” the artist says. “I’ve just never been approached before.”
Her break came from director Ian Rick-son. Harvey met him five years ago when he was running London’s Royal Court Theater. “He gave me pointers of the kind of music he was looking for,” Harvey says. “I did whatever I felt I needed to do for his vision.”
The score — which takes up the first two minutes of the play, then creepy-crawls around the starts and finishes of all four acts — centers on a hiss, a compressed signal of menace and torment. It’s the sound of seething. “I just kept coming back to that sound,” Harvey says.
To achieve it, she “mashed up guitar feedback and played it at the wrong speed.” The music also features melodic piano interludes, though Harvey says she “under-cut that with something wrong in the lower end, something destabilizing. It sounds like radio static, or like things breaking down.”
It’s the perfect tone for a play centered on a character whose hatred of marital conventions, and fear of her own feelings, has made her quickly run off the rails. If the result reads as extreme now, imagine how it went down when Ibsen first presented it in 1889. “In the context of the time, this was utter-ly unheard of,” Harvey says.
That, of course, turned her on. The chill of the music bears a relation to Harvey’s last CD, 2007’s “White Chalk,” which presented a kind of psychosexual dreamscape. Harvey’s next album, arriving in spring, will pair her again with old collaborator John Parish. She’ll tour in May.
In the meantime, Harvey has lots of other ambitions. The woman who previously wrote music for dance also paints, sculpts and writes poetry. She has been drawing so much of late that she hopes to have an exhibition of her work. And that’s not all. “I’d like to do some comedy work,” says Harvey, who rarely cracks a smile in public. “I’d love to do a show with a standup comic and music.”
“I’m not sure how that would work,” she admits. “But there must be a way.”
Don’t bet against her.http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/2009/01/23/2009-01-23_pj_harvey_hits_broadway_with_hedda_gable.html
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