AMG plot
It makes sense that an offbeat director such as Peter Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Prospero’s Books) would be attracted to a project such as 4 American Composers, a 1983 British television special profiling John Cage, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, and Robert Ashley, four U.S. musical artists who haven’t been content simply to entertain, but feel compelled to “push the envelope” of music.

Meredith Monk episode chronicles the career of the award-winning artist, a composer and singer who also works in film and dance. Monk is the fourth generation in her family to become a singer, and pioneered “extended vocal technique.” Greenaway here provides viewers with performance sequences from Monk’s multimedia pieces “Dolman Music,” “Travelling,” “Ellis Island,” and others.

Robert Ashley episode chronicles the work and career of the distinguished composer , an innovator of opera who has worked to make it American in subject matter and idiom, writing opera for television. Greenaway here provides viewers with performances excerpted from Ashley’s seven-part television opera Perfect Lives. The opera was co-produced by Britain’s Channel Four television network in August of 1983.

Philip Glass episode chronicles the career of the award-winning artist , a composer trained in mathematics and philosophy, who in his twenties had a musical epiphany when he discovered the techniques of Indian music while transcribing Ravi Shankar’s music for a French filmmaker. Glass eventually applied techniques from India, North Africa, and the Himalayas to his seminal work. Greenaway here provides viewers with excerpts from performances of Glass’ compositions

John Cage episode centers on a concert performed in England on Cage’s 70th birthday. Featured are partial performances (sometimes overlapping) of a number of pieces, including “Roaratorio” (with Cage as narrator), “Forever and Sunsmell,” “Double Music,” and others. Highlights include a performance by Marcel Duchamp and interview commentary by Cage and others.

Four American Composers Meredith Monk 1983 PAL DVD DD2.0 x264-nosferato.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	52 min 9 s
Size: 	1.58 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	700x576 ~> 994x576
Aspect ratio:  	1.727
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 948 kb/s
BPP: 	0.392
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 384 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/10AE6D89F3EB278/Four_American_Composers_John_Cage_1983_PAL_DVD_DD2.0_x264-nosferato.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/4294D722E9E783E/Four_American_Composers_Meredith_Monk_1983_PAL_DVD_DD2.0_x264-nosferato.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/15068E940B7261A/Four_American_Composers_Phillip_Glass_1983_PAL_DVD_DD2.0_x264-nosferato.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/0449690446F2CD7/Four_American_Composers_Robert_Ashley_1983_PAL_DVD_DD2.0_x264-nosferato.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:French

The post Peter Greenaway – Four American Composers (1983) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

AMG plot
It makes sense that an offbeat director such as Peter Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Prospero’s Books) would be attracted to a project such as 4 American Composers, a 1983 British television special profiling John Cage, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, and Robert Ashley, four U.S. musical artists who haven’t been content simply to entertain, but feel compelled to “push the envelope” of music.

Peter Greenaway - John Cage.avi

General
Container:	AVI
Runtime:	54mn 16s
Size:	600 MiB
Video
Codec:	XviD
Resolution:	592x448
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	1 152 Kbps
Audio
2.0ch AC-3 @ 384 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/0E47BA5EC630502/Peter_Greenaway_-_John_Cage.avi
https://nitro.download/view/943AF3FB3CAC6F1/Peter_Greenaway_-_Meredith_Monk.avi
https://nitro.download/view/7C0C0F00CEB40AC/Peter_Greenaway_-_Philip_Glass.avi
https://nitro.download/view/8B1ABE77A276087/Peter_Greenaway_-_Robert_Ashley.avi
https://nitro.download/view/AB88C87BA00D544/four.zip

Language(s):English
Subtitles:French

The post Peter Greenaway – Four American Composers (1983) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

From Jennifer Dunning’s 1990 review in The New York Times:
“Meredith Monk has been an anomaly for much of her 27-year career as a composer and choreographer, creating dances that were operas, operas that were dances and mythic theater pieces that were operas and dances. To complicate matters, Ms. Monk is also a filmmaker. In Book of Days, she has created a film that is essentially a moving picture.

“Book of Days opens, in color, with 20th-century workmen blasting a brick wall, leaving a hole that opens into a black-and-white small town in the Middle Ages. Men, women and children glide about their daily tasks, stopping to answer sometimes tellingly anachronistic questions from 20th-century interviewers.

“The medieval Christians are dressed in white; the Jews are in black robes, each marked with a yellow circle. Both are stricken by the plague, for which the Jews are blamed. A Jewish girl has visionary dreams that prompt her to draw crude objects identifiable as a car, an airplane, a gun. But there is no belaboring of those visions–or of the stylized plague. Book of Days is a very beautiful visual play of surfaces and textures, from brick to rough-plastered wall and from the luminous innocence that lights the girl’s face to the canny innocence illuminating the face of the crone, played by Ms. Monk, who teaches her to embrace her visions.”

843MB | 1 h 14 min | 720×540 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/F15D17FEDB0122D/Book.of.Days.1989.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.x264-KG.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Meredith Monk – Book of Days (1989) first appeared on Cinema of the World.