Record-breaking building features graduate’s soaring soundtrack
Wednesday 30 January 2013
The project to build the tallest building in Western Europe has brought together an array of former music and sound recording students, who together have helped ensure a little piece of Surrey is encaptured in The Shard.
Visitors to the building, which opened this week (opens 1st February 2013), will be accompanied wherever they go by specially-created music reflecting the peace and serenity of standing 1,016ft above the ground. The man behind this is Tonmeister alumnus David Mitcham (1979) who has composed Shard Symphony, an exciting soundtrack to entertain tourists as they travel up to floor 72 to take in the 40-mile view across London.
However, the production has involved a number of alumni, most particularly at Abbey Road Studios where David recorded the music with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Joyful Company of Singers. Andrew Dudman (1998) was the senior balance engineer, and John Barrett (2007) was protools operator, assisted by current Surrey student Seb Truman, who spent his Professional Training Year at the world-famous studios. David’s wife Sue (1977) was producer.
David said he was delighted to be asked to compose for such an iconic project. “Composing some of the initial pieces was quite quick,” he said. “It helps to be excited about what’s going on. I hope the work is uplifting.
“The music played in the lifts as people travel to the top has upward rising motifs, but, once on the viewing floor, it is more ethereal and heavenly. Four choirs answer each other across the space. My music is used as a soundtrack for films played in various parts of the building. The view from the top is just wonderful! Being so much higher than anything else you can see the shape of the Thames as it twists and turns through the city.”
Two former Surrey students were playing in the orchestra – Bryn Lewis, Harp (1981) and Hazel Mulligan, Violin (1979).
David and Sue also invited a couple of alumni friends to attend the recording session – Mike Knowles (1978), who was the first student to spend his industrial year at Abbey Road and set the standard for the many to follow, and Dave Lorde (Human Biology 1977).
David credits his time at Surrey as a major influence on his career. “The most important thing about my course was the balance between the technical and the artistic. The combination influenced me very strongly in the way I think about things, and, on a practical level, every composer now has to be their own sound engineer too so the skills I learned have helped enormously. Surrey, together with the National Youth Orchestra, changed my life completely. They broadened my mind.”
David began his career as a professional composer in 1986 and, initially, he worked in the corporate and commercial sector but by the late 1990s had developed to include scores for television and feature film. Much of his work has been for the BBC Natural History Unit.
David has won many awards for his scores for wildlife films. In 2011, Echo: An Unforgettable Elephant won the Best of Festival awards at the Missoula Wildlife Film Festival and the Wild Talk Africa Film Festival. In 2010, the BBC series South Pacific was awarded Best Use of Music also at Missoula. In 2003 Danger in Tiger Paradise was nominated for the Ivor Novello award for Best Original Music for Television and won the award for best musical score at the biennial Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival and The Elephant, the Emperor and the Butterfly Tree won the Soundtrack award as well as Best of Festival at Wildscreen 2004 - the ‘wildlife Oscars’.
