Peter and Elissa were ’tapping different angles and different sides of the bells to make different sounds’ Harriet Prep The students expressed their observations of how the bells were played and what the improvisation made them think about. Bell Improv’ Getting ready to beĮlissa and Peter introduced the vast sound-world of the bells with an improvisation that explored a variety of bell techniques. Learning how to make the most pure resonant sound from the bells. Peter and Elissa were concerned that they should do stacks of planning leading up to the workshops, but I assured them that once the students engage with the instruments and their chosen part of the Galaxy, our planning pathway will be revealed. We have welcomed percussionists Peter Neville and Elissa Goodrich to introduce the Federation Handbells and share with us all their ’trade secrets’ about how to make really cool sounds with percussion instruments. This wonderous observation, along with the idea that we are all made of star dust as the Preps have been remarking all week, are just two of many magical moments that have made the start to our percussion workshops delightfully inspiring. It'll just keep crumbling until the wind blows the last studio props into the sand." Well, Judy Garland's ruby slippers were auctioned off long ago, but the film in which she wore them and several dozen other gems from the MGM crown will last for ever.When Miles from Prep first heard the sound of the Federation Handbells, he said that they sounded like ’stars singing in the sky’. Having become a studio songsmith with the coming of sound, Arthur Freed took charge of MGM musicals in 1940 and, working with Stanley Donen, Vincente Minnelli and Gene Kelly, made some of the century's greatest, most life-enhancing works.īack in the 1950s, David O Selznick, onetime MGM producer and Mayer's son-in-law, said: "Hollywood's like Egypt. MGM was a producer's studio, not a place for maverick auteurs like Orson Welles, though Sam Peckinpah made his first important film there, and probably its greatest achievement lay in that ultimate collaborative form, the musical. The silent classic Ben Hur was an MGM film, and the 1959 remake brought a late burst of glory to the studio in the year it was finally forced by anti-trust legislation to sell off its cinemas. In 1925, MGM's The Big Parade launched a vogue for films about the Great War 24 years later, Battleground did the same for movies of the second world war. The studio brought together William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Norah Charles and teamed Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Greta Garbo made all her American films there, and Clark Gable was publicly acclaimed the King of Hollywood while a contract player. Chips in England, and provided the space in At the Circus for Groucho Marx to sing of "Lydia the Tattooed Lady". In 1939, it created Tara in Gone with the Wind and the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, produced one of the greatest-ever comedies, Ninotchka, made Goodbye, Mr. Warner Brothers movies may have been grittier, RKO's darker, Fox's more in touch with political currents, but MGM had a special magic. Together they established a factory that produced bespoke goods with a reputation for style, opulence and meticulous craftsmanship. They were a formidable combination, the ultimate ruthless mogul and the shrewd creative brain who provided the model for Monroe Stahr in Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, the greatest novel about Hollywood's golden age. MGM rapidly became the biggest and most successful of the eight corporations that dominated Hollywood, with the robust, pugnacious Mayer as head of production and the frail, sensitive Irving Thalberg as his right-hand man. Mayer's company to create Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Four years later he merged it with Goldwyn (co-founded by ex-glove salesman Samuel Goldfish and the Selwyn Brothers) and ex-junk dealer Louis B. In 1920, the immigrant waiter's son Marcus Loew, former furrier and owner of a movie chain, bought the ailing Metro company. Though Leo the MGM lion may still occasionally roar beneath that grandiose motto Ars Gratia Artis ("Art for Art's sake"), he will never be the beast he was from the 1920s to the 1960s. But since the sale of its grand lot in Culver City in 1985, several changes of ownership and the initiation of few productions of its own, the studio has been more like a black hole than a galaxy, and its current £2.4bn debt has led to the postponement of the 23rd James Bond movie. In its heyday, MGM boasted that it had "more stars than there are in heaven".
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