Output details

BBC FOUR World News Today (created by New Guide to Opera (Michael Wolters and Marcus Dross), with Julian Lloyd Webber, Seinab Badawi, BBC News Team, and students from Birmingham Conservatoire)

In BBC FOUR World News Today Wolters set live music live to a live performance of the news (Birmingham Town Hall, BBC Four, BBC World, 5 June 2008).

Wolters and Dross spent two days with the BBC News Team in order to learn how a TV programme is put together, organised, developed and broadcast. Wolters noticed similarities between the news team’s and his ways of working: both create time-based frameworks first and then fill it with material from various clearly defined categories.

Wolters needed to build up a large potential of music, a gamut of musical items, as this corresponded with the way the news team worked: having a large enough number of items on standby to choose from. He wrote and rehearsed 80 pieces of music with the ensemble. In the performance 17 of those pieces were used. The selection and order of pieces was fixed 20 minutes before the broadcast but changed dynamically during the performance: following a phone call from the control room informing Wolters, as director, of a rescheduling of news material, he had one minute to adapt and recompose live.

In his ongoing desire to connect his artistic work with ‘real life’, Wolters, with Dross, was looking for environments where music is deemed inappropriate. A news programme is one of those. (However, on American TV and increasingly in the UK, music accompanying news items has since become more of a norm). This piece examines the effect of adding more and less neutral music to more and less neutral stories.

A live excerpt of the performance was included in the worldwide broadcast of the news programme itself, thus creating a feedback situation, where the performers had to accompany themselves on the screen.