Something very strange to rant about!

Judging a book by its soundtrack
I have just been watching The Culture Show on BBC2 and watched in amazement as a composer tried to compose pieces of music to represent the six books recently shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. How on earth could he try and do this without reading the books? He merely chatted to the authors and made a few suggestions so that in most cases what resulted was a kind of mixed soup of sound. For example The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, resulted in a 1920's sounding piece of jazz reminiscent of a Manhatten detective story. Shame cos had he thought to even check on the period of the book, it could have resulted in a fantastic big band sound typical of the 1940's. The thing that music can do as well as literature is set the mood. This cannot be done without first reading the book however! See what you think of the results of this very weird endeavour. Janet 2 Oct 2006

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