Banks: Seven

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Tony Banks (b. 1950)Seven: A Suite for OrchestraThe idea of writing for an orchestra had been in my mindsince the recording of the music soundtrack for the film The Wicked Lady, backin the early eighties. At that time I had an existing piano piece which becamethe main theme, that took on a whole new character when it was orchestrated.This inspired me to want to create more music this way using only an orchestra,with the only addition being possibly a piano. With the film score, I hadwritten the music on the piano, which was then orchestrated, and although mostof the pieces worked well, some sections ended up further from the originalconcept than I would have liked. This time I wanted to make sure that thepieces ended up being a true representation of what I had originally written,even though I knew I was going to need the help of an orchestrator. I thereforerecorded fairly detailed demos of the pieces, which I then gave to Simon Hale,the orchestrator of this suite, with the brief to make the music intelligibleto orchestral players. The idea was to keep faithfully to the structure, andnot to change any melodies, chords or other elements, but to have some freedomwith instrumentation, and the use of additional arrangement ideas, to make theresult convincing. There were obviously some ideas that worked better thanothers and it was not until we were actually recording with the orchestra thatthis became apparent. Having worked for over thirty years in the studiorecording with Genesis and others, I was unprepared for the method of workingin this situation. In the time the group would take to have perhaps got theirinstruments working, the orchestra is expected to have done a finishedrecording of maybe twenty minutes of music of which they previously had noknowledge. At the same time we were making frantic changes to the score, bothto correct typographical errors and more importantly to improve parts. Thenthere were also decisions to be made in terms of tempo and expression, whichhad to be communicated to the conductor and then to the players. This provedtoo much to do in the time available, so after recording four pieces andlistening to them many times afterwards I realised I would have to start again.I went in much better prepared the next time, enlisting the help of Nick Davis,who has been involved in my last few studio projects, as co-producer. I triedto make sure that everything from our end was as finished as possible, and thatthe conductor had a clear idea what was intended, and although it was stillvery intense work, everything seemed to come together more easily. Also, havingbeen through the process once, I knew more what to expect and was thereforeable to enjoy the recording and be much happier with the result.Of the seven pieces in this suite, five were writtenspecifically for this project, the other two being ideas from the past that Ihad always thought would work well with an orchestra. The Gateway was in factwritten some twenty years ago as