Half Moon

Music for Airports

A video work accompanying Bang on a Can All-Stars' 1998 live performance of Brian Eno's Music for Airports.

John Cage: From Zero

A fascinating study of merging form with content, broken into four shorts, each complete with opening title and closing credits: "19 Questions," "Fourteen," "Paying Attention," and "Overpopulation and Art."

Conducting Mahler

Documents the interpretations of Gustav Mahler's compositions by conductors Bernard Haitink, Riccardo Chailly, Riccardo Muti, Claudio Abbado, and Simon Rattle, who detail the special relationship they have with Mahler's work.

Hexagon

A compilation of six standalone short films, each inspired by a contemporary Dutch music composition and created as part of a collaboration between Nederlandse film directors and composers for a Holland Festival presentation.

In the Ocean

In this unique documentary, Dutch filmmaker Frank Scheffer trains his lens on the groundbreaking music group Bang on a Can, capturing the band's performance of Brian Eno's ethereal composition "Music for Airports" at the 1999 Holland Festival. The film not only highlights the work of Eno, a distinguished ambient music composer, but also charts the cross-pollination of musical ideas between Europe and America in the 21st century.

A Labyrinth of Time

Carefully composed portrait of prominent modern composer Elliott Carter (1908-1912). Scheffer depicts both the person and the development in his music and the musical tradition it grew out of, as well as the time in which the American Carter grew up. The result: historical images of the city of New York, old film footage, cinematographic finds to illustrate the music and statements by conspicuous fellow-composers and musicians, including Pierre Boulez and Daniel Barenboim.

Attrazione D'Amore/Voyage to Cythera

Attrazione d'Amore is a touching illustration of the unique relation that has developed between the Conductor Riccardo Chailly and his famous Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Voyage to Cythera navigates through wonderful musical quotes made of performances conducted by Berio, rehearsals, archival documents and interviews featuring Riccardo Chailly and Louis Andriessen.

Helicopter String Quartet

One morning, the late Karlheinz Stockhausen awoke from a dream that told him to take to the sky. Stockhausen envisioned four helicopters swirling in the clouds, with each of a quartet’s members tucked inside his own chopper, communicating through headsets, stringing away in sync to the rotor-blade motors. He immediately set forth to make that dream a reality. In 1995, Dutch film director Scheffer followed Stockhausen in the days leading up to the premiere performance of his Helicopter String Quartet in Amsterdam. The resulting film offers a rare glimpse of Stockhausen as he patiently dictates every agonizingly detailed measure to the Arditti Quartet.

Eclat

Eclat is a fascinating documentary about the work. We witness rehearsals by the Netherlands' Nieuw Ensemble, hear comments about the piece from the composer, conductor Ed Spanjaard and some of the musicians, and we see a full performance of the work. Eclat ("To burst out") is a beautiful example of the strangely lyrical pointillist style that Boulez had inherited from Anton von Webern. Aural pinwheels and shifting musical kaleidoscopes with stunning instrumental color is the only way to verbally describe what must be heard to be understood. This is definitely not for those who hate "modern" music. For those who respond to contemporary music, this piece is masterful and this film is a must-see!

Gozaran: Time Passing

It is the dream of the Persian avant-garde composer Nader Mashayekhi to bring modern classical music to his country Iran. His dream becomes reality when he is asked to conduct the Teheran Symphony Orchestra.

Tea

Director Scheffer registered a performance of the Tea Opera by Chinese composer Tan Dun (who won an Oscar in 2001 with his score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Scheffer interlaces the images with interviews with Dun, stage director Pierre Audi and librettist Xu Ying, about the opera and the role tea and oriental philosophy play in this work. Using monochrome, sometimes abstract images (in yellow, blue, red and green), close-ups of plants and flowers and images of the Chinese nature and people (sometimes accelerated or decelerated, sometimes in black-and-white), he mirrors the stylised opera performance and Dun's reflective music.

Gustav Mahler: I Have Lost Touch with the World

A documentary based on Gustav Mahler's 9th Symphony. Riccardo Chailly is conducting and analyzing the four movements of the symphony.

Ring

Against the background of this short film in which he includes a complete Wagner cycle as a music video in four minutes, Scheffer shows in Ring many composers and conductors who have played a major role in twentieth-century music. Flashes of Elliot Carter, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Richard Wagner, Bernhard Haitink and many others crop up in the Wagner set. This leads to a compilation of the many music documentaries that Scheffer has made in recent years.

Inner Landscape

Documentary about the creation of the chamber opera Si Fan, composed by Chinese composer Guo Wenjing in 2015 for the Nieuw Ensemble. In Si Fan (‘yearnings of love’), Guo combines traditional opera from his native Sichuan with his own music. "I don’t think when composing, I follow my heart", Guo says to Ed Spanjaard, head conductor of the Nieuw Ensemble, who comes to visit him in China to learn about the secrets of Sichuan opera. In this painstaking film, Shen Tiemei, the star singer of the Sichuan opera, speaks about the differences between East and West, and between tradition and the modern age.

Gustav Mahler - Singer for the Earth

The young conductor John Warner (27) and the musicians of Orchestra for the Earth are going to Austria, searching for the deeper meaning of the magical Gustav Mahler composition "Das Lied von der Erde". They refuse to take an aeroplane, since its CO2 emissions are too high, which contributes to Climate Change. Therefore, they travel by train. The Orchestra for the Earth wants to draw attention to the theme of Climate Change with their music.

Varese, the One All Alone

Described by writer Henry Miller as “the stratospheric colossus of sound”, French sonic alchemist Edgard Varèse (1883 - 1965) continues to influence music even 40 years after his death. Artists who cite his influence include Frank Zappa, John Cage, Elliot Carter, Pierre Boulez and many others in the contemporary DJ scene. Classifying music as ‘organised sound', Varèse was the first composer to emancipate music from accepted chordal combinations.