A celebration of music and the moving image

IF you've ever sat through the closing credits of Star Wars, you'll know that you can find out the names of the assistant accountants, rigging gaffers, apprentice machinists even the latex foam lab supervisor.

- By WILLIAM RUFF

But no matter how hard you look, you won't discover the names of the trumpeters who play that spine-tingling opening fanfare or the French horn player who melts hearts with the Princess Leia theme.

Each stormtrooper gets his moment of individual glory but all the musicians are just lumped together under 'London Symphony Orchestra.

It's easy to take film music for granted. In fact, if a film really grips us, it's easy not to notice it at all.

But just try watching your favourite blockbuster without the music and then say how excited or moved you feel.

One of the good things about living within striking distance of Nottingham over the last two weeks is that there has been no chance of ignoring the potent combination of music and the moving image.

This year's Soundstage Festival has been bigger and better than ever before and has featured just about every genre you can think of (and many you can't) across the city in venues large and small.

The theme has been Journeys, taking audiences across worlds, even galaxies from long, long ago to the future and beyond.

The world of silent films

This year's voyage of discovery was launched by Neil Brand, the ultimate expert about music and film and one of the world's finest when it comes to improvising accompaniments to silent films.

The theme of his Riding the Rails show was trains, starting with perhaps the most famous film made by pioneer brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière.

It has become iconic: just an everyday scene at a train station in which a steam train pulls into the station from the distance, growing larger as it approaches the camera positioned near the tracks.

Legend has it that those first audiences were so terrified by the realism of what they were seeing that they screamed and ran for safety.