Electric Edwardians

Of In the Nursery’s many different film projects, providing new soundtracks to decades-old silent films, one of the most unusual and remarkable is the collection of short in-the-moment documentary or ‘actuality’ films collected and released via the British Film Institute as Electric Edwardians. This grew out of the discovery of a cache of such films, featuring street scenes, city events, sports competitions and more by the Mitchell and Kenyon company, based out of Blackburn, England in the very early 20th century. As part of the restoration and presentation of many of these films, In The Nursery created equally short orchestrations for each of them, eschewing trying to replicate the music of the time in favor of their own lushly beautiful sonic constructions, aided by such regular studio partners as oboist/cor anglais player Jill Crowther and flautist Henrik Linnemann. The gentle loveliness of pieces like “Degree Procession” have a nice counterpart to the sports soundtrack selections in particular – for example, “Burnley v Manchester United” has a quick piano part as its core, suggesting the vivid energy of a match.