He arranged music from the film scores and other music of William Walton, Malcolm Arnold, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ernest Bloch. Artists who have performed his work include José Carreras, James Galway, Julian Lloyd Webber, and Jill Gomez. Outside the area of music, he put together anthologies of the prose of Arthur Machen and James Farrar. He died of an AIDS-related disease at the age of 48.
Christopher Francis Palmer was born in Norfolk in 1946. He early showed interest in music, encouraged by his father, a RAF pilot, who had trained as a church organist. He also studied the organ at Saxlingham, then went on to the University of Cambridge, where he qualified in modern languages and music. His teachers at Cambridge included Peter le Huray and Sir David Willcocks.
His first involvement in film music was as a writer, and through this he met many film composers in the United Kingdom and the United States. He struck up a friendship with Bernard Herrmann, who was living in London at the time. He assisted Herrmann with his scoring for Taxi Driver and Obsession (both released in 1976; Herrmann died in December 1975, just after completing the score to Taxi Driver). Through Herrmann, Palmer had met Charles Gerhardt, with whom he collaborated on at least 15 albums. Miklós Rózsa was impressed by Palmer's critiques of his work, and invited him to orchestrate part of his score for the film Last Embrace (1979). He then met Elmer Bernstein, who used Palmer's assistance in scoring Heavy Metal (1981). This led to further orchestration work with film composers such as Maurice Jarre (A Passage to India (1984), Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)), Stanley Myers (The Witches (1990)), and many others.
Elmer Bernstein and Christopher Palmer, London, 1995
Not content to work only on new film projects, Christopher Palmer also sought to preserve the legacy of the past, by arranging symphonic suites from the scores of composers such as Sir Malcolm Arnold, William Alwyn, Sir Arthur Bliss, George Gershwin, Bronisław Kaper, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Jerome Moross, Alfred Newman, Alex North, Conrad Salinger, Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Sir William Walton, Franz Waxman, and Roy Webb. He appeared as himself in the 1992 documentary film Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann.
He collaborated with Sergei Prokofiev's son Oleg Prokofiev on the publication of Serge Prokofiev, Soviet Diary, 1927 and other writings (Faber and Faber, 1991). His planned biography of Prokofiev was left unfinished at his death, which was due to an HIV/AIDS-related illness in 1995, when he was aged only 48.
Christopher Palmer composed the original music for Miloš Forman's film Valmont (1989).
He worked as an orchestrator or arranger on such films as Obsession (1976), Zulu Dawn (1979), A Passage to India (1984), Spies Like Us (1985), Legal Eagles (1986), Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989), Shirley Valentine (1989) and The Witches (1990).
He was the Musical Assistant/Associate on films such as The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Music Co-Producer on Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), and Music Consultant on Cape Fear (1991).
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Palmer
Further Readings:
Paperback: 295 pages
Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (November 17, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520246101
ISBN-13: 978-0520246102
Amazon: Music and Sexuality in Britten: Selected Essays
Philip Brett's groundbreaking writing on Benjamin Britten altered the course of music scholarship in the later twentieth century. This volume is the first to gather in one collection Brett's searching and provocative work on the great British composer. Some of the early essays opened the door to gay studies in music, while the discussions that Brett initiated reinvigorated the study of Britten's work and inspired a generation of scholars to imagine "the new musicology." Addressing urgent questions of how an artist's sexual, cultural, and personal identity feeds into specific musical texts, Brett examines most of Britten's operas as well as his role in the British cultural establishment of the mid-twentieth century. With some of the essays appearing here for the first time, this volume develops a complex understanding of Britten's musical achievement and highlights the many ways that Brett expanded the borders of his field.
More LGBT History at my website: www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Gay Classics
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