MITTEN ON STRINGS FOR LATEST SUITE
Clive Mitten revisits and reorchestrates the music that made him, on Suite Sixteen.
Clive Mitten will release his new orchestral record on January 28. A double-CD featuring two hours of music,
Suite Sixteen: Tales From A Misspent Youth – Volume I sees the former Twelfth Night bassist celebrate the prog rock that fired his imagination as a teenager. Working alone on an iMac equipped with state-of-the-art music software, Mitten has given the classical treatment to artists including Peter Gabriel, Mike Oldfield, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Supertramp, Jethro Tull and Rush.
“I’ve been doing this for almost two years non-stop,” Mitten tells Prog, “But I’m loving it. It’s a very particular thing to do, no one has ever done anything like this. The challenge is always around orchestration – how do you take rock music and represent it orchestrally so it makes sense to ‘prog people’, but also makes sense as orchestral music? In Supper’s Ready and La Villa Strangiato I put huge guitar solos onto harps; all of the solos on Shine On You Crazy Diamond are on cello, so it’s essentially a cello concerto. It’s having that space in your brain to think like that.”
Gabriel insisted on hearing the covers of Solsbury Hill and Games Without Frontiers personally, and subsequently granted his permission, but Mitten had less luck elsewhere: “King Crimson’s music publishers didn’t reply, we heard nothing from ELP, and Yes are the only ones who said no.” His interpretations of these groups’ music therefore remain on the shelf, for now.
Suite Sixteen will be released on Bumnote Records. For more details go to www.twelfthnight.info.