Commissioned and premiered in Jan 2010 by the NY Guitar Festival at Merkin Hall. Marc Ribot’s delicate and at times haunting solo guitar score contemporizes this classic Chaplin film to a story relevant to the economic and social conditions following the housing market crash of 2008 (which occurred shortly before the commissioning of this work).
“I did not use Charlie Chaplin’s score as a reference. I admire his score greatly, and his writing greatly, but I did not want to use that as a reference because my interest in this, as with everything else, comes from doing a particular reading. And my particular reading of this film is as a contemporary film. This is kind of striking to me. When I first saw the film as a kid — like 45 years ago — it seemed really old. It seemed ancient. It was kind of walled off in this ghetto of the past. So much so that the content of the film seemed funny even when the characters weren’t being intentionally funny. It seemed inherently funny for something to be that old. Whereas, when I watch it now, I don’t see old. I see a contemporary story about a single father in economically really hard conditions.”
– Marc Ribot in an interview for Flavorpill 5/21/10
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