ONE WORLD - ONE MUSIC

AUDIO-VISUAL CONTENT: 300-400 coloured images, 20 audio selections, video sequences (optional)

David Fanshawe presents his own original story of Music and Travel, in an autobiographical retrospective. He focuses on 30 years' work as a composer, musical explorer and sound recordist. You will experience rare ceremonies and unique sounds recorded on Fanshawe's now legendary journeys throughout Arabia, Africa and the Pacific, as well as excerpts from his biographical films African Sanctus, Musical Mariner and Tropical Beat. With exuberance, Fanshawe shares his visions, travel experiences, listening ears, creativity and philosophies, punctuated by many humorous anecdotes. He is renowned for his live demonstrations of voice (Muezzin) and keyboard and usually performs a tribal dance (Bwala)!

Recorded highlights from the Fanshawe Collections include: the guttural chants of the pearl divers of Bahrain, the Acholi Bwala dance of Uganda and a variety of ingenious home-made instruments from East Africa. Traversing continents and oceans, we finally land on Tahiti and experience the thundering drums of the Fete. On Easter Island, we witness the Hoko war dance, filmed for posterity in a subterranean cave of the ancestors. Amongst the atolls of Micronesia we hear stick dances and star-path chants, performed by traditional navigators who still sail by the stars. In Papua New Guinea, we discover sacred Sepik initiation flutes - the longest flutes in the world.

Ethnic recordings are interwoven with published extracts from Fanshawe's classical compositions which defy categorisation: choral, orchestral and archival eg. African Sanctus and Pacific Odyssey. Commercial film and TV scores which, over the years, have helped to fund Fanshawe's field research, demonstrate the composer's versatility and how he survives, writing music in today's changing world.

One World - One Music stresses the importance of preserving our rich diversity of World Music in the light of an ever increasing mass-media and cultural invasion. It summarises the extraordinary life of a composer and explorer, whose journeys have not only inspired his compositions, but have also given him a better understanding of his own identity and originality. David Fanshawe encourages his audience to start exploring at home: then to go out beyond one's own back yard in search of life's inspiration. We can all strive to achieve our full potential and ultimately satisfy our inner soul. Fanshawe concludes with his challenging motto: