Everest 1922: Audiovisual Perspectives is a half-day event mounted by Royal Holloway’s Centre for Audiovisual Research in collaboration with its Centre for GeoHumanities and the Royal Geographical Society.
2022-23 marks 100 years since the Mount Everest Committee, Alpine Club and Royal Geographical Society presented and toured its first film of an expedition to Mount Everest: the film opened in December 1922 and ran through the first months of 1923. Though ‘silent’, both Climbing Mt. Everest (1922) and its successor The Epic of Everest (1924) were afforded fascinating musical and sonic exhibitions.
This event focusses on the sonic dimension of the first of these films, contextualising its approach more widely in the presentation and material exhibition of early travelogues and ethnographic films, as well as with respect to the rather differently presented Epic of Everest of the following year.
As part of the event, original instrumental music created by mountaineer T. Howard Somervell and collaborator C.M. Smith-Dodsworth. Matthew Elderton-Lewis will conduct music performed by student musicians at the conference which will be heard and discussed for the first time since the 1920s. An exciting addition to the event will be the contribution made by some Tashi Lhunpo Monks, who are currently on tour in the UK. In the workshop they will demonstrate the instruments that we see being played on screen, and formed the basis of Somervell’s and Smith-Dodsworth’s Westernised musical arrangements.
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