(If you missed the first six Gallifrey One posts, here are Friday [1, 2], Saturday [3, 4,5] and Sunday morning [6].)
Okay, so I gave a panel at Gallifrey One! I may as well just open with that, as it (and subsequent events related to it) took up the majority of Sunday afternoon. I gave a panel!
It was the “Murray’s Gold: The Music of Doctor Who” panel, and it had been a source of hyperactive, excited stress for the entire weekend. Okay, that’s a lie. It had been a source of hyperactive, excited stress for weeks. Nonetheless, it was brilliant! My co-panellists were amazing; Emily is a doctoral student in music theory whose Ph.D. is actually on the music of Doctor Who (and who has also blogged about the panel, right here); CJ is a musician and orchestrator who currently teaches high school music; and Ramie is a professor who plays and composes. As a group of people who are all musicians and instructors, the interaction was fantastic and we got a lot from the audience.
Speaking of which! The audience was wonderful; they filled up the room, had what seemed like unlimited questions and comments and discussion points, and they had all manner of fascinating ideas to bring to the table. We abandoned the idea of strict moderation and instead structured the hour as more of a “back-and-forth” with the people who had come to attend the panel, which was a great idea as we got to explore the evolution of the theme song, the audience’s favourite (or less-favoured) musical moments, the Doctors’ and companions’ themes, and the orchestration and sound design of the latest series of the show.
I promised a multi-media component to this post! So here is our panel in its entirety (click to listen in a new tab).
Murray’s Gold: The Music of Doctor Who
If you attended the panel at Gallifrey One, if you’ve just listened to it now and thought it was interesting, if you plan to attend a future convention and might like to see a panel like this, or heck, if you just like me and want to see me hyperactively-excitedly-stressed again in eleven months’ time, please do send a note to the convention organizers and let them know. We all agreed that we had loved doing the panel and that we would be thrilled to return next year and do it again!
After the panel, I ran into Indy yet again (how fun is it that it is possible to make awesome convention friends and then just keep on enjoying their company randomly all weekend?) and, at his strong encouragement, ended up attending the final panel given by Millennium FX, loitering creepily outside the doors, and taking the opportunity to tell Neill and Rob how much I admired them and how very huge their involvement in the weekend’s events had been to me (“Huge?” Neill asked, and, “It must be those American breakfasts,” Rob replied). And it did take strong encouragement – I would never have been brave enough to do such a thing of my own accord (what? actually talk to actual people?). It was at that point that Indy took the (now very much treasured) picture I posted at the end of Friday night’s entry.
And then! And then! As we were standing at the side of the auditorium for the year’s retrospective on Doctor Who, I got a text message from Chris of Radio Free Skaro (hello, Warren! I guess you’ll be getting a Google Alert from this post). And Emily and I got to record a podcast with them! (I suppose I ought to have set the stage by saying that these guys are the Doctor Who podcast to which I’ve always listened, and it was pretty mad just to meet them at all, much less get to record with them. Go and subscribe to them!)
I mean, yeah, I sound like Dr. Frankenstein animated a head cold and set it loose on the convention, whereas they all sound like poised professionals, but still.
So here is some more multi-media: that podcast is here on the Radio Free Skaro website! You should go and listen to it! (Emily and I start about twenty minutes in, but the whole thing is pretty darned cool. To wit, for instance: Jane Espenson and Doris Egan.)
So! Holy post full of stuff. I’ll get to the last convention report pretty quickly, though I’m afraid it will probably be anti-climactic now (but I have a pattern, darn it, and I’m sticking to it!), and then… well, there will probably be some going-home-sadface stuff, but then I get to post about the aftermath of Gallifrey One, which – though scaled down several orders of magnitude – is still fun and great and all that good stuff!
So yeah! That’s going to happen!
