Writing Music for the Stage

A Practical Guide for Theatremakers

Michael Bruce

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781780017686
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

The definitive guide to writing music for the stage, by the Composer-in-Residence at the Donmar Warehouse.

Music has played a vital part in drama since the earliest days of theatre. For composers, writing music for the stage is an opportunity to exercise their utmost creativity and versatility: a good musical score will both support and enhance the play it serves, and can lift a prosaic moment into something quite extraordinary.

In this book, Michael Bruce takes you through the entire process – from initial preparation, through composition, rehearsals and recording, and finally to performance. He covers everything a composer needs to know, including:

• Getting started – spotting when and how music might be used in a play, doing research, considering form and content
• Building a 'sound world' – finding and using source music, creating incidental music, choosing the best instrumentation, scoring, utilising technology, writing music to accompany song lyrics
• Working on the production – understanding the composer's role in rehearsals, collaborating with key creatives, employing actor-musicians, getting the show on
• Recording – knowing when to record, booking and working with musicians – and the studio engineer, running a recording session

Also included is key practical advice on how to get work as a theatre composer and build your career.

Throughout the book, the author draws on his own experience of creating music for a wide variety of plays at the Donmar Warehouse, the National Theatre, in the West End and on Broadway, including detailed case studies of his work on The Recruiting Office r, Coriolanus, Privacy, The Winslow Boy, Noises Off and Strange Interlude, illustrated by online recordings from his scores.

An essential companion for all composers – amateur, student or professional – Writing Music for the Stage is also invaluable reading for other theatre professionals, including directors, playwrights, producers, actors, designers and sound designers – in fact, for anyone seeking to understand how music helps to create worlds and tell stories on stage.

Act Two:

Composition

‘Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.’

Johannes Brahms

Creating a Musical World

The Power of Sound

Music is unique as an art form in that it elicits a visceral response from the listener that requires next to no effort on his or her own part. If you’re looking at a painting or film, or reading a passage in a novel, it is possible you may not fully comprehend it, or you may switch off and not absorb it at all. Sometimes you can simply not be seeing what the artist wishes you to look at. Hearing, however, you cannot turn off. I’ve always been fascinated by the instinctive response people have to sound, and the tools this provides to us as composers.

We’ve all been in a situation where a sudden loud noise made us jump. If we happen to be in the vicinity of the noise, it’s not possible that we could be simply ‘hearing the wrong way’. We don’t need to be concentrating on the sound for it to scare us. What commonly occurs after a shock like this is that a part of our brain known as the hypothalamus initiates a ‘sequence of nerve-cell firing and chemical release… chemicals like adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol are released into our bloodstream’¹¹ which prepares our body for running or fighting. This creates a prickly sensation across our skin, heightens our other senses, diminishes our perception of pain and leads to an increase in our heart rate. The ‘fight or flight’ principle is a primitive, in-built self-defence mechanism gifted to us by Mother Nature and evolution to help preserve our species. If a listener actively engages in the sounds around them they can begin to appreciate the nuance of a sound and contextualise it to an extent, but they are powerless to remain unaffected at all.

The point here is that as a ‘sound creator’ – a composer or sound designer – you have at your disposal an uncommon amount of power over a group of people. You can shock people, scare people, unnerve people, move people, even sicken people with sound. How many of us are unable to deal with even the thought of fingernails being drawn across a blackboard? Some sounds can be designed to provoke a physical reaction from an audience. Daft as it may sound, writing music or creating sound for a public performance comes with a certain amount of responsibility.

Case Study: Infrasound

Infrasound or ‘low-frequency sound’ is defined as ‘sound waves below the frequencies of audible sound, and nominally includes anything under 20Hz’.¹² Infrasound is felt rather than heard. Gerry Vassilatos wrote in a paper for the Journal of Borderland Research that ‘Infrasound produces varied physiological sensations that begin as vague “irritations”. At certain pitch, infrasound produces physical pressure. At specific low intensity, fear and disorientation. Nazi propaganda engineers methodically used infrasound to stir up the hostilities of crowds who were gathered to hear [Hitler].’¹³

Infrasound can occur in nature, caused by extreme weather, seismic tremors or even by animals such as elephants, giraffes and whales who use it to communicate or ward off foes.¹⁴

Infrasonic waves are known to cause feelings of nausea, in-ear pressure and in some cases terror, nausea and dread.¹⁵ In his book, Lost Science, Gerry Vassilatos references an unlikely victim of this phenomenon:

Walt Disney and his artists were once made seriously ill when a sound effect, intended for a short cartoon scene, was slowed down several times on a tape machine and amplified through a theatre sound system. The original sound source was a soldering iron, whose buzzing 60-cycle tone was lowered five times to 12 cycles. This tone produced a lingering nausea in the crew which lasted for days.¹⁶

A paper published by Vic Tandy entitled ‘The Case of the Ghost in the Machine’ concerns the psychological effects of infrasound. Tandy was an engineering designer who worked for a company manufacturing medical equipment. He started (along with his colleagues) to notice ‘a feeling of depression, occasionally a cold shiver… a growing level of discomfort’. One evening, when he was on his own in the laboratory, in the centre of the room, ‘he became aware that he was being watched, and a figure slowly emerged to his left. It was indistinct and on the periphery of his vision but it moved as Tandy would expect a person to. The apparition was grey and made no sound. The hair was standing up on his neck and there was a distinct chill in the room. As he recalls, “It would not be unreasonable to suggest I was terrified.” He was unable to see any detail and finally built up the courage to turn and face the thing. As he turned the apparition faded and disappeared.’

By a stroke of good fortune and clever engineering he discovered that the cause of this was a low-frequency standing wave caused by a fan in the extraction system. The dimensions of the room and the length of the wave meant the energy focused in the spot he was sitting. He found out that the frequency at which it resonated interacted with the frequencies at which his head and eyes naturally resonate causing discomfort and blurry vision. The fan was modified and the nausea and ghost vanished.¹⁷

In 2003, Jonathan Amos from the BBC wrote an interesting article that suggested that ‘people who experience a sense of spirituality in church may be reacting to the extreme bass sound produced by some organ pipes’.¹⁸ An experiment by Professor Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire played a piece of contemporary music laced with intermittent infrasonic sound to an audience of 750 people. The results showed that ‘odd sensations in the audience increased by an average of 22% when the extreme bass was present’. He detailed some audience reactions as being ‘shivering on my wrist, an odd feeling in my stomach, increased heart rate, feeling very anxious and a sudden memory of emotional loss’.¹⁹

Focus and Practicality

We know that simple crude sound and physics can have a substantial effect on a listener. The composer and sound designer’s job is to harness audio to better tell a story. I’m not in any way suggesting you use infrasonic waves to make a thriller scarier but the principles of ‘coercion’ with sound have been used in many different and (in the case of Adolf Hitler) disturbing ways.

In the theatre a large part of a director’s job is telling the audience where to look and when. It is about focus. Good music and sound design work in a similar way. Underscore can add depth to a moment or highlight an action. Scene-change music creates or shifts mood and adapts the pace of an evening. Some writers (and actors) object to music and sound design as they think they ‘instruct’ an audience how to feel and would rather the text and performance did that. In my opinion, you can have the best of both worlds. Music and sound can be seamlessly incorporated into the narrative arc of the show, but they can be necessary for the production from a purely practical perspective. Sometimes, a scene change is required when the only alternative would be for the audience to sit in silence as stagehands noisily move furniture about. In this case it alienates an audience, makes them feel uncomfortable, awkward and ultimately ignored. Some plays don’t require much in the way of underscore, but most of them require some changing of scene or location even in a minimal way.

More About Diegetic and Non-diegetic Music

Diegetic music can also be termed ‘source’, ‘found music’ or ‘actual sound’ and is defined as any sound or music presented as originated from a source within the story-space. It can be offstage as long as it exists within the world of the piece.

Non-diegetic music can be termed ‘extra-diegetic’, ‘incidental’, ‘curtain music’ or ‘commentary sound’ and describes music or sound that originates from outside the boundaries of the story-space. It is not present in the action of the scene. The Performing Rights Society defines this as: ‘Music heard by the theatre audience as an accompaniment to the play, but which is not performed by or intended to be audible to any of the characters in the play.’²⁰

Included in this category is incidental music, which is written by a composer for a specific production to enhance, focus or accompany action or mood. It can also function as transitional music (between scenes) or be used to open or close a performance.

Diegetic and non-diegetic terminology also applies to films and musical theatre. In the Baz Luhrmann film Moulin Rouge, the number ‘Sparkling Diamonds’ is diegetic as the song is part of a performance inside the narrative: Satine and the performers know they are singing. The song ‘One Day I’ll Fly Away’ is non-diegetic as the musical element here exists outside the world of the narrative: Satine is unaware she is singing.²¹

Found Music

Within the diegetic music category, we find what is known as found or interpolated music. The Performing Rights Society defines interpolated music as: ‘Music not specially written for a theatrical production (and excluding overture, entr’acte, exit, incidental and curtain music) and which is performed by or intended to be audible to a character or characters in that theatrical production.’²² In other words, music you will not write yourself but will be part of the action in the show. We’ll cover more about copyrights and licences later.

Commonly, interpolated music comes in the form of either a pre-existing and recorded song or piece of music that a character is listening to (perhaps on a radio) or a live musician, singer or band on stage. In this case, the title and perhaps even the artist is normally specified by the playwright in the script. If you’re looking for a recorded piece of ‘found music’, there may be several options to choose from.

Case Study: Philadelphia, Here I Come! at the Donmar Warehouse

In the play Philadelphia, Here I Come! by Brian Friel, the main character, Gar, is a big fan of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto and regularly plays it on his gramophone. The action is set in the fictional town of Ballybeg in rural Ireland in the 1960s. The Mendelssohn Violin Concerto is one of the most recorded concerti in the repertoire, but for the 2012 Donmar Warehouse production, in order to try and create a sense of authenticity, we decided to try and find a recording that could potentially have been bought in the period and location the play was set. We found an old vinyl record of the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin’s recording from Abbey Road in 1958, which we believed could have found its way to rural Donegal by the 1960s. The recording has a pleasing (from an authenticity point of view) crackle and hiss, and Menuhin’s individuality in phrasing is markedly unique. The result sounds stylistically different to many modern recordings. As time passes, tastes vary and different artists bring different interpretations to the same piece of music. Strangely, even though the music was originally written over a hundred years before Menuhin recorded it, the actual recording feels very much of the era in which the play was set.

Occasionally though, you may not be able to find exactly the piece of music the author was looking for, or in the case of an older play it may no longer exist. Sometimes even if you find the specified piece of music or recording it won’t fit into the aesthetic of your particular production. An authentic sound cue or recording might be historically accurate, but so far from what a modern ear is accustomed to that it doesn’t serve your purpose.

Case Study: The Winslow Boy at the Old Vic

The character of Dickie Winslow in Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy is a youthful man with a partiality for the dance trends of the day. Set sometime between 1914 and 1918 in London, there are mentions of ‘the Bunny Hug’, ‘the Turkey Trot’ and ‘a Kangaroo Hop’. These are pre-war dances that were commonly performed to rag-time music. Here is a stage direction from the play:

He [Arthur Winslow] suddenly cocks his head to one side and listens. There is the sound of a gramophone playing ‘Hitchy-koo’ from somewhere upstairs.

Luckily there are still recordings of this song in circulation so the task was to find one that sounded appropriate and also to choose a suitable moment in the song which would be lively and bold enough to be suitably annoying to the character of Arthur Winslow. Fortunately with this piece (being a ragtime) it begins in a lively way and continues in that vein throughout, so it was never really a challenge to find an appropriate part of the track. It’s worth noting that in the world of the play the song was being played on a gramophone, so it would have been possible for it to have started playing from somewhere other than the beginning. Also, from a practical point of view, it may be necessary to repeat sections of it if the scene were to run longer than the recording. This is where (providing appropriate licences are cleared) a sound designer may need to be ‘creative’ with the structure of the original track.

Later in the play, references are made to ‘early rag-time music’ and the characters of Catherine and Dickie Winslow ‘dance, in the manner of the period’, but the specific tune is not indicated. In this instance the challenge is to find something appropriate to which the choreographer can choreograph a legitimate dance of the period, and something that sounds like it came from the same record collection as the guy who likes the ‘Hitchy-koo’ piece. In the 2013 Old Vic production it was clear to me that these should all be found pieces of music. Sometimes it’s fun to write pastiches of music from a particular period, but you should only do this when your particular production renders it necessary or even possible. Most of the time in the theatre you are working to strict and limited budgets so it may be difficult to recreate the kind of music you need in full with the limited resources you have. The Winslow Boy still required scene-change music, however, which leads us on to non-diegetic music.

Considering Non-diegetic Music

Every theatre production will have its own requirements of non-diegetic music, but usually the most useful way to begin is by looking at the diegetic music that is already pop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Josie Rourke
• Tuning Up: Preface
• Overture: Introduction
• Act One: Preparation
• Act Two: Composition
• Act Three: Process
• Act Four: Performance
• Act Five: Work (and How to Get It)
• Curtain Call
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes
• About the Author
• Copyright Information