Bruce Writing Music for the Stage

A Practical Guide for Theatremakers
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78001-768-6
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

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 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 Officer, Coriolanus, Privacy, The Winslow Boy, Noises Off and Strange Interlude. The book is accompanied by online excerpts 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. 'This fascinating book - like its author (with whom I've had the good fortune to work on three productions) - is bursting with practical advice, good sense and invention. A must-read for all those with an interest in how music works on stage.' Mark Gatiss 'A good score makes a world of difference to an actor. Read Michael Bruce's book and you'll understand why. He is a genius.' Judi Dench 'Michael's music is wonderful: inclusive, original, respectful and - in its rightness - sheer joy.' Josie Rourke, from her Foreword

Michael Bruce is a composer and lyricist who has written scores and songs for many theatre productions around the UK, in London and New York. After training at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) he worked as a musical director and musician. In 2007 he won the Notes for the Stage prize for songwriting run by the Stage newspaper, which led to a concert of his musical-theatre work being staged at the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. Following the success of this, his album Unwritten Songs was released and debuted at number one on the iTunes vocal chart. He has held the position of Composer-in-Residence at both the Bush Theatre and the Donmar Warehouse in London. His work at the Donmar has included scores for The Vote, Privacy, Coriolanus, Trelawny of the Wells, Berenice, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, The Physicists and The Recruiting Officer; at the National Theatre: Sunset at the Villa Thalia, The Beaux Stratagem, Man and Superman, Strange Interlude and Men Should Weep; and at the Royal Shakespeare Company: The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Candide. He has written scores for shows at the Old Vic, Hampstead Theatre, the Finborough Theatre and the Lyric Hammersmith, and in the West End his credits include Much Ado About Nothing, Relatively Speaking, Hay Fever and Noises Off. On Broadway his work has included Les Liaisons Dangereuses and The Winslow Boy. Michael has worked extensively as an arranger, orchestrator and conductor - and is also incredibly proud to have played table tennis for Scotland in his youth. Author photo by Steven McIntosh

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bruce, Michael

Leseproben

Overture:

Introduction

‘I want to do something creative, not just easy.’
Johann Sebastian Bach

Our Beginnings with Music

Listening to music is an experience expressly connected with emotion. From the main stage at Glastonbury to street carnivals in Rio de Janeiro to the high-school choir singing a medley from Mamma Mia!, the human capacity to connect with and be affected by an organised combination of tones and vibrations is a phenomenon that follows us from the womb.

Professor of Musicology Richard Parncutt asks, ‘Why should music be so emotional when, unlike other behaviours and experiences such as love, pain and hunger, it is not critical for human survival?’ The theory he puts forward is that during prenatal development, infants learn to associate audible sound and movement patterns with the mother’s changing physical and hormonal state, and that this may be one of our primary early interactions with music. Perhaps when similar patterns of sound and movement are recreated at later points in life the corresponding emotional response may stem from this infant experience.1

Of course, this doesn’t really detail why certain pieces of music are more effective than others at stimulating certain emotions, but part of the magic of music is its mysterious power over us. Some think that rather like a conjuring trick, it loses its power when it is interrogated and explained in scientific terms. I would argue, however, that even after analysis, music still holds our emotions to ransom, and particularly interestingly when played in a dramatic context such as in the theatre or cinema.

There are many articles and intellectual treatises on the sometimes ‘scientific’ reasoning behind why it might be that certain pieces of music make us feel a certain way, but approaching it from an academic viewpoint and applying abstract musical terminology tends to get us nowhere closer to the beautifully secluded heart of the matter.

This is not to say that musical critique does not have its place, but I don’t think it’s all that inspiring for the burgeoning artist who wants to expand his horizons and understand the compositional process. What I think we can say is: all music is written within a framework, and that framework varies depending on many social, historical and aspirational factors. The mine of musical interpretation and commentary is deep, but we don’t learn as much from literature as we do from the composers themselves. Each new piece of music is informed by and descended from some expression that came before, no matter how tangibly. Even if a composer heads out on a new road that seems previously completely untravelled, his compositional choices will still be influenced by those roads he eschews. If we think of the vibrations and tones given to us by the laws of physics as akin to a box of paints, then our musical heritage is as colourful and expressive as that of all the great masters in any National Gallery.

But unlike painting or sculpture, music is not frozen in time. In Leonard Bernstein’s 1955 telecast on The Art of Conducting, he said: ‘Music… exists in the medium of time. It is time itself that must be carved up, moulded and remoulded until it becomes, like a statue, a fixed form and shape.’ Music can therefore never be perceived in a snapshot. Music never stands still; the canvas on which composers paint is actually time itself.

Live theatre is like live music, in that it’s only alive when it’s moving. Every moment is fleeting and never to be repeated in the exact same way again. Of course, like music, it can be repeated (and needs to be, usually eight times a week, if it’s to be successful), but the contextual factors of a particular performance, with a particular audience, on a particular day, and with a particular cast and crew, dictate that no two performances can ever be identical. Theatre, like music, is in the business of telling stories and in the examination and reflection of the human condition, but because music is so ephemeral its critical interpretation is often a little abstract. It can instantly set a tone or mood, create momentum, encourage contemplation or affect emotional depth; it can lift the heart to the stars or drag the soul through the gutter, but when combined with the literal exposition of stories in a theatrical setting, music can lift a prosaic moment into something quite extraordinary.

A Brief History of Music in Theatre

Theatre is not confined to the West End of London or the twinkling lights of Broadway; theatre is everywhere. It’s on the news and in the local pub. It’s in the chamber of the House of Commons. Theatre is where drama is. And drama happens where conflict arises. If you wander through the halls of any high school in Middle America or college in the UK you will find an English or Drama department reading (at the very least) and perhaps even staging plays. Plays are conflicts dramatised. They tell us a lot about ourselves, they cultivate curiosity, stimulate ideas, encourage our minds to be subtle and flexible, jump-start our imaginations and show us new perspectives on our lives.

Theatre has long been linked with music. The use of incidental music in plays may possibly have originated in ancient Greek or Roman theatre, but there is certainly the documented use of songs and music as a link between scenes in the English comedy Ralph Roister Doister by Nicholas Udall, written in the mid-sixteenth century. Music was also used as an essential accompaniment to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century festivals and the pageants called masques.2 Shakespeare’s plays are full of songs, dances and calls for incidental music, which is unsurprising, as Elizabethan life seemed to thrive on the joys of music. Publishers in London produced scores of consort pieces, madrigals and broadside ballads, as many of the educated could read and play music; their most favoured instruments being the recorder, lute and viola da gamba.3

Through the character of Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare gave us a fair treatise on the value of music and song:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

Evidence of the prevalence of music in plays in Shakespeare’s time can be seen in the theatrical impresario Philip Henslowe’s surviving papers, which contain details of the operational requirements of Elizabethan public theatres. They include:

The Enventary of Clownes Sewtes and Hermetes Sewtes, with dievers other sewtes, as followeth, 1598, the 10 of March… iij [3] trumpettes and a drum, and a trebel viall, a basse vial, a bandore [a bass cittern], a sytteren [cittern: a stringed Renaissance instrument which looks like a modern-day flat-back mandolin].4

The Licensing Act of 1737 granted only two ‘patent theatres’ in London the rights to present dramatic plays, Covent Garden Theatre and Drury Lane. All scripts had to be vetted by the Lord Chamberlain and his Examiners of Plays. Smaller venues could be granted ‘burletta’ licenses which allowed ‘plays with music’ to be performed, but never serious drama. This legislation led to the divide in British theatrical performance between what was known as legitimate and illegitimate theatre.5 Venues in London were often prosecuted or closed when they strayed too far from the remit of their license. In her article ‘Theatre in the Nineteenth Century’, Jacky Bratton considers that

the very restrictions that forbade the new theatres to do Shakespeare or other straight plays perhaps partly inspired the brilliant ingenuity and inventiveness of entertainment at this time. Unlicensed premises relied on silent or musically-accompanied action, physical theatre, animals and acrobatics, and thus both melodrama and Victorian pantomime were developed…a more spectacular, visual style took over from the static eighteenth-century emphasis on the spoken word.6

In 1843 the Patent Act was abolished allowing all theatres to stage dramas. Curiously this didn’t lead to many more productions of classic plays, but to a more experimental and innovative variety of entertainment to suit the masses. This precipitated the birth of the West End as we know it today. The two patent theatres became venues for two types of musical theatre – opera at Covent Garden and the annual pantomime at Drury Lane. Emphasis was on the spectacular. ‘As Victorian technology – electric lighting and hydraulics – advanced, the scale and excitement of the on-stage battles, storms, explosions and transformations grew, until they slid seamlessly, at the turn of the twentieth century, into the new medium of film.’7

Some of our most eminent and long-standing composers wrote a great deal of music for plays. Henry Purcell, the renowned Restoration composer, built a large part of his career on it, and Jean-Baptiste Lully wrote incidental music for the royal comédies-ballets that prefigured the development of the French opera and opéra-comique.8 In the seventeenth century, Henry Purcell was writing music for English plays and in the 1800s, Edvard Grieg’s score for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt was nearly ninety minutes long. As Anthony Tommasini mentioned in a recent New York...