Liner Notes & Blog

Yet another page that is under construction.

“Penny Lane” or the Strangeness of Nostalgia [2025-11-10]

The idea that music theory takes all the mystery out of music is such nonsense. One can write down what McCartney’s playing, but nothing can really explain the effect he gets when he modulates from B major in the verse to A major in the chorus. In the hands of any other songwriter, this shift down a whole tone would darken the mood, but he uses it to brighten it instead. What the hell is going on?

Sure, if we want to dig around a bit, we could point out that as the tonal center shifts down, Macca pushes the melody up, and that’s what’s giving the chorus the sort of lift it has–this is an example of the melody overruling the chord changes–but that doesn’t tell us just how hard that is to pull off nor does it explain the sort of innate, illiterate counterpoint that McCartney has. He didn’t need to write things down, but he could feel it without doing so. That’s a very rare trait in any musician, and in fact, it runs counter to way counterpoint developed.

Counterpoint, at least in Western music, was an outgrowth of music notation. In practice, most people rely on seeing how notes sit against other notes on the page to be able to construct it, but McCartney doesn’t, which is probably why his solutions are so different from everyone else’s, but this is using music theory to talk about music, and I don’t really want to do that.

I want to talk about music theory as a way of expressing something way outside of music. There’s the ending of “Penny Lane” in which now he modulates back up to B major so it feels as if we’re in a new key, but of course we’re back to the home key. That’s about as perfect a musical metaphor for the kind of weird nostalgia that McCartney traffics in in this song. The musical references to British music hall are obvious, but what isn’t obvious is the way he manipulates these forms to suggest a sort of nostalgia that’s way beyond what most songwriters can imagine, let alone express. In this much more complicated attempt to go back and revisit the past, when you feel you’re back home, you’re not; when you feel you’re not back home, you might be…or perhaps you’re not.

“And though she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway.”

I’ll bet that McCartney, himself, doesn’t really know where “Penny Lane” came from or how to get back to that song. It’s something of a one-off that he was able to do right at the chronological apex of The Beatles’ career at a certain very specific time, perched between looking at the past and–not looking at the future but rather–using the cutting edge machinery of the present–by which I mean the strangeness of LSD and multitrack recording–to look at the past.

There’s no other song that he’s ever written that’s anything like “Penny Lane”, and he’s probably smart enough to realize that just as the song’s narrator knows that it’s impossible to revisit the Penny Lane, it’s just as impossible to revisit the song in terms of writing any sort of sequel.

It’s like, if we want to cite another example of nostalgia gone off the deep end, Ray Davies’ “Waterloo Sunset” (which almost was “Liverpool Sunset” until he changed his mind). It also has its references to British music hall, although the references are a little harder to pick out. In comparison to the technicolor production on “Penny Lane”, it sounds as if it were recorded in a shoebox. No reverb. A less imaginative band would have dipped the song into a reverb chamber, but the Kinks didn’t, and that is probably why we still listen to the song. That shoebox is where that song’s narrator lives in all its pedestrian monotony. It’s a more detailed and richer portrait of reserve than you can get in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. It’s a feeling that passes way beyond regret into something else. It’s like the spectre of the kind of regret that you find in G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology, which might tell us why “Waterloo Sunset” is a one-off. Once he was able to articulate the sort of nostalgia that the narrator feels, Davies was never able to bottle that in the same way again. You can think of Davies’ entire career from then on (like McCartney’s) as looking back on this singular song about looking back.

Props to Rob Collier for his instagram project on McCartney’s basslines, including transcriptions. Click the link to go to his IG account.

Liner notes on show at Jazz Central on 9-17-2025 [2025-08-26]

The obvious focal point of this show is the connection between Shakespeare and jazz.

Of course, there doesn’t necessarily need to be any connection, and a lot of my musical settings for Shakespeare have little to do with jazz, but a lot of them do, and that has to do with some basic facts.

One is that the main contribution that the United States has made to theatre arts is probably the form of the musical. (Are there any other strong contenders? I’m happy to be corrected on this. Put other suggestions in the comments.)

That means that if you’re producing Shakespeare in the US and you want to draw upon that particular tradition, you’re looking at things like the Great American Songbook in all its AABA, 32 bar glory, and that means that you are right next to jazz.

Like anybody else immersed in American culture, I have Songbook structures (or things like 12 bar blues forms) always in the back of my head, and, in fact, what I write tends by default to follow this form even though the harmonic language may be far away from the 1920-1950 time interval that roughly brackets the Songbook.

That’s the Songbook, but what about jazz as its own thing independent of musical theatre and the Songbook?

I participated once in this writing session–you compose a tune and then hand it off to some performers in–and I wrote it so that one section has two choices for melodic lines. The underlying chords were the same, but one melody leans toward American musical theatre and the other one towards more European operetta. What I wanted was a form that was flexible enough that the vocalist could determine in real time without any consultation which melodic line to choose and which direction to take, each of which imparts its own emotional weight.

Is this approach part of the tradition of musical theatre? Whether or not, it is most certainly part of the jazz tradition. I mean, you could try to invoke the aleatory techniques in 20th classical music as the precedent, but that sounds forced. The idea of deliberately playing around with different melodic lines (and also harmonies as well) and adjusting on the fly to what you happen to feel works best at that time is what jazz musicians do constantly.

There’s a great anecdote from Paul Berliner’s Thinking in Jazz that I cannot find because I can’t remember the appropriate keywords, but the drift is this: there was this famous jazz bassist who had to get from one note to another and had to create a walking bassline that used six quarter notes. The problem is that there were only five semitones in between the starting note and the target note. So what the bassist did–and you can do this on a non-fretted instrument–is subdivide the interval into six, instead of five, steps, and he just walked from the start to the target using this non-standard chromatic scale. Now that’s clever.

My point is that a lot of these musical settings were written with that in mind. It’s not just that they follow Songbook forms; it’s that they deliberately meant to be interpreted, working from fairly simple structures.

There are, of course, certain notes–for example, common chord tones that allow modulations–that have to be played, but a lot of rest is up to the individual performers. When the note is sung or what note it is depends on the particular spin somebody wants to put on that text or that character at a certain moment in time.

Obviously there are many improvisational traditions, but the one I’ve been using as a guidepost is primarily jazz.

That’s the end of the personal rambling on the material that’ll be played at the show.

There’s another simpler question about what the historical connection is between Shakespeare and jazz.

The best known is probably Ellington and Strayhorn’s “Such Sweet Thunder” LP from 1957 in which both composers created somewhat abstract settings, more abstract than the ones I’ve written, for Shakespeare. Some of them are tone poems. Some of them, as Cleo Laine pointed out, are very deliberately meant to follow Shakespeare’s metrical structures. I cannot remember which piece it is, but one of them has ten note phrases. Laine speculates that this is a direct reference to iambic pentameter. Again, my memory fails me. I can’t remember who pointed this out, but ending trumpet line by Clark Terry in “Up And Down, Up And Down (I Will Lead Them Up And Down)” fits exactly Puck’s line, “lord, what fools these mortals be”.

Of course, while we’re talking about Ellington, we don’t have to limit ourselves to explicit examples of Ellington writing towards Shakespeare.

If you wanted to broaden the discussion (as you should), then you’d gravitate towards things like the 1956 version of “Black and Tan Fantasy” at the Newport Jazz Festival (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doa64ysMrK8&list=RDDoa64ysMrK8&start_radio=1 ). There’s no clear reference to Shakespeare, but the music is “Shakespearean”, whatever that imperfect and nebulous term might mean. The first time I heard this version, I got the feeling of a band that was trying to cram into this one tune all these different varieties of the human experience. It’s messy and vulgar (thanks to the ghost of Bubber Miley), as messy, vulgar, and celebratory as Falstaff, and as sad and crazed as the funeral scenes in several plays (Hamlet and Laertes fighting in Ophelia’s grave).

This is not surprising. It’s Ellington’s own rewrite of New Orleans funeral traditions at the very least. I have no idea whether the title is a reference like “Black, Brown, and Beige” to being what Ellington referred to as a “Negro tone poem” or the beverage or the Irish paramilitary unit, which was contemporaneous with the tune’s composition.

If there is any jazz that conveys the messiness of the human condition the way that Shakespeare does, it’s this piece…but I’m digressing and also overpromising as well.

Will the settings in this show reach for the same goals? Probably not. “Black and Tan Fantasy” is a very abstract setting for Shakespeare, so abstract that I may well be the only person who actively links it to Shakespeare.

My settings are firmly set in specific texts, but their goals are to present possibly a different perspective on the scene that the text came from. As a quick example, Duke Orsino is usually presented as a bit of a melancholic fop instead of a case study in melancholia, but I take him straight as his word.

I’m not going to divulge more. You’ll have to show up to hear the setting for “Come Away, Death”.

Several questions about masques [2025-06-18]

There are aspects of the theatrical form, the masque, in several Shakespeare plays (e.g., Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest), but I wouldn’t call these plays masques. (For more on the term, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masque .)

I have several questions about masques. These came about because I was looking at other English Renaissance playwrights. Jonson wrote a large number of masques. In addition, in the context of this website, it makes sense to ask about the form since it integrates theatre with music as well as dance.

Are masques the closest thing to opera that the English Renaissance theatre created? Similarities? Differences?
Does anyone consider any Shakespeare play to be a masque (instead of having masque-like elements in some sequences).
If the answer above is no, then the next question is why Shakespeare didn’t write masques. Here are several possibilities:

a. His theatrical company didn’t produce masques. Can anyone find a masque that was produced by the King’s Men?

b. He didn’t particularly want to. The problem, of course, is that it’s hard to answer this since we don’t know much about his working methods. I will suggest a related question, which is: are masques in English Renaissance theatre on the same level as other theatrical forms like comedy, tragedy, and history?

Is there, for example, any masque that is as highly regarded as Dr. Faustus or The Spanish Tragedy? Is there any masque that is as highly regarded as Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo?

How “Christian” are Shakespeare’s plays? [2025-06-11]

I have two related but different questions. The easier one is how many references do Shakespeare’s plays have to Christianity and whether this is more, less, or roughly equal to contemporaneous plays by, let’s say, Marlowe, Jonson, Fletcher, etc.?

The second question is how “Christian” the plays are, which is a much more subjective matter since you have to deal then with what you mean by a text being “Christian”. (Tangent: Chorus in Henry V describes the monarch as being “the mirror of all Christian kings”, but that’s also a very ambiguous way to put it.)

Harold Bloom argued that Shakespeare was primarily a pagan force, which I sort of see even though I really haven’t been able to connect the dots.

What I can see, though, is that there were institutional reasons why playwrights would be advised not to put in references to Christianity, especially references that could be construed as taking sides in the religious battles that consumed England through at least the 1500s and 1600s.

Simply put, there was an official censor. Moreover, the monarchy was switching constantly between Catholic and Protestant. Along with that, vast tracts of real estate and money were being seized. One year, the favored religion was Catholicism; the next, Church of England.

Given this, the politically savvy playwright would take pains to avoid direct conflict. At the same time, the savvy playwright would want to entertain audiences, and one way to do that would be to articulate anxieties about the monarchy that one is not supposed to say.

I’m going to come up, though, with an example in which one the plays goes out of its way to avoid mentioning Christianity.

It’s that scene in Much Ado (5.3.12) in which Claudio, after slut-shaming Hero at the wedding altar, goes to what is supposedly her tomb to pin up a bit of what seems to be deliberately bad doggerel to make amends. Then, we have the song, “Pardon, Goddess of the Night”, which makes no sense to me.

This is Messina so the setting is unequivocably in Catholic territory. Why at this crucial point in the play are the characters invoking some sort of “goddess of the night” instead of some Christian deity or Christian saint? From a dramatic standpoint, this is a critical moment since it is supposed to document Claudio’s acknowledgement that he messed up big time. That seems to be undercut by referring to some pagan goddess. Note, by the way, that we can’t make Hero the goddess of the night.

Here are the lyrics:

Pardon, goddess of the night,
Those that slew thy virgin knight,
For the which with songs of woe,
Round about her tomb they go.
Midnight, assist our moan.
Help us to sigh and groan
Heavily, heavily.
Graves, yawn and yield your dead,
Till death be utterèd,
Heavily, heavily.

Hero, if anything, is the “virgin knight”. In that case, Hero can’t be the goddess.

From the standpoint of the underlying political and religious instability in Elizabethan/Jacobean England, it makes sense not to refer to Christianity. Why poke the censor in the eye if you can avoid it? On the other hand, it does lead to this somewhat bizarre moment in which a major transformation for an important character occurs in what is a pagan ritual.

Maybe this is why Bloom thought of Shakespeare as pagan. There’s probably a much more general reason. I think that Bloom felt that way because Shakespeare doesn’t fit well into any particular system of thought, whether that be a religious, philosophical, or political system. You’ve got plots and poetry, and both of those are running ramshackle over any one system.

Addendum: having made the argument above, I would also point out that there has been a significant push to champion Shakespeare as a particularly Christian writer. He’s a central figure, not only in theatre arts or literature, but also in Western civilization. It makes sense that if your agenda is to push aspects of Western civilization that people should know, you’re going to emphasize texts like the Bible and Shakespeare’s plays. You can try to get two for one if you can make the claim that Shakespeare is especially Christian, but I’m not looking for external agendas here. What I’m looking for is stuff in the texts.

“Unlikeable” characters like Bertram from All’s Well that Ends Well. [2025-06-10]

We could ask if there is any way of making these sorts of characters more likeable. There’s another way of looking at the play and this character, which is why we as an audience would insist on having main characters in “comedies” that are likeable.

Is this a limitation in thinking on our part? When we insist on these sorts of conventions, are we succumbing to an artificial construct? If dramatic works have to fall into categories like comedies or tragedies, there are plenty of narratives that they cannot use. As importantly, there are also many situations in real life that they can’t represent.

We can get back to the general question later. Let’s go to a specific one related to the play.

Staging problem: is there a way for a production to make Bertram more likeable?

On that, I’d say yes. I’d also say that this tends to be the default option that productions choose.

I’d like to hear what others have seen in productions, but what I’ve come across is usually the situation in which a production tries to tidy things up at the end with a “nice” reconciliation between Helena and Bertram.

For example, there aren’t stage directions that say that they embrace and kiss, but there’s also aren’t stage directions that say that they don’t embrace and kiss, etc.

You can try to shoehorn this play into a sort of rom-com template. In fact, given what modern audiences expect, there’s a lot of pressure on a production to do this.

If this happens, then Bertram has a chance to change into something better. The real difficulty with this is that it’s hard for a production to pull this off. Bertram is so disagreeable in so many ways up to the very end that a production is making a big ask of the audience to accept him as husband material.

I’d be interested in hearing about productions that managed to pull this off convincingly.

What music was used in the original productions, especially at the end of the play? [2025-05-31]

Three simple questions here.

In the original performances was there music that closed every play?

This article from the Guardian claims that it was a jig. However, the example that they use from the Globe’s 2003 production of Richard II uses a march. I think of jigs as being in compound meters like 6/8, 12/8 and less frequently 9/8. Here’s an example of “Lark in the Morning“, performed by Fairport Convention, and here’s the sheet music for several of the versions.

So the three questions are:

1) Was there always music at the end of original performance? The narrator for the Richard II broadcast in the first video claims that there was always end-of-the-play music. It seems difficult to square this with a production of, let’s say, King Lear unless they were using the concluding dance primarily as a curtain call, or maybe that’s just an attitude that modern audiences end to bring to a tragedy like Lear. An uptempo dance number seems incongruous with the rest of the play.

2) Was the music a jig, and, if so, are there any reasons why this musical form was used?

3) Finally, were jigs a fundamentally different 400 years ago?

Of course, modern productions don’t need to follow original practice, but I’m obviously interested in this topic because it concerns the way music was used in those first performances.

Addendum: here’s how the OED weighs in on this.

It claims that “jig” is an ambiguous term and can refer to a lively dance but also specifically to one in triple meter.

(See respectively a) Oxford English Dictionary, “jig (n.1), sense 1.a,” June 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1173828595 and b) Oxford English Dictionary, “jig (n.1), sense 2,” June 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/2286843155 .)

Both the more general meaning and the more specific were in use in the 1590s. The obvious question to ask here is whether a jig could have referred to a dance that was not in some sort of triple meter.

You can find the answer in what I think is the most interesting quote in the OED’s entry, which coincidentally happens to be linked indirectly to Shakespeare.

1598 The Orbes celestiall Will daunce Kemps Iigge.J. Marston, Scourge of Villanie iii. x. sig. H3^v

Marston, whose plays I don’t know but probably should, is making an obvious theatrical reference to what may be the most famous comic actor in Shakespeare’s troupe and who was well-known for his publicity stunt for dancing 110 miles from London to Norwich in 1600. The main nugget I want to extract, though, from this is the reference to a well-known tune, “Kemp’s Jig”, which is a polka and definitely not within the stricter definition of a jig. You can find sheet music for it at the Sessions.

(link at https://thesession.org/tunes/7093 )

Misc. Questions [2025-05-27]

Q: why focus on staging problems?

Shakespeare has dual citizenship in both literature and theatre, which leads naturally to the question of what is gained and lost in each medium. One important feature that’s lost when Shakespeare is performed is much of the ambiguity in the language. On the page, without a specific delivery, the text is allowed to be as ambiguous as it can be. Once you put that text in a production, though, you almost always start shutting down some interpretations in favor of others. That’s not a minor thing because so much of the technical wizardry of Shakespeare has to do with his ability to present two or more sides of a particular issue. That’s not just a virtuoso display either. I think it’s the direct result of the type of political and religious anxiety that fills the English history in the 1500s and 1600s with the kingdom ping-ponging back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism. Add to that infertile monarchs, and you have the ideal setting for an anxiety about succession. No surprise that so much of the art of rhetoric at that time should be consumed with equivocation, which we think of now as double-speak but which had a very specific legal and religious meaning at that time, namely how far a Catholic could bend the truth without lying. The ability of Shakespeare’s text to equivocate, therefore, is crucial to its artistry, to explaining what helped it document the anxiety of its times and, therefore, why it was popular. That, in turn, can help us figure out if it’s possible to tap into those anxieties to make Shakespeare truly popular in the same way to current audiences. Returning back to limitations of restricting Shakespeare to performances, live performance radically reduces the possibilities in the text. Massive pruning occurs, and this happens even though you retain all the original text. The way it’s delivered and staged necessarily will cut off some interpretations.

To address the other question, what is lost when Shakespeare is read rather than performed? The main one for me is a view that faces outwards towards a well-defined audience and that also has well-defined problems to consider. In comparison, reading is such a private activity that it can feel like just a conversation with oneself. That’s not a bad thing necessarily, but it can devolve into navel-gazing in which we never get beyond questions of why we personally like or don’t like some particular character. That’s not a bad starting point, but if the discussion goes no further than that, we’re left flopping around in subjective feelings.

Instead, if we think about the text as something that needs to be performed, we get related questions such as:

If this play were to be performed under such and such circumstances, would the audience like or not like the character? And if we want to get granular about this, as we should, we can ask what percent of the audience would like the character?
More crucially, is this going to be good for the dramatic impact of the performance? Is this going to get the audience talking about the play? That’s ultimately what you want on the simplest level. You don’t want to close early and you don’t want to lose money.
If you want the audience to like (or not like) character, how are you going to stage this to get that effect? How ambiguous or fluid do you want to be?

Inherent in all of this is still the personal opinion of whether you like a character, but we’re no longer trapped in a maze of endless subjectivity in which I live in the realm of my autonomous opinion, you in yours, and nothing is really ever negotiated or decided. If we focus on staging problems, what we have instead are well-defined questions that are largely external and that are measurable to some extent. The play is either financially successful or not. The audience comes back or ignores the play.

Theatrical Innovations, circa 1590-1610 [2025-05-27]

Q: The two major innovations in Western theatre from the 1590s to the 1610s are Shakespeare and opera. Is it a coincidence that they are essentially contemporaneous or is it that there is something about the early modern period that necessarily led to both happening within the same couple of decades?

Poetry vs. Prose [2025-05-15]

Q: is there a difference between poetry and prose?

Ask you to bear with me for a moment because this sounds like one of those navel-gazing exercises from a literature class, but I think it actually has practical implications in terms of staging problems. Let’s have one of those meandering discussions first.

The obvious first response is that these distinctions are meaningless. There is, after all, prose that is “poetic”and there is poetry that is…one hesitates to use the word “prosaic”. Both of these words are problematic because they connote judgment. We could say instead that there is prose that is like poetry and there is also poetry that is like prose. Given this situation, isn’t it splitting hairs to differentiate between poetry and prose?

The not so obvious answer is what Umberto Eco wrote in The Postscript to The Name of the Rose in which he wrote,

“Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.”

which addresses the question not from the standpoint of the reader but the producer. This is the way, Eco asserts, that writers differentiate between the two. If you start with an idea, separate from words, and you try to put that into words, then you are in the realm of prose. However, if you are dealing first with words, especially in all their irrationality and in the way that usage and etymology weigh them down with illogical associations, and then ideas follow from that, you are dealing with poetry.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that the line between poetry and prose can’t be fuzzy for the reader, but it does highlight a fundamental difference from the writer’s standpoint. If you accept what Eco is saying, the act of writing poetry is fundamentally different from writing prose even though the two categories may blur for the reader.

The obvious question now is what is it for actors who are delivering the lines, especially since we can think of acting is a sort of halfway point in between writing and reading? Let’s extract a practical staging problem from this, though.

Prob: given how much of the text in Shakespeare is poetic, how does a production handle this?

The stick-your-head-in-the-sand reaction is that this doesn’t create any staging problem, but I’m going to disagree firmly on this. The difficulties of the language–what others call poetic–present distinct hurdles for the audience. A production ignores that at its own peril.

Should you have music in a Shakespeare production, and why is the default option not to? [2025-03-02]

One short answer to the first question that is straightforward but that doesn’t really delve into all the murky details of the second question is as follows: if you want a production to be guided by historically informed practice, you need to have music in many, if not most, of the plays because that’s how they were originally produced.

Of course, one need not adopt all the attributes of the original performances, but it is something to keep in mind. If you are using the original production styles as your north star, then by default, you have music in a production.

That leads us to the curious situation in which the default has shifted so that not having music (or minimizing its role) is more the standard option now. There are a lot of reasons behind this, some of which have to do with printing technology. When Hemmings and Condell undertook the First Folio, they had their hands full just trying to collect and print the text of thirty-six plays, let alone trying to publish the music for the lyrics. Music, like mathematics, has a reputation in the printing industry for being difficult to process, edit, and print. Having to print the music would have been made a gargantuan task more gargantuan.

But there’s another reason why music and Shakespeare repel each other in many productions, and that has to do with 1) Shakespeare’s reputation at the apex of theatre arts and 2) the schism that’s developed between “straight” theatre (i.e., without music) and musical theatre.

Serious work (and Shakespeare is serious work) is done in the former. The latter, meanwhile, is where things get dumbed down. I’m not saying, by the way, that I agree with these assessments, but they are pervasive. To give an example, it took until Of Thee I Sing before a Broadway musical won the Pulitzer (not that the Pulitzer is the sole arbiter of great theatre, but it can stand in as a representative of the establishment’s attempts to create a canon).

A lot of this goes back to Plato’s stated mistrust of music, that weird, irrational discourse that has no meaning or so little linguistic content as to be virtually meaningless in terms of logical argument, but I’m getting away from the main topic.

There is a lot of antagonism between straight theatre and musical theatre. I don’t know the full origins of this, but there is this persistent bias that music gets in the way of serious drama (with the exception of opera, which, like ballet, has such a specific skill set that it’s simply not open to actors). There are these notions that great acting is acting with speech and not acting with singing and that great plays or films are those don’t break into song and dance. Whether that idea is correct or not isn’t an issue I want to resolve now. I just want to acknowledge that this view is pervasive and that, if you think of Shakespeare as being central to theatre arts and you have this notion about music and theatre, you’re going to avoid putting music into your productions.

Are there plays, scenes, or texts that shouldn’t be set to music or that resist that sort of treatment?

This is, as you might recognize, a slight variation of the previous question. For some directors who are allergic to musical theatre, they would put all of Shakespeare in this category, for example. Let’s not go quite to that extreme. There are texts that resist being put in musical settings, which means it’s always reasonable to ask if the musical setting is detracting from the text and from its dramatic impact in a production. Maybe I can use this as a, what they call, “teaching moment”.

Some time ago, I went to this lecture given by a nationally recognized composer who had set a lot of poems to music. There was a Q and A session afterwards, but it didn’t feel like a real Q and A session of the sort in which you could ask in a straightforward way about the viability of the artistic project and, namely, if some texts are just degraded by being forced into a musical setting. [to be continued]

Liner Notes from 2023 and 2024 Minnesota Fringe Fest

These liner notes are taken from iterations in the 2023 and 2024 Minnesota Fringe, specifically the “more information” section. The editing is far less polished, the writing is more verbose, the tone is more declamatory, almost aggressive at times, but there are topics that aren’t discussed elsewhere so I’m leaving this up here until I can rework it into a palatable form, which may be next month or several years from now.

Q: What music, if any, should you have in productions of Shakespeare?

Shakespeare explicitly states that songs are supposed to be in his plays. There are over 70 lyrics throughout the plays. What do you do?

We don’t usually think of Shakespeare as being musical theatre, but there’s a lot of music in the plays. In fact, there are over 70 designated lyrics in the plays, and that concerns just songs. The immediate problem is that with a couple of exceptions, we don’t know what the original music was, so the problem is what music do you use for these lyrics?

We could delete the lyrics, or if they are crucial to the plot (e.g., “Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred” from The Merchant of Venice), we could just have the actors recite them, or we could slap together a few chords and string a melody over those like a recitative from an opera.

Look, I understand why this often happens. It’s late in the game, the first show starts in two weeks, there wasn’t any budget to hire a pit orchestra, and the actor who claimed that he could play guitar actually can’t play guitar. Just get through the lyric as quickly as possible and be done with it.

At the same time, it’s a lost opportunity on several fronts (one of which includes marketing), and I’ll tell you why.

The twin engines of American musical theatre are 1) music and 2) dance. This is what gets people to see shows and, as importantly, to see them again. Is it possible to use these to propel a Shakespeare production? Given the title of the 2023 show–“Butts in Seats: How to Get People to Attend Your Shakespeare Production by Having Musical Settings for the Lyrics in His Plays”–you can probably guess what my answer is. Let me connect the dots.

If you can set the lyric to a catchy melody, you can grab the audience’s attention in a way that you can’t with words alone. Never underestimate how persistent an earworm can be. That, in fact, is the point behind “The Willow Song” in Othello in which Desdemona obsesses about a tune she half-remembers.

Besides pulling an audience in, a catchy tune also offers a simple way to market a production. Use a short clip of the tune on social media, let’s say. The grand soliloquy may have the drama, but it’s hard to fit on a short clip. You can do that with a catchy tune. This addresses another real problem associated with producing Shakespeare, which is:

Problem #2 How do you market Shakespeare so that you can attract an audience?

It’s at this point that I’m going to quote Benedict from Much Ado About Nothing (2.3.60) when he notes somewhat bemusedly,

Now, divine air! Now is his soul ravished. Is it not strange that sheeps’ guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?

How exactly does this happen? Like Benedict, ours is not to wonder why, but I’m willing to take whatever tools I can. As the history of American musical theatre demonstrates, one surefire way to get a theatrical audience is through compelling music. In terms of a Shakespeare production, the music needs to be inherently catchy. Furthermore, it needs to fit the dramatic function at that point in the play, and, as importantly, it needs to be interesting for the actors to sing.

My show gives several examples of musical settings that were explicitly written to fit those three needs.

The goal of these musical adaptations is to address one of the persistent, if not the most persistent, staging problem in Shakespeare. In order to describe that, permit me a brief tangent.

Tangent

The demand for some works of the performing arts comes primarily from the audience. However, the demand for other works comes primarily from the practitioners. The more I look at this, the more I’m convinced that Shakespeare falls very much into the second category. That doesn’t mean that the general audience isn’t interested in Shakespeare. What it means is the main reason that Shakespeare gets produced is that actors want to play these roles. I think the reasons are practical and straightforward, but they also present difficulties for the audience. A production needs to take that into account.

If you look at the situation from the standpoint of an actor who has to devote hours and hours to memorize lines, the front-and-center question would be how would you prefer to spend your time, memorizing some random play or Shakespeare? What is less likely to bore you during the often tedious process of learning the lines and reciting them in weeks of rehearsals?

The answer is obvious. The problem, though, is obvious as well. What makes Shakespeare not boring after a hundred repetitions is what makes Shakespeare difficult for the audience, which is often hearing it for the first time. The same intricacies of the language that keep it interesting are also what make it hard for an audience to follow.

And now we return to our main programming.

There are many solutions to this problem. I’m going to suggest, as you might expect, music. If the music serves the dramatic function of the scene, it can convey quickly the mood, which makes it easier for the audience to navigate the language. To put it bluntly, catchy music gives the audience something to grab ahold of (even when they might not quite understand why they’re interested). That’s important enough that I’m just to repeat it but in a loud voice.

Catchy music gives the audience something to grab ahold of.

This is really something to keep in mind given the situation that exists for theatre currently. The word of that keeps on being bandied about is “existential”. Everything nowadays is existential, which can make the word seem trite, but it’s a legitimate point to make that for many theatre companies, the crisis is existential. Here’s a very long (~13,000 word) article, so long in fact that it may be longer than my “more information” section, Theatre in Crisis: What We’re Losing and What Comes Next, that discusses how dire the situation is for many companies that have failed to regain their audiences since the pandemic started in 2020. The article also notes that this seems to be a particular problem that theatre has by making the comparison that attendance at music performances has recovered significantly better than theatre. This, of course, raises two questions, 1) why this is so and 2) can we borrow anything from standard music performances to help theatre regain its audiences?

As you might expect, I have opinions about the why, and as you also might expect, I will now inflict them on you. The why has to do, I think, with the fact that audiences for music performances have a fairly good idea what they are going to see and hear in a performance. They may not know the exact set list, but they know when, for example, they go to see Taylor Swift, that she will be a large number of songs that they know and that she will be presenting herself in a way that they know somewhat. All an audience has to do is look through a few videos of previous gigs, maybe from the last tour. That will give you a pretty good idea. Musicians also have an advantage here in that their art form fits pretty nicely into the way social media works. You have a short clip, maybe three minutes, which is by default, the length of a pop song, that you post to your favorite video hosting entity or social media account. People can hear you in action. The consumer is informed.

To a significant extent, this doesn’t happen in theatre at least not to the same degree. Yes, you may know the play backwards and forwards, but you often don’t have a short, little clip of the play in action…unless, unless you have a short, little clip of, let’s say, a song from that play.

You can see where I’m going with this. The point is to draw upon the way in which music performers get the word out about their work and apply that to a theatrical performance.

Besides the general problem of promoting and marketing a Shakespeare production, there is another problem that my settings are meant to address. It’s both a marketing problem and a staging problem.

Problem #3: How, if at all, do you address the relative lack of gender diversity in Shakespeare?

Only 17% of the text in Shakespeare is spoken by female characters.

Keep this in mind the next time you attend a theatre performance and estimate the demographics of the audience. There is a big discrepancy between the demographics of the dramatis personae and of the audience. There are several possible “solutions”.

a) One is to sweep it under the rug and ignore the discrepancy.

b) Another is to add new text and characters so that there’s more gender parity. This is actually not as uncommon as one might expect. Especially recently, there have been lots of Shakespeare-adjacent productions (e.g., Hamnet, Jane Anger, Emilia, A Room in the Castle) that use some of Shakespeare’s words to create a fundamentally new work.

c) One can cast women to play male roles.

There is another approach that this show proposes and that is:

Use musical settings to shift the focus on the female characters. The technique is simple. Musical settings generally slow down the action. They also frequently make use of repeated phrases, and they focus the audience’s attention on the character singing.

This approach is essentially the analog of the lighting designer putting a spotlight on a particular character but doing it with music instead. In addition, this approach works without adding any new text and characters so what you have is really a Shakespeare play.

How, you might ask, did my show develop a focus on these sorts of texts? It wasn’t directly done to solve this particular staging problem, per se, although that’s always been in the back of my mind. It began when listening to a BBC podcast, My Own Shakespeare in which the novelist, Margaret Drabble. pointed out a particularly important passage for her, which is Titania’s speech to Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.1.84-120). Because the play is often used as the one work to introduce children to Shakespeare, this speech, which doesn’t fit in well with the potions, fairies, and romantic shenanigans side of the play, doesn’t get emphasized, but as Drabble mentions, there’s a lot going on. (Ref: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02r717c )

Titania complains bitterly to Oberon that he is abusing his supernatural powers to create havoc through the environment. Usually in productions, the emphasis is on Oberon’s own formula for Love Potion #9, but the extent of his meddling goes much farther and has a much more sinister tone. Titania’s speech is the one place in Shakespeare that explicitly mentions climate change. Furthermore, he uses weather, specifically the clouds and vapors, to introduce by metaphor contagious diseases spreading throughout the land. What more could you want from a play from the 1590s? Climate change and a pandemic, thrown in for extra measure. You can’t make a better argument for relevance than that.

The administrators at Fringe Fest have not placed a word limit on this “more information” section so with that in mind, I see no reason why I can’t quote the entire passage.

These are the forgeries of jealousy;

And never, since the middle summer’s spring,

Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,

By pavèd fountain or by rushy brook,

Or in the beachèd margent of the sea,

To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,

But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,

As in revenge have sucked up from the sea

Contagious fogs, which, falling in the land,

Hath every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborne their continents.

The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,

The plowman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard.

The fold stands empty in the drownèd field,

And crows are fatted with the murrain flock.

The nine-men’s-morris is filled up with mud,

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,

For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.

The human mortals want their winter here.

No night is now with hymn or carol blessed.

Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,

Pale in her anger, washes all the air,

That rheumatic diseases do abound.

And thorough this distemperature we see

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts

Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,

And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown

An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds

Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,

The childing autumn, angry winter, change

Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world

By their increase now knows not which is which.

And this same progeny of evils comes

From our debate, from our dissension;

We are their parents and original.

My setting for this, “The Mazèd World”, will be performed at some of the shows.

(The text comes from the Folger edition at https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/a-midsummer-nights-dream/read/2/1/ )

Getting back to the main topic, there I am, mulling over how I can set this speech to music, which is tricky for a couple of reasons, one being its length and the second that it has no rhymes. As I’m doing this, a couple of thoughts occur to me. The first is that if you expand this composition project from setting just the lyrics to any possible text in Shakespeare, the available material multiplies by about a thousand fold. (In addition, the material not in the lyrics is generally much stronger than the writing in the lyrics. For the most part, it’s where the drama happens.) But the other thing that occurred to me is that if one focuses deliberately on the text delivered by female characters, one often gets a new perspective on the material.

I don’t know why specifically Shakespeare had Titania deliver these words although from a sort of structuralist standpoint, you can see why. He establishes Oberon as the patriarchal King of the Fairies. There’s some sort of crisis. The obvious character to rebut Oberon’s policies is the Queen of the Fairies. Why exactly, though, she would give this type of speech that links together the environment and contagious diseases is unknown.

Whatever the reason, the main point I want to make is that you get to this perspective if you focus on what the female characters are saying. That’s how this aspect of the project started. There are other examples. Again, since I apparently don’t have a word limit, why not provide at least one more?

In most productions of the great forest comedy, As You Like It, the emphasis is on the inevitable (whoops, spoiler alert) marriage of Rosalind and Orlando. This satisfies the romcom-esque requirements of the genre of that time (as well as ours). As Emma Smith has pointed out, if there’s a heroine in a comedy who isn’t married at the start of the play, you can bet that she will be by the end whether she want to be (Rosalind) or not (Olivia in Twelfth Night). (See her podcasts, Approaching Shakespeare, which are essentially transcripts of lectures she delivered at Oxford.) This is the more formulaic part of the play. It’s important, no doubt, but—of course, you can see where I’m going with this—it’s the less formulaic parts of the play that we might want to explore. How can we do this? One way is to focus on the less formulaic relationships in a play, in other words, not the front-and-center romance between Rosalind and Orlando but between, let’s say, the friendship between Celia and Rosalind. Because this doesn’t fit in with the inevitable marriage that must occur, it’s more contingent, and what the characters say takes on more the quality of something that could be said but also might not ever be said. The characters are not necessarily destined to have this relationship because of the conventions of the form. For that reason, Rosalind’s and Celia’s friendship has a different feel.

Here’s a quick plot summary up to the speech I want to mention, a speech that I’ve set to music.

Rosalind’s father, Duke Senior, has been exiled by Duke Frederick, who is Celia’s father. Duke Senior then decides to exile Rosalind. Celia offers to renounce her inheritance to accompany Rosalind in exile. Here’s the dialogue.

CELIA

O my poor Rosalind, whither wilt thou go?

Wilt thou change fathers? I will give thee mine.

I charge thee, be not thou more grieved than I am.

ROSALIND I have more cause.

CELIA Thou hast not, cousin.

Prithee, be cheerful. Know’st thou not the Duke

Hath banished me, his daughter?

ROSALIND That he hath not.

CELIA

No, hath not? Rosalind lacks then the love

Which teacheth thee that thou and I am one.

Shall we be sundered? Shall we part, sweet girl?

No, let my father seek another heir.

Therefore devise with me how we may fly,

Whither to go, and what to bear with us,

And do not seek to take your change upon you,

To bear your griefs yourself and leave me out.

For, by this heaven, now at our sorrows pale,

Say what thou canst, I’ll go along with thee.

ROSALIND Why, whither shall we go?

CELIA

To seek my uncle in the Forest of Arden.

ROSALIND

Alas, what danger will it be to us,

Maids as we are, to travel forth so far?

Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.

CELIA

I’ll put myself in poor and mean attire,

And with a kind of umber smirch my face.

The like do you. So shall we pass along

And never stir assailants.

Note, by the way, the sort of contingency here in the scene. It’s not a foregone conclusion that Celia would go with Rosalind. In Twelfth Night, Viola must venture to a new territory entirely by herself. This could have been written with Rosalind fending for herself alone. The fact that the dialogue didn’t have to happen means that its lines actually reflect not convention but what the characters, and specifically Celia, really think.

Because the scene doesn’t have to occur, it may be the purest expression of friendship in the play but because it is relatively brief, it often doesn’t receive the attention that I think it should.

Before I get to a possible solution for this, I need to make a tangential comment about the film adaptation of Dan Clowes’ comic strip, Ghost World. In the original, the focus is almost entirely on the friendship between Rebecca and Enid. In the film adaptation, the focus gets shifted to a relationship between Enid and Seymour. Somewhere along the line, prompted by Terry Zwigoff’s personal interests, the great Delta bluesman Skip James becomes a central figure.

Look, I love Zwigoff’s documentaries on Crumb and Howard Armstrong and I love Skip James, but I just disagree with the way he shifted the emphasis in his adaptation. The interesting stuff is happening in the friendship between Rebecca and Enid or in the mundane but mysterious crevices of the original comic strip. (Clowes said that the title came to him as graffiti that he saw on Division Street in Chicago. I know that street, and I’ve probably walked nearby where that graffiti used to be. It’s unclear to me what Division has to do with Ghost World, but that’s okay.)

For years, I’ve been carrying around this sort of dissatisfaction about the way Ghost World was adapted. That’s probably why I wrote the musical setting that I did for this scene from As You Like It, which slows down this dialogue, repeats some phrases and focuses our attention on the true import of what Celia is saying. On one sense I wrote this musical setting to restore Ghost World back to its original form, not that that really makes any rational sense, but again, that’s okay.

There are three different settings that I’ve composed. These will be scattered throughout the five shows.

On a wider note, there’s a much more general notion at play here, and it’s the idea that the interesting things in Shakespeare may not be the front and center concerns. I make the argument both above and in my musical setting that it’s not the Rosalind and Orlando wedding that makes As You Like It intriguing but things that are off to the sides.

I would make a similar claim about Cymbeline. The central character seems to be the eponymous one. After all, the play is titled after him, and he’s the king of Britain so he’s got to be important “by definition”, and the central relationship, if we follow the appropriate protocol should be the one between the central heroine, Imogen (Cymbeline’s daughter), and Posthumus.

Following Emma Smith’s dictum, Imogen must be married to Posthumus before the play is done, but by this necessity, the relationship takes on a more perfunctory quality. It’s the relationship between Imogen and her long-lost siblings, Guiderius and Arvirargus, that is may be more interesting because it is actually contingent. There’s no guarantee that they will meet again or that they will form an alliance. This is what gives the emotional heft to a scene in which Guiderius and Arvirargus think that Imogen has died. Here’s the first stanza of the song they sing:

GUIDERIUS, as Polydor

Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages;

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Cymbeline (4.2.331)

I particularly like this lyric because it seems like the closest he got to William Blake. The musical question is how to set this. The obvious choice would be a minor key, but I decided to go against convention and write it in a major key. An arrangement was used in Brick by Brick Players’ staging of Cymbeline in 2022. This tune will be performed at the 2023 Fringe Fest with some additional Baroque ornamentation in the repeat. That’s all I’m going to say. You’ll just have to attend to hear the rest.

IN CONCLUSION…

At this point, the reader may recognize that these liner notes exceed the length of both several scenes in the plays and many, typical grant applications. With that in mind, we refer the reader to the actual production for more details.