Music and Videos

Note: This page is under construction. More examples to be posted later.

“If We Shadows”, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

As a work of music-theatre, the following example should work simply as a stand-alone tune. At the same time, it also does have a definite theatrical function, and, in specific, it answers the following staging question:

When Puck breaks the Fourth Wall at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, how can we use this moment to reiterate the supernatural nature of the play?

Because Puck addresses the audience directly, this might be both the most and least artificial moment in the play. Least artificial because it acknowledges the play as being a play; most artificial in the context of the rest of the play. Whichever side you choose, it seemed like a good moment to heighten the artifice and the supernatural qualities of the preceding two hours as well as the obvious questions of whether the play–and theatre as a whole–are the “dream” in the title.

What better way to underline that artifice than with music?

I want to make a short tangent here because this setting illustrates how this Shakespeare project has evolved. Originally, I focused solely on those texts that were officially designated as lyrics and that were therefore meant to be sung. What I found, though, is almost without exception, the most interesting text was elsewhere, which is why I started setting whatever text caught my attention to music. This leads naturally to a question for the reader:

if there is a text from the plays that you find particularly interesting, let me know.

I’m always on the lookout for new suggestions. I can’t guarantee that I will set it to music, but I like to hear what texts other readers find intriguing. The format that I particularly like is the one of (act#, scene#, line#) from the online Folger editions. Use the “contact” page on this website.

Now back to the main topic.

We were talking about the epilogue to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Since this is not designated as a lyric, this is almost always recited, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be sung, and, in fact, I would argue that a musical setting, precisely because it can employ musical techniques, can get the audience to revisit and reconsider the supernatural nature of the plot as well as the way it swerves from one state of mind to another.

Note, for example, that the last few lines, “else the Puck a liar call,” are delivered twice, the first time in a minor key and the second in major. The words are exactly the same, but the mood is totally different. The goals go from the obvious, namely get the audience to focus on these lines, to the more subtle, such as getting that audience to see how the same words can have different moods depending on the context, in this case, the harmonic context.

Regarding the supernatural quality of the play, that’s where the coda comes in. This highlights the collaborative nature of how this setting was written. The vocalist, Sophie Caplin, rehearsed the first draft, which ended in a fairly straightforward manner on the tonic in a manner that was too resolved. What to do? Well, go instead to an augmented chord instead that feels as if it’s going to resolve to the tonic but that never does.

What effect was I trying to get? There’s an appearance Tom Waits made on the Letterman show. I can’t remember what year, but it’s somewhere on youtube. He pulls out some glitter out of the pocket on his blazer and sprinkles it on Dave’s desk and calls it “fairy dust”. That’s what I’m after here.

“Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind” As You Like It

Synopsis: In As You Like It, Duke Senior and his entourage have been exiled to the Forest of Arden. Sometimes they revel in the pastoral; sometimes they contend with mosquitos and the elements. Here they contend with the elements, at times descending into a particularly 1590s type of melancholia.

There are many different ways to set this. I decided to take up the text’s intimations on that type of melancholia to write this in a style from the 1600s.

Addendum: there is a long streak of melancholia common to British music that extends from John Dowland, through Purcell, and up to and including Radiohead. I really don’t understand this phenomenon well so these are preliminary notes, but they are probably relevant to productions of Shakespeare so I’m putting them here anyways. Almost contemporaneous with Shakespeare is Robert Burton’s bestseller, The Anatomy of Melancholia, which over hundreds of thousands of words goes on and on and on about this affliction. Certainly, contemporaneous with Shakespeare is his pop culture colleague, John Dowland, whose big hit, “Flow, My Tears“, tapped into this emotionally excessive strain of sadness. Obviously, depression isn’t solely an English concern so I really need to qualify this by showing how it’s more than that particular mental illness.

What I want to point out is how that era went overboard in elevating and cultivating melancholy as an index of refinement and taste. Not surprisingly, you find characters like Jacques in As You Like It, Orsino in Twelfth Night, and, of course, Hamlet, each of whom revels in their particular editions of melancholia.

I’m probably more interested, though, in ways this expresses itself in music, but even then, I don’t have a good feel for this besides referencing the well-known bassline from “Dido’s Lament”. You can find something of this, extending hundreds of years into Radiohead’s tunes (e.g., slow section of “Paranoid Android“). If I had to take a guess, I’d say that harmonically it emphasizes minor triads and avoids diminished chords, but I don’t have anything more complete than that.

Addendum: so much of what I write is not written in the abstract. It’s written to order, rather like the way you’d get a suit or dress tailored or get an item off the menu. For whatever reason, Radiohead seems to be a favorite of several of the people I collaborate with so, when I have the opportunity to delve into that brand of melancholia, I can usually find a related passage in Shakespeare, and everyone is happy or reasonably satisfied.

The customer is always right, as they say.

“Under the Greenwood Tree” (waltz), As You Like It

Synopsis: Duke Senior is exiled and takes refuge in the Forest of Arden. His entourage seeks to make the best of it by embracing the pastoral. The melancholic Jacques makes an appearance.

Yet another setting from As You Like It. Actually I have at least five other settings of this lyric because there is no one right way to set it. The setting depends on many factors. In this case, I’m leaning heavily on Viennese waltzes as filtered through the Great American Songbook. This is a deliberate decision as the essay in the video notes. The Songbook is one of the great forms developed in the 20th century. I look at it primarily in terms of how jazz musicians used it, but, of course, its first use was in Broadway shows. To this day, it determines to a large extent how we think of musical theatre and the way that music can propel a dramatic work.

Celia: “…that thou and I am one…” As You Like It

Synopsis: Rosalind, daughter of the exiled Duke Senior, has also been sent into exile. Upon the penalty of death, she must leave the relative security of the court to fend entirely for herself.

I want to take a short tangent here to make an obvious point that’s outside of this synopsis, which is that one of the most critical things a production can do is speak to the audience directly in terms of its own immediate concerns and wishes. This moment in the plot is, on the surface, about some fictional Forest of Arden, and it can, especially given the artifice of theatre, feel far removed from daily life, but, of course, it’s more than that.

Any woman who’s had to walk through an empty parking structure at night knows what Rosalind is fearing. The world is dangerous, especially for women. It was dangerous in this play; it was dangerous in the 1590s; it’s dangerous now.

Her friend, Celia, renounces her entire inheritance to accompany Rosalind so she will not be alone and so she will be safer. If I force you to ruminate on this as I am doing now, it will appear to you as one of the great moments of female solidarity–or any type of solidarity for that matter–in the plays, but it often gets overlooked because it occurs in a relatively short, twelve line speech.

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

And yet, it may be the center of the play, more important in its own way than any of the comedic banter between Rosalind and Orlando. In the rom-com world of Shakespeare’s comedies, it is pre-ordained that Rosalind and Orlando will flirt and be married by play’s end. It’s not at all clear, though, whether someone like Celia will come to Rosalind’s aid, especially when the costs are as high as they are. (If you compare this plot to Twelfth Night, Viola, in comparison, must fend for herself until she reaches Orsino’s court.)

In comparison to Rosalind’s and Orlando’s courtship, which is a given, the friendship between Celia and Rosalind, and Celia’s offer in particular, are not. It is contingent, which is why it is special. If you accept this, then you necessarily get this staging question:

if this is one of the most important moments in the play, how do we stage it so that the audience recognizes the full import of Celia’s decision?

and

how do we focus the audience’s attention on this character and her sacrifice?

Given that I am primarily a composer, my answer should be obvious by now: set the speech to music to let the audience dwell upon its import.

Addendum: I am going to complain now because I can, because this is my website, and because there actually might be some use in this complaining. This project began by setting to music those texts that Shakespeare officially designated as lyrics. As I mentioned, there are over 70 of these. The good thing about these texts, from a musical standpoint, is that they have rhyme schemes and metrical structures that stay the same from one stanza to the next. That makes them easier to set.

The problem is that often they are some of the least interesting texts in the plays (with obvious exceptions such as “Willow, Willow” from Othello). “Under the Greenwood Tree” or “It Was a Lover and His Lass” serve adequately as lyrics, but they aren’t on the same order as this bit of dialogue from Celia.

That’s why this project evolved from staying within the bounds of the texts that are designated as lyrics to any text in the plays that I find interesting. (If you find some text in the plays interesting, reach out. That’s what the contact page is for.)

The difficulty, though, from a musical standpoint, is fitting what is often blank verse into fairly traditional song forms. Often “fitting” seems like a euphemism for “shoehorning”. Because I spend a lot of time with jazz, I gravitate, almost by default, towards the main formats in the Great American Songbook, i.e., 32 bar AABA or ABAC song structures. These are structures that are meant to work with lyrics that rhyme. I’m trying to think off the top of my head of a tune from the Songbook that doesn’t rhyme. I know there is one prominent example, but I cannot recall it. No matter, the point is that the vast majority of Songbook tunes have a very well-defined rhyming pattern.

Celia’s speech definitely does not. It’s difficult to speak for anyone else, particularly those to come to these settings on their own. My relationship with them is as the composer so I necessarily don’t have a representative view. Having said that, I don’t feel the lack of rhyming creates an insurmountable obstacle. The melodies and the chord changes tell you where the tune is going, or at least they tell me.

That highlights one of the obvious things about this project that was unknown when I started it, namely, that it will teach you things because you get forced into unexpected corners and you have to fight your way out. The example of about fitting unrhymed text into very regular song forms is one case.

There’s a relevant anecdote I’m going to misremember now about a Martin Scorcese interview in which he mentioned some obscure, B-movie director (so obscure that I can’t recall the name now). Because Scorcese loves movies, he knows all this stuff, but until The Last Temptation of Christ, he didn’t know that he needed this information.

There’re battle scenes between Roman and Jewish soldiers, but Scorcese didn’t have enough extras to film both sides so he had the extras dress up as Roman soldiers and march left to right, then as Jewish soldiers and march the opposite direction and then put everything together in the editing room. The only reason that trick came to Scorcese is that he knew those old B-movies.

You do what you can with the resources you have.

“Fear No More” Cymbeline

Synopsis: you might think that the most important character in the late Shakespeare play, Cymbeline, is Cymbeline, and the most important relationship is the (spoiler alert) the inevitable marriage between his daughter, Imogen, and Posthumus.

I will claim, instead that the most important relationship in this play is between the three siblings. They have been separated since they were infants, but when they are reunited, in some mysterious way, they recognize each other.

In this scene, the two brothers acknowledge the death of their sister in this funeral song. We know that Shakespeare intended it to be sung, but the music has been lost. What we are left with is the most often quoted words in the play, words that characters in Mrs. Dalloway, for example, quote against the backdrop of Britain’s trauma in WWI.

Fear no more the heat o' the 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.

What I hear, though, is an older Britain, one commensurate with Dickens or William Blake. It’s that line about chimney-sweepers, of course. You think about the way both of them wrote about the people who had to do this job, mostly children since they were small enough to fit in the chimneys, as Britain was entering the industrial age.

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,

In Dickens’ or Blake’s hands, you can sense outrage, which may be why I prefer Blake to Shakespeare in many respects. With Blake, you get moral beauty whereas with Shakespeare, you get equivocation after equivocation, or you get, in this case, this metaphor in which that dust foretells what will happen to all of us.

Somewhere, and I can’t tell where, I read that this lyric was a favorite of fans who followed glam-rock in the early 1970s. Surely, it’s that line about “[g]olden lads and girls”, the type of intimation that Todd Haynes tried to capture in his opening sequence in Velvet Goldmine, a sequence that borrowed, itself, from A Hard Day’s Night just as Brian Eno’s great tune borrowed its rhythm from “I’m Waiting for the Man“.

Addendum 1: if the argument I’m making about focusing on what seem to be the minor characters or the minor relationships in a play feels familiar, there’s a reason. It’s exactly the same argument that I was making earlier about focusing on the friendship between Celia and Rosalind. Even though by word count, these relationships seem less important, I’m asking you to reconsider that based on an argument that they are contingent instead of being inevitable. In terms of the conventions and protocol of hetero-normal plots, we know that some relationships must lead to marriage, and we can, to a certain extent, just run on autopilot. However, for other relationships, usually friendships, we don’t know where they are going, which is why these minor events may be the most interesting parts of the play. Apparently, that’s what Woolf’s characters, Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith, felt.

“…out, out…” Macbeth (5.5.22) and (5.5.55)

In the Shakespeare project, I usually begin, as you might expect, with the text and the dramatic moment in the plot. There are, of course, other ways to proceed, and one is to collaborate with an ongoing production in which case you can begin not necessarily with the text but with other elements such as the costumes, stage design, or lighting, in other words, the non-verbal, visual aspects of the production. What happens if your music responds primarily to a visual cue instead of a textual one?

A lot of this could be the preferences of individual composers. We could take Glass and Reich as examples. Glass has remarked that he starts, or his operas start, from images primarily. Somewhere I remember reading that Reich said, meanwhile, that his work is often a response to texts. Certainly, that’s the case with “Come Out” or Jacob’s Ladder.

What sort of music does one come up with if the cue is visual? Of course, that question is meant to segue into an example.

Synopsis: Lady Macbeth has committed suicide. The would-be king, Macbeth, is pondering the endgame, prophesied by the witches and how recent events fit in.

I could claim that the music was written in response to the text, but that’s not true. What happened was that everything began with the images. Then I searched for text and music that could accompany the visuals.

Actually, if we really want to be accurate about this, before the visuals were the circumstances of the “commission”, so to speak. This short was submitted to Film Score Fest, which occurs every two years in St. Paul. The last time it had previously occurred in 2021, it was held outside, probably because of the pandemic. What happened, though, was that during one of the films screened, an emergency vehicle had to use a nearby street. Large swaths of the film were obliterated by a siren. Given tha, I thought the simplest way to handle the situation was to make a first-strike manoeuvre and include a siren already in the film. If you listen to the film all the way though, it has street noise including sirens. Of course, what happened in Film Score Fest 2023 is that it was held inside the History Theatre so the situation in which a performance was interrupted by ambulances never occurred. The prompt was a staging problem that never occurred. This determined the images, which then determined the text and the music. These are the mundane details in which we tried to solve a staging problem that never happened. Let’s get back to this speech, though.

It’s one of the most famous speeches in Shakespeare, and it was so before Faulkner used it to fashion what may be the most important American novel of the 20^th century.

This musical setting is my attempt to come up with the clock tower from hell in which I replaced the usual chimes before the hour strikes with a six note tone row. That tone row was specifically constructed so that if you transpose it up a tritone, you get the other six notes remaining in the chromatic scale. If that doesn’t make sense to you, just think “the clock tower from hell”.

The goal was to come up with something that had a feeling of vertigo to it to emphasize how at sea Macbeth is at this point when he’s just begun to realize that what he thought was a certain path to the throne has been a misreading of irrelevant facts.

For another example of creating musical settings using images as prompts, see the following:

Side Passage, Jake Docksey

The images come from charcoal drawings that Jake assembled over the course of two years. He then manipulated the physical objects by stacking them in layers and cutting parts away to reveal images underneath.

The result is a dense, highly elliptical film that doesn’t yield its meanings easily, which is why I never asked him what the film “meant”. The individual images are realistic depictions of recognizable objects, but the ways in which they move and are combined have the logic of a hallucination or a dream, something I’m going to take here as an opportunity to make a tangent.

There are a couple of passages from Dickens’ The Uncommercial Traveller that seem relevant, not in terms of content but in terms of this dream-like state. Quoting a passage in Macbeth (2.2.48), Dickens writes about “sleep” as “the death of each day’s life”, but then, powerful writer that he is and not content to leave this alone, he rewrites it into something that I prefer.

“I wonder that the great master who knew everything, when he called Sleep the death of each day’s life, did not call Dreams the insanity of each day’s sanity.“

All the while, Dickens has been walking near asylums, churches, and inns. My favorite passage in this essay occurs a little later in a section which seems the blur the distinction between what Dickens has experienced in a dream and elsewhere. It starts out innocuously enough, not unlike that butterfly on that stump, before it turns quite strange.

“There was early coffee to be got about Covent-garden Market, and that was more company—warm company, too, which was better. Toast of a very substantial quality, was likewise procurable: though the towzled-headed man who made it, in an inner chamber within the coffee-room, hadn’t got his coat on yet, and was so heavy with sleep that in every interval of toast and coffee he went off anew behind the partition into complicated cross-roads of choke and snore, and lost his way directly. Into one of these establishments (among the earliest) near Bow-street, there came one morning as I sat over my houseless cup, pondering where to go next, a man in a high and long snuff-coloured coat, and shoes, and, to the best of my belief, nothing else but a hat, who took out of his hat a large cold meat pudding; a meat pudding so large that it was a very tight fit, and brought the lining of the hat out with it. This mysterious man was known by his pudding, for on his entering, the man of sleep brought him a pint of hot tea, a small loaf, and a large knife and fork and plate. Left to himself in his box, he stood the pudding on the bare table, and, instead of cutting it, stabbed it, overhand, with the knife, like a mortal enemy; then took the knife out, wiped it on his sleeve, tore the pudding asunder with his fingers, and ate it all up. The remembrance of this man with the pudding remains with me as the remembrance of the most spectral person my houselessness encountered. Twice only was I in that establishment, and twice I saw him stalk in (as I should say, just out of bed, and presently going back to bed), take out his pudding, stab his pudding, wipe the dagger, and eat his pudding all up. He was a man whose figure promised cadaverousness, but who had an excessively red face, though shaped like a horse’s. On the second occasion of my seeing him, he said huskily to the man of sleep, ‘Am I red to-night?’ ‘You are,’ he uncompromisingly answered. ‘My mother,’ said the spectre, ‘was a red-faced woman that liked drink, and I looked at her hard when she laid in her coffin, and I took the complexion.’ Somehow, the pudding seemed an unwholesome pudding after that, and I put myself in its way no more.”

The excerpt cuts off before we see what happens to that butterfly, that stump, or in fact, the physical materials of the film, which are charcoal and paper. That’s left for the in-person showings for Film Score Fest 2025 or Jake’s exhibit during the St. Paul Art Crawl for Spring 2025.

Three of the main drawings will be exhibited at Studio 411 in the Northern Warehouse (308 Prince Street, St. Paul) at the following times and dates during the 2025 St. Paul Art Crawl (Spring Edition):

April 25th, 7-9 pm,
April 26th, 12-8 pm,
April 27th, 12-5 pm.

Getting back to the physical materials of the film, they are rooted heavily in traditional drawing instead of software. Computer programs were used to sequence images, but the crux of the film starts with charcoal drawings. Jake discusses this in more detail in a couple of interviews below.

So what of the music in the film? It’s not clear given how dense the film is or how hallucinatory, whether any music is really needed. When things get as elliptical as this, there’s a compelling argument for not having any music at all. Here’s the excerpt above without music or recitation.

Is it better or worse without the music? It’s not exactly clear. Certainly that was always in the back of my mind as the film-scorer. Sometimes music degrades the overall experience, especially here because silence plays an important role in the film, because it’s highly experimental, and because it doesn’t telegraph its intentions. You could easily watch it twenty times and still be scratching your head.

This is, of course, the case with a lot of experimental film like, let’s say, Stan Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet. Brakhage’s work sits firmly outside any sort of mainstream. It can be bewildering because of the amount of information thrown at the viewer. It can also demonstrate just how little territory most film explores with its more typical, linear pacing and structure. The main thing I want to talk about, though, is the music or the fact that there isn’t any.

When you have a film that doesn’t particularly guide the viewer toward a fixed meaning, do you want any music at all? And if you do have music, what type of music should you have?

The advice–first, do no harm–seems relevant here, with harm being either getting in the way of the film or getting in the way a viewer might interpret it. A lot of film music is very pushy, and to be fair to the film-scorers, that’s often the case because there were explicit orders from the director or producers. If there’s something that wasn’t in the visuals or that was too weakly stated there, then it’s often left to the music to prop things up and tell the viewer how to feel. The string section swells; you automatically feel the emotions you’re supposed to feel.

The thing, though, with a film as elliptical as this, meaning seems particularly slippery, which is why I avoided asking the other people involved what the film “meant”. What I didn’t want to do was impose a meaning and act as an intermediary between the images and the viewer.

As a result, the music I came up with was very sparse with more silences than anything else. I also avoided triadic harmony and more typical resolutions, the reason being that these would have burdened the images to more meanings that I wanted to suggest. That doesn’t mean, though, that I didn’t want some commentary in natural language. I felt that something could be added that still wouldn’t get in the way so I asked Sophie to find some texts that functioned like marginalia. Sophie chose one poem by Desnos and the other by Verlaine. Both the music and the recitation have something to do with the images–they aren’t totally disconnected–but the connections are very tenuous. That was a deliberate choice. Both poems are below.

"Porte du second infini" (excerpt)
Robert Desnos
L’encrier périscope me guette au tournant
mon porte-plume rentre dans sa coquille
La feuille de papier déploie ses grandes ailes blanches
Avant peu ses deux serres
m’arracheront les yeux

"Le Rossignol"
Paul Verlaine
Comme un vol criard d’oiseaux en émoi,
Tous mes souvenirs s’abattent sur moi,
S’abattent parmi le feuillage jaune
De mon coeur mirant son tronc plié d’aune
Au tain violet de l’eau des Regrets,
Qui mélancoliquement coule auprès,
S’abattent, et puis la rumeur mauvaise
Qu’une brise moite en montant apaise,
S’éteint par degrés dans l’arbre, si bien
Qu’au bout d’un instant on n’entend plus rien,
Plus rien que la voix célébrant l’Absente,
Plus rien que la voix -ô si languissante!-
De l’oiseau qui fut mon Premier Amour,
Et qui chante encor comme au premier jour;
Et, dans la splendeur triste d’une lune
Se levant blafarde et solennelle, une
Nuit mélancolique et lourde d’été,
Pleine de silence et d’obscurité,
Berce sur l’azur qu’un vent doux effleure
L’arbre qui frissonne et l’oiseau qui pleure.

Addendum: a few details about the music. Time permitting, I’ll write a bit more about this. In the event that I don’t have time, come and talk to me at the shows or at the panel discussion. [to be continued]

Addendum: for more details about Jake’s process in constructing the film, see an interview here.

A longer interview is here.

Richard II (3.2.149-182)

As I’ve mentioned in “…that thou and I am one…”, one of the technical difficulties in setting Shakespeare to music is that the most interesting texts are usually not in those passages that are officially designated as lyrics. That means that if you want to use other passages, you need to contend with lack of rhymes or repetition. This next setting has, thus far, more words in it than any other. The content is complicated, and its complications surely must have resonated with its original audience.

For audiences in Shakespeare’s day, one of the most nerve-wracking issues regarded the divine right of kings. Where does the king’s authority really come from? Who can challenge it? This is why one of the most critical moments in Richard II is when that monarch, his kingdom crumbling around him, delivers a soliloquy questioning both that divine right and also the cost of assuming the crown. Here, Richard II asks his subjects to think of him as a human being with the same needs as they, which is in its own way a highly subversive act of Shakespeare’s part and which produces this very odd moment in the play. The quote that keeps coming to mind is something that the great cartoonist, Jim Woodring said in an interview that I have misplaced.

World peace will never come until the poor learn to feel sympathy for the rich.

That’s the sort of strangeness in Richard II’s speech. The character is warped by the formal demands of the office. The audience is caught by the equivocations that Shakespeare constantly throws up. I have a lot more to say about this passage, especially when paired with another one in the play, but for now, I’ll put these down and focus on the staging problem at hand:

Can we use music to highlight the formality of the office as well as the way Richard II’s hold on it is disintegrating?

That’s the goal of the setting. There are specific, compositional tools I use to get to that place, for example, the way I wait until bridge to hit the IV chord and the way the drums hold off until we get there.