Something, When Nothing Is Best

I recently wrote incidental music for a play, David Mamet’s “Edmond”.  Having forged many sound designs (including composed music) in years past, I’ve always had some clue as to what I wanted to do for each production.  This time was an exception, as my first inclination was: leave as-is (no music).

You can fit music into a Mamet play, and if you do, it sticks out like a sore thumb and doesn’t integrate well.  Mamet’s language is center stage and the timing needs to be crisp — this is especially true in “Edmond”, which has many scenes and shifts gears quickly.  I’m used to generating a lot of content for plays, and believe in an integrated production design, so my approach is to always underscore where possible.  This doesn’t work for Mamet, especially “Edmond”.

I told the director first off, don’t do anything.  At most, keep sparse or bookend the whole dramatic work by simply putting something at the top and something at the end.

I ended up writing about 30 cues — 15 of which were used for almost every scene transition.

Initially, I recorded some solitary drums — from a drum kit — but sparse and authoritative.  After building a few cues with iterative feedback from the director, I scrapped it.  Too “militaristic”.

I turned to guitar textures, largely atonal, and layered, which is my forte.

I had a guitar still strung up with a Glenn Branca tenor strings and tuning, and improvised some small gestures and microtonal movements.  At HIGH volumes.  This produced some great combination tones (Cue22C).

I also strummed a little melody, and ferociously hammered a heterophonic chord.  At HIGH volumes.  More snippets (Cue9).

The rest was editing (and fragmenting and layering) within Logic, created subtle differentiated cues of about :30-1 minute in duration.  I probably spent 10% of my time recording at most, but the rest was editing.

I’ll go check out the performance next week, but for now I still believe that nothing was probably the best solution for the work.  At least I generated some decent content for future use (or for my CV).  Most importantly, it kept me productive, learning new approaches and solutions to creative problems.

Tagged as: Composition, David Mamet, Plays, Songwriting, Theatre