Sound effects
Henrietta Bredin on how music can add another dimension to drama
There is a long tradition of music
to accompany drama. Shakespeare's plays, for example, would not only have been accompanied by, and embroidered and studded with, different sorts of music, but almost all contain at least one song, and it is a subject that he frequently puts into the mouths of his characters; from Bottom the Weaver claiming to have 'a reasonable good ear in music' as he calls for 'the tongs and the bones', to Orsino opening Twelfth Night with his demands for an excess of it and Richard II complaining 'how sour sweet music is,/ When time is broke and no proportion kept'. Songs were used to evoke mood, as magical charms and incantations, in order to establish the character or mental state of the singer. Instrumental music accompanied dances and masques, provided interludes between acts and created atmosphere to establish the emotional climate of a scene.
Plays today use music in a similar fashion. Fewer playwrights habitually incorporate songs in their work than in Shakespeare's day, hut the renditions of 'Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered', 'Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye' and the Pet Shop Boys' It's a sin' are all hugely telling moments in Alan Bennett's The Historv Boys. Nicholas Hytner, directing the play at the National Theatre, was involved with the shaping of the work from an early stage — indeed, according to Bennett, inspired the idea for the play that he 'didn't quite write' but which became the play that now exists. The music that Bennett has written in for the boys to perform represents a world that is not their own; in particular, it is the world of Hector, their idiosyncratic and inspirational teacher. Hytner says that shortly before rehearsals began, when the decision was made to incorporate a video element in the production, he also decided to add more Eighties pop music. This has the effect both of evoking the period and also of giving something of their own to Hector's pupils. When one of them says of another's Pet Shop Boys moment, 'That's crap', he retorts, 'So is Gracie Fields. Only that's his crap. This is our crap.'
Hytner says that he usually knows almost from the point of deciding to direct a particular play whether he wants to include music and, frequently, the sort of music he wants. For David Hare's Stuff Happens he knew that a play about the build-up to the war in Iraq was not going to be something in need of background music, of mood enhancement or atmosphere, 'An ironist's music' was what he needed. 1 knew from the beginning that it would almost certainly he Shostakovich, probably the 8th string quartet.' Talking to Gerard McBurney, who made the arrangement, was the next step, and he, being steeped in Shostakovich's music, had a number of other suggestions to make, but they all in the end led back to Hytner's original choice. The quartet was, after all, dedicated by its composer to 'the victims of fascism and war', and its lack of sentimentality, its slicing, sinewy quality, contribute a painfully ironic punctuation to the action unfolding on stage.
Where live music is concerned, there are two things that Hytner has made National Theatre policy: for the players to be visible and for there to be no amplification unless it is specifically designed from the beginning, as is the case for the epic, two-part Philip Pullman adaptation of His Dark Materials. This could hardly be more different in content and style from either the Hare or the Bennett. 'It's big, bold story telling, and the action is often pared back, like in a screenplay, to give more space to the music and to the image being presented.' The composer in this case is Jonathan Dove, and he has provided over two hours of music altogether. He agrees with Hytner: 'The music tells the audience a lot, almost like an extra bit of scenery. The Church in these stories is represented as a powerful force, and not for good. Towards the end of the first act, the scene is a research facility run by the Church. There's nothing on stage specifically to indicate that, but the music is a version of the Church music that's already been heard, so subliminally the audience becomes aware of a connection,' Dove has written music for a great many plays, at the Almeida and at the National. It's often a matter of looking for a single significant idea that relates to the central theme of the play and can be varied in a number of different ways. As an opera composer I'm aware that what I do is similar to what actors do when they're performing: making decisions about how fast a scene goes, the emotional temperature, where the climax comes, rhythm and pacing.' He feels that writing the music for His Dark Materials has been more like writing an opera or a film score than any play he's done before. 'There's a complex range of characters and the dramatisation of the books is necessarily highly compressed, so music helps keep a sense of who people are and their relation to one another.'
The performers benefited from Dove's involvement, playing for rehearsals even before all the music was entirely fixed. 'I had colours worked out, some of the paint assembled on the palette.' Actors told him that when they heard their music they had a sense of where they were, how they fitted into the structure of the piece; and of course, ultimately, this has the same effect on members of the audience.
At an earlier stage still, Dove had to find a solution for a key element in Pullman's world, the notion of Dust, an ever-present but invisible presence. 'I had to devise a sound for that before anything else, and it wasn't something I could achieve with conventional acoustical instruments.' He worked with Duncan Chave, the sound designer at the National and a composer in his own right, experimenting with ideas until he got what he wanted. 'At first I was after something that sounded like tiny particles of metal falling through the air, so we splintered the sound of a triangle to see how that behaved. Then I wondered if it could sound more like whirling fragments of glass hut with some kind of pitch at the core of it. Once I'd cracked that, the rest of the sound world took shape.'
Sometimes a director will want music but will be unclear about what sort of music that might be. Nigel Hess, who worked for a long time with the Royal Shakespeare Company, was talking on BBC Radio Three recently and clearly relished the speed at which he sometimes had to work, reacting to demands, changing things right up to the last minute, relying on his own fecundity of ideas and the quick instincts and skills of a small group of resident musicians.
So music can work with drama in many ways, forming a subtle, flexible tracery that brackets and punctuates text, filling in broader brushstrokes of colour and atmosphere, or taking another angle, creating a counterpoint. It can add to one's appreciation and understanding of language by complementing it, illustrating it, setting it off to advantage and, with luck, surprising one into a deeper and richer comprehension.
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