Music as a Chariot

The Evolutionary Origins of Theatre in Time, Sound, and Music

Richard K. Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138295469
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351382076
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

Music as a Chariot offers a multidisciplinary perspective whose primary proposition is that theatre is a type of music. Understanding how music enables the theatre experience helps to shape our entire approach to the performing arts.

Beginning with a discussion on the origin and nature of time, the author takes us on an evolutionary journey to discover how music, language and mimesis co-evolved, eventually coming together to produce the complex way we experience theatre.

The book integrates the evolutionary neuroscience of the human brain into this journey, offering practical implications and applications for the auditory expression of this concept—namely the fundamental techniques artists use to create sound scores for theatre.

With contributions from directors, playwrights, actors and designers, Music as a Chariot explores the use of music to carry ideas into the human soul—a concept that extends beyond the theatrical to include film, video gaming, dance, or anywhere art is manipulated in time.

Chapter 1

Why This Book?

Of the nature of the soul … let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the figure be composite—a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him … the soul which has seen most of truth shall come to the birth as a philosopher, or artist, or some musical and loving nature.

—Plato, Phaedrus

Know thou the self as occupier of the chariot, but the body as the chariot itself; but know thou the intellect (buddhi) as charioteer, and also the mind (manas) as rein. The senses (indriya) they call the steeds, the objects of sense the resorts (gocara) for them; him that is yoked (yukta) with self, senses, and mind, the wise call by the name enjoyer.

—The Katha-Upanishad

Introduction: An Ear-Opening Experience

I was a junior in high school in 1969, a nerd at a time when nerds could not have been less fashionable. Every day brought another embarrassment and humiliation. But I had found music early in my life, and music, it would turn out, would be my salvation.

One day, after a particularly traumatic experience—which, curiously I can’t even recall now—I came home, and went up to my bedroom to sulk. I can’t ever remember being so despondent and overwhelmed. I pulled out a new record that I had just bought a couple of days ago. It was a new band I had recently encountered, Pink Floyd. I put on side three of Ummagumma, an experimental departure from their earlier albums.

I lay down on my bed as the grand and pompous first movement of Sysyphus started. Somehow it was exactly what I was feeling: angry, oppressed, overwhelmed. The second movement, a piano solo, calmed me down quite a bit, and was much more reflective, although quite melancholy, which was now how I was feeling. The third movement led me into a world that was funky but unpredictable, a bit scary and chaotic, again very much like my life. It built to a huge climax, and then released into this quiet, reflective but deeply unsettling world. By this point I was only semi-conscious, but somehow deeply connected to the music, my moods changing with the album tracks.

A crashing, raging sound momentarily shook me from my reverie followed by an eerie dissonant and slowly building section before the monolithic oppressive chords made their final climactic re-entrance. It left me in a very calm place, immersed in a world of birds singing and insects buzzing around, and eventually a very simple, peaceful acoustic guitar seemed to take away all my pain. This gave way to the final movement on that spinning bit of vinyl, Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict. The piece is among the most whimsical in popular music. It left me … happy.

As I awoke from this experience, I was astounded. How was it that less than a half an hour ago I had lay down on my bed overwhelmed by despair and hopelessness? And now I was … happy!? Nothing in my world had changed, except that I had listened to music. How was it possible that music could possibly have that kind of influence on me?

A little over three years later, I was going into my junior year at Michigan State University, when I landed a job as an assistant director with one of our faculty members, Peter Landry, at the Calumet Summer Theatre, in one of the most northern points in Michigan. We were mounting a production of Emlyn Williams’s classic psychological thriller, Night Must Fall.

The rehearsal process was uneventful until about two weeks before we opened. Peter received news that his father had passed away. He told me that he would need to leave for about a week for the funeral, and I would have to take over directing the play. Picture this: I’m barely a junior, and all the people in the company are either grads or the senior star actors at Michigan State. And I’m going to “direct” them! Now, I’m an opportunist as much as anybody else, so I was like “yeah, sure I’ll do that, no problem.”

Then Peter said, “Oh, and while I’m gone could you find some sound effects? Door creaks and thunders, things like that.” This is a murder mystery, right? It’s about a gardener who comes to visit this really, really old lady in a wheelchair, and it’s one of those creepy, spooky, great summer stock entertainment kind of shows. So, he left, and I started to put together some sound effects from these Electro Voice sound effects records they had—thunders, door creaks, all the sounds I thought the show might need—and commenced to directing the production. And I directed, and I directed, and I directed, and every day the show just got progressively … worse. It never got better. Every direction I gave made the show worse. It kept going down and down and down and down and down …

So now I’m really embarrassed, and Peter comes back from his father’s funeral about a week later, and the show is as deadly boring as you can possibly imagine. Not at all scary, my creepy sound effects are not doing anything. We all gathered, and Peter pulled out this reel-to-reel tape recorder—in those days it was a Wollensak. He sat down, and said, “well I’ll tell you what, let’s just run through and see what we’ve got.” We started running through the show, and while Peter was gone, he had put together a soundtrack of film composers such as Bernard Herrmann, classic music from fifties suspense thrillers. And the show went from “I can’t bear to watch this” to frightening, chilling and riveting. The tempo and rhythms of the actors magically fell into place; the music commanded and transformed the acting. I experienced the show like it was my very first time and it totally blew me away.

Suddenly I realized how music could fundamentally transform theatre.

Old School Aesthetics

So began a journey that has lasted my entire life, a combination of discovering how sound and music work in the sound scores I composed, and of sharing those discoveries with students in sound design classes over 40 years.

These are the discoveries I hope to share with you in this book, but before I do, it’s important that we understand something about art and artists. We are all unique and different. That is as it should be. Who would want to live in a world in which all of the art followed the same set of rules, in which all of the art somehow turns out the same, because we all follow the same rules? Every maker of art and every person who experiences art has a separate and unique aesthetic.

Aesthetic. That word can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. It has changed quite a bit from its original use. The origin of the term aesthetic comes from the Greek term aisthetikos, which means “perceptible things,” or from aisthesthai, meaning to “perceive by the senses.” However, it was resurrected and appropriated in the mid-eighteenth century to mean what it generally means now, our general sense of beauty and art (Oxforddictionaries.com 2016). But this earlier definition precisely fits our needs in this book. So, we will use the term exclusively in this book in the Greek sense. When we use the term aesthetic in this book we will mean how we perceive the world through our senses, especially our senses of hearing and sight. Using the term in this way allows us to immediately bypass value judgments in perceiving art. Quite the contrary, it validates every individual’s own valuation of art. If it moved you, then it’s a valuable piece of art.

Oh, and by the way, in 2003, Stylus editor Ed Howard reported that the general consensus about the Ummagumma tracks I had been listening to was that they were “something lower than shit” (Howard 2003). Other people’s aesthetic. Go figure.

At the same time, we are very concerned in this book with how we connect with each other using music, especially when we use it in the more highly specialized discipline of creating sound scores for theatre. How our audience perceives music is critically important in understanding how we connect with one another, even more so when we attach ideas to music like we routinely do in theatre. We will find that using the term “aesthetic” in the Greek sense will be much more helpful in improving our ability to create and understand music composition and sound design for the theatre.

In using the term “aesthetic” in this manner, we go much further than avoiding often less than useful valuations of artworks that undermine and inhibit creativity. If you create music in your art work, this book makes no attempt to evaluate the quality of your art. Instead, this book will hopefully give you a fundamental understanding of the interconnection between composer, performer and audience. To do that, it helps to understand how human beings perceive the world through their senses. But do not confuse that with me trying to convince you to like music that I like, or theatre that I like, or that I think you should compose or design in a certain way. I will show you some fundamental tools we use along the way, and help you understand how we use them and why they work. What you do with them is gloriously your own business. In that sense, my hope is that my aesthetic will inform your aesthetic, not that I will convince you that I have attained some ultimate truth that you must blindly adopt as if it were a religion.

When Sound Gets Divorced from Music

As an example, let’s consider how I have typically composed sound scores for theatre over the last 40 years. I like to work more like the composer of a musical would work: we compose pretty much the entire score, and the director then stages the entire production allowing the preexisting music which dictates tempo, dynamics, vocal colors and so forth. I’ve been fortunate to work with an extraordinary director, Joel Fink, together in this manner for many, many productions both in Chicago and at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and we’ve developed an amazingly intuitive relationship where we instinctively know how each other “perceives the outside world through their senses,” each other’s aesthetic. On any number of productions, Joel has walked in to the first cast read-through with my complete soundtrack, to which he will stage the production. Yes, there are many changes and adaptations we will make along the way to address mistakes I made in the composition, nuances that the actors bring to the performance, and the tremendous conception that Joel develops in the realization of each production. Working in this manner puts a tremendous responsibility on my shoulders to come to a complete and full understanding of exactly how music works in the production. There have been instances where Joel has listened to my initial compositions and said “lovely piece, Rick, but this music is for a different show.” But for the most part, the score is largely composed in advance of the rehearsal process.

Composing the score in advance of rehearsals, like a musical, has become a large part of my theatre aesthetic.

But it isn’t the only viable aesthetic out there. Most directors will argue for a different aesthetic, and with very valid arguments. While working in this manner has its advantages, as evidenced in the dominance of preexisting scores in musical theatre and opera, working in this manner also has its decided disadvantages. In particular, an existing score tends to undermine the journey of discovery undertaken by the actors. Including music very early in a production tends to dictate the actors’ pacing and rhythms—it’s very hard to fight against it. Many directors are very leery about introducing sound too early in the rehearsal process, and some prefer not to introduce it until the actors’ pacing and rhythms have been clearly set. Scenic artists typically develop the space in which the events of the play unfold. Once this space has been created, directors then learn how to reveal actions that take place in time. Since sound is primarily a time art, it makes sense to orchestrate those actions after the actors’ action has been staged. Doing this helps to accommodate the rhythms imposed on the actors’ performance imposed by the scenery. This is another very common way of working, especially in smaller theatres with limited budgets. Most films are also created in this manner. The composer receives a relatively complete edit of the movie and then composes the score to support the rhythms and pacing of the actors and the film editor.

Working in this manner places its own challenges on composers and sound designers: their process can’t really start until the other processes are complete. In film, this often means very compressed time schedules squeezed between the “rough cut” and the release of the film. In theatre, this often means that the composer/sound designer can’t really begin to work on a show until the technical rehearsals—a time-honored tradition made all the more pragmatic by salaries that compel sound artists to restrict their effort to very short time periods. Still, this approach can work amazingly well provided that the amount of orchestrating required is doable, and, conversely, that the sound team has developed the extraordinary ability to create workable sound quickly and efficiently, often while waiting for lighting designers to perfect their own contributions.

If composing the sound score before the show goes into rehearsal is one approach, and composing the sound score during the technical rehearsals is another, there remains but one more aesthetic in the creation of sound scores: composing the sound score during the rehearsal process. It seems that this is, for practical reasons the most common approach, but perhaps the one that is the most fraught with potential problems when the sound score is composed simultaneously, but separately from the rehearsal process. The problems with this approach will require a bit of explanation, but is so important that it serves as one of the underlying themes of this book, so bear with me.

Joe Stockdale is considered by many to be the “father” of Purdue Theatre. He came to Purdue in 1951 and directed productions there until spring of 1976, three months before my tenure at Purdue began. He led the LORT Purdue Professional Theatre and directed 140 shows that included such notable artists as William Saroyan, Academy Award winner Anne Revere and James Earl Jones. His students included such legendary figures of the American stage as Peter Schneider and Tom Moore (Williams 2007). Later in life I had the privilege of discussing some of my then emerging ideas about the function of music in theatre, and Joe graciously offered these thoughts in an email to me:

At the end of the sixteenth century in a Florentine academy, opera was “invented” as part of the rediscovery of classical theatre. The creation of opera was based on an interpretation of Aristotle’s writing about music as a constituent part of tragedy. However, in opera, the libretto [plot’s text] was secondary to music because operas were sung throughout and therefore music composition and its relation to character was the natural focus rather than music’s relationship to plot described by Aristotle.

Throughout the centuries that followed plot and its relationship to character continued to be the focus in drama except for interludes of musical prominence such as Ben Jonson’s court masques (1605–1625), Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1727), Rousseau’s Pygmalion (1770), Diderot’s discussion of fitting prose to music, music’s popularity in underscoring the text of melodrama, Richard Wagner’s thoughts on the unification of the theatrical elements of opera, musical background for early silent films, then TV soap operas, and eventually genuine musicals such as Show Boat, Oklahoma, South Pacific, Gypsy, and West Side Story and now the triumph of the musical revue on Broadway which pretty much eliminates plot and dialogue.

(Stockdale 2009)

Joe’s disdain for the modern Broadway musical aside, there is a very real problem with Joe’s snapshot history for me: it only considers instrumental and sung music. It doesn’t include music’s profound influence in theatre that is neither instrumental nor sung music.

For example, it doesn’t include the prosody of the actors’ dialogue. Prosody is the part of speech that doesn’t use signs or symbols like language does; it involves the rhythms with which the actors speak, the stresses and dynamics, the speech melody. It’s how we tell a question from an exclamation from a command, even when the words spoken are all exactly the same. Consider the many ways of saying the simple statement “I’m going to the store.” It could be filled with the excitement and anticipation of having just won the lottery. It could be filled with frustration and anger, like how I would say it after I discovered for the third time that I was missing a part to repair my leaky faucet. It could simply be filled with indifference because I’m bored and need something to do. Or it could be bursting with the excitement and anticipation of going shopping for that new flat-screen television. It’s a form of music that we as orchestrators cannot ignore.

Beyond the music inherent in the actors’ speech, there are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Why This Book?
• Part I The Nature of Time
• Part II Music = Time Manipulated
• Part III Song = Music + Idea
• Part IV Theatre = Song + Mimesis
• Index