Macbeth

WHY MACBETH?

Following the success of my dance piece On the Nile, I’m starting a new project—a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that will also ultimately become an evening-length, narrative dance to be performed sometime in early 2026.

In the meantime, instead of writing the entire piece and then releasing an album, I’ve decided to release one or two pieces every couple of weeks. I have a tendency to compose in fits and starts, so this will keep my momentum going and give you a peek into my creative process.

Why Macbeth?

Not only is it one of Shakespeare’s greatest and most performed plays, I think I’m just drawn in our present moment to stories where the megalomaniacal tyrant gets what’s coming to him. But there’s more to it than that. For one, I’m allegedly a direct descendant of King Duncan and his son, Malcolm—both key characters in the play—and that link, however tenuous, also informs my desire to explore the story through my music. Plus, I like witches.

I’m using Shakespeare’s Macbeth as my primary text, but not my only one. Shakespeare based the play on Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, a pseudo-historical account of the British Isles, which I’m also reading (or, more accurately, trying to read). I’m also consulting historical and archaeological reports written by those who’ve been trying for centuries to untangle the myth of Macbeth from the real person, in addition to consulting a raft of Shakespeare scholarship. I’m having a lot of flashbacks to my undergrad days at NYU, sitting up on the top floors of Bobst Library, immersed in back issues of Shakespeare Quarterly.

If you are here to listen to these pieces in the order in which they connect to play, I'm afraid you are out of luck. That's because I’m not writing the project in chronological order.

Under the influence of Brian Eno and John Cage, I am allowing random chance to dictate the order in which these pieces are both composed and released. There are twenty-eight scenes in Macbeth, and rather than simply go through them start to finish, I use a random number generator to pick a number between 1 and 35. If the number is between 1 and 28, I write the piece based on whatever scene in the play corresponds to that number. If the number is 29 or above, I write an extra-textual piece (such as "Two Sisters," the first piece released in this project.)

This randomized method is to keep me from falling into too many patterns—I don’t want any piece to necessarily relate directly to the one before it or after it, and writing them out of order serves that purpose. Plus, life is random. We impose order on it, but it’s more chaos than anything else, and Macbeth is all about the chaos. Thus, I am writing chaotically.

I will be the first to admit that this whole project is a little weird. But they are the weird sisters, right?

MACBETH: THE DANCE

Watch this space for information on the 2026 premiere of this piece as a full-length evening of modern ballet.

stream the videos here

Upon This Bank and Shoal of Time

We'll get to the A.I. "slop" that makes up this video at the end of this comment. But first, where does this fall in Macbeth? This line is taken from one of Macbeth's most famous soliloquies, in Act 1, Scene 7, where he says:

"If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well

It were done quickly. If th’ assassination

Could trammel up the consequence and catch

With his surcease success, that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,

We’d jump the life to come."

Macbeth is cognizant of the consequences of his plan (spoiler alert) to kill King Duncan. He realizes that if he kills Duncan and receives the reward promised to him by the three witches/weird sisters, he will likely be sacrificing his eternal reward in heaven. Is that a chance he's willing to take?

The source music for this piece isn't Scottish--it's Irish, though the connections between the Gaels and Scots are well documented. It's a mournful traditional tune called "Sad Is My Fate." I've taken the primary melodic line and turned it into a round that keeps getting faster and faster and faster, thus mirroring Macbeth's growing anxiety. The piece starts at 30 beats per minute and by the time it's over, we're cooking at 180 bpm. (I am imagining this as a solo dance for Macbeth whenever the choreographed component of this project get underway, where there dance repeats the same phrases in an ever-faster, ever-more-chaotic manner.)

As for the video: I love putting in passages from Macbeth and telling the A.I. algorithms to create abstract imagery based on them. A.I. really struggles with the idea of abstraction--hence every image in this has the sea and a human figure. It's pretty terrible stuff--which is why I love it.

Whither Should I Fly?

From "The Macbeth Sketchbook, No. 1" by James Nevius In Act 4, Scene 2 of Macbeth, Lady Macduff is confused and angry over her husband’s sudden flight to England, feeling he has abandoned his family. She speaks with her young son, and their conversation is briefly light-hearted before a messenger warns them to flee. Moments later, Macbeth’s hired murderers arrive. As they attack, Lady Macduff cries out, "Whither should I fly?"—a desperate question revealing her sense of helplessness. She and her son are brutally murdered, marking a turning point as Macbeth’s tyranny deepens and the violence extends to innocent lives.

Will All Great Neptune's Ocean Wash This Blood Clean from my Hand?

From "Macbeth Sketchbook, No. 1" by James Nevius In Act 2, Scene 2 of Macbeth, Macbeth returns to Lady Macbeth after murdering King Duncan, deeply shaken and overwhelmed with guilt. He is disturbed by his inability to say "Amen" after hearing someone pray and fixates on the blood on his hands, asking, "Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?"—a reflection of his belief that nothing can cleanse him of the crime.

Two Sisters

From "Macbeth Sketchbook No. 1." by James Nevius In Shakespeare's Macbeth, there are three witches—aka the “weird sisters”—who kick off the play and give Macbeth the prophecy that he will be king of Scotland. But what if at some unknown point before the action of Macbeth begins, there were only two weird sisters? What if the third one hadn’t joined them yet? That’s the basis of this 54-second ditty. There’s a heck of a lot of Brian Eno and John Cage in the DNA of this entire project and there will be a lot of music based on other music. This is one of those pieces. What you are hearing is my arrangement (by which I mean severe rearrangement) of a Scottish folks song, “Two Heads Are Better Than Yin” (Two Heads are Better Than One).

The MACBETH SKETCHBOOKS

Stream songs from my new, ongoing Macbeth project