The MACBETH SKETCHBOOKS

Following the success of my dance piece On the Nile, I launched a new project—a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that will also ultimately become an evening-length, narrative dance and/or noir staging to be performed sometime in 2027,

Instead of writing the entire piece and then releasing an album, I decided to release one or two pieces every couple of weeks. I have a tendency to compose in fits and starts, so this was designed to keep my momentum going and give my audience a peek into my creative process. As the works were being written, I released them under the title Macbeth Sketchbook No. 1 and Macbeth Sketchbook No. 2. Once the project was finished, I rejiggered it a bit (excising some tracks and repurposing others) and released it Sound+Fury: A Macbeth Soundtrack in two volumes.

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 used 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 also consulted (or, more properly, consulted people who'd read it). I likewise turned to everything from 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 had 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.) 

Under the influence of Brian Eno and John Cage, I allowed random chance to dictate the order in which these pieces were both composed and released. There are twenty-eight scenes in Macbeth,  and rather than simply go through them start to finish, I used a random number generator to pick the next scene in the play I would tackle. This randomized method kept me from falling into too many patterns—I didn't want any piece to necessarily relate directly to the one before it or after it, and writing them out of order served 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 write chaotically.

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

You can read more about the method behind my madness on my blog at jamesnevius.substack.com.