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

Let Us Be Beaten If We Cannot Fight

This is the penultimate scene in Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 6), and the scene is so short that I've included the entirety of its dialog within this composition. It's a short conversation between Malcolm, Macduff, and Siward; Malcolm's army has just reached Dunsinane and he's about (spoiler alert!) meet Macbeth in battle.

I used A.I. to generate a video based on these few, brief lines and it's not half bad. It's not great, but I think it gives a sense of what an adaptation of Macbeth set to this music could look like. Some of it is totally weird. Note at around 1:50 that the Death Star seems to hover in the sky.

Stars, Hide Your Fires

Instead of typical music video, I created a work of art to accompany this piece. The piece pulls random images from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art that reflect Macbeth's inner turmoil.

What I love about this artwork is that some of the imagery seems spot on--pictures of assassins or of witches gathering on the heath. But other images seem to make no sense at all, and those are ones I think I like the best.

The video here just gives you a small sample of the artwork. To truly experience it in all its glory, click the button.

STARS, HIDE YOUR FIRES

When the Hurly-Burly's Done

When my random number generator picked the opening scene of Macbeth just after it had picked the closing scene of the play ("The Time is Free," below), I figured there must be a ghost in the machine. Or, at the very least, a witch.

Macbeth famously opens with the three witches (aka "weird sisters") talking about when they'll next get together. Here's the whole scene:

FIRST WITCH When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

SECOND WITCH When the hurly-burly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won.

THIRD WITCH That will be ere the set of sun.

FIRST WITCH Where the place?

SECOND WITCH Upon the heath.

THIRD WITCH There to meet with Macbeth.

FIRST WITCH I come, Graymalkin.

SECOND WITCH Paddock calls.

THIRD WITCH Anon.

ALL Fair is foul, and foul is fair; Hover through the fog and filthy air.

It takes less time to read this dialog than it takes to listen to my piece, but I'm sure that's going to be a running theme in a play that is composed of so many short vignettes.

The first thing you'll notice about this music is how upbeat it sounds. That's on purpose. The witches are often depicted as sinister, dark figures, but they are some of the only characters to come out of the play unscathed. They are simply soothsayers--their prophecy kicks of the action of the tragedy, but they play no other role and (in my mind, at least) just go back about their witchy business. Much ink has been spilled over the years about the significance of the drunken porter in Act 2, Scene 3 as one of the only moments of levity in the play. But I'd like to think the witches bring an aspect of playfulness to the table, as well.

I fed the text of Act 1, Scene 1, into the A.I. video generator and this is what it spat out. Not bad. Not good, mind you, but not terrible. Enjoy.

The Time is Free

Interestingly, when I had a random number generator pick the next two scenes from Macbeth that I would score, the two it picked were Act 5, Scene 8--the last scene in the play--followed by Act 1, Scene 1, the drama's opening ("When the Hurly-Burly's Done," above).

"The time is free" is one of the final lines in the play, spoken by Macduff. Having (spoiler alert!) killed Macbeth, Macduff is hailing Malcolm as the new king and commenting that not only is the kingdom now free of Macbeth's tyranny, but that time itself has returned to its normal parameters. It is as if to say that all the action that has happened--from the opening scene with the witches to this point--has happened in a parallel timeline where nothing seems coherent or real. Macbeth's Scotland is the upside-down.

(You can see why I chose Macbeth in this present moment?)

This piece will be the finale of the dance that will ultimately be choreographed to the entire Macbeth soundscape. The music's melancholy nature reflects that while things may go back to some semblance of normalcy at this point, many lives have been lost along the way. It is a song of mourning.

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