Every time I sit down to write one of these blurbs, I'm tempted to start by saying, "One of the most famous scenes in Macbeth...." But this one really *IS* one of the most famous scenes in the play -- Act 5, Scene 1 -- where Lady Macbeth is talking in her sleep. While the most famous phrase in the scene is surely Lady Macbeth saying, "Out, damned spot, out, I say!" I chose to call this piece "Hell is Murky" because I feel that better captures Lady Macbeth's inner turmoil.
It's a waltz, which seemed like a somnambular time signature, and while it's primarily written in the key of Bb minor, it modulates back and forth occasionally between Am and Bb minor. I wasn't going to necessarily use leitmotif when I started working on this project, but writing a full-length drama musically (and out of order!!) can be challenging, so that Am/Bb shift is, I think, going to be Lady Macbeth's signature.
The images are all public domain photos or paintings of Lady Macbeth. Some are famous -- like the Delacroix and John Singer Sargent -- and others were new to me.
Macbeth's most famous soliloquy--"Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" (Act 5, Scene 5)--proved to be a daunting challenge for me, musically. How can you take some of the most famous words in the history of English-language theater and reduce them to melody? I was stymied when me random-scene generator picked this as the next installment in my ongoing attempt to write a Macbeth-inspired contemporary ballet.*
But the answer was staring me in the face: just use the words.
The piece begins with multiple overlapping voices repeating the soliloquy's opening line: "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow." Because Macbeth is contemplating desolate inevitability of death, the music's palette matches his somber frame of mind. I was hoping that the the overall atmosphere would be one of resignation rather than rage, embodying the bleak reflection that each tomorrow only extends the inevitable end.
* to recap: I'm writing a movement for every scene in Macbeth, but I'm following a sort of John Cage-esque formula of letting the computer pick a scene at random and then writing whatever comes out of the hat (so to speak).
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.
As per my usual m.o., 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 the 1:50 mark that the Death Star seems to hover in the sky.
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.
"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.
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