This piece is a bit of a throwaway (can I admit that?) that probably won't make it into the final dance. That's because the scene it is meant to represent (Act 3, Scene 5), where the three witches meet Hecate, is almost certainly not written by Shakespeare. It adds nothing to plot and, in fact, slows the action down. I can understand why it was added -- the witches don't have a lot to do after their initial prophecies -- so I'm sure some well-meaning dramatists wanted to both gives these actors more time on stage and amp up the "spooky" factor at the same time. But I think it won't make the cut in my production. We'll see.
The witches leitmotif (which appears in a number of other pieces I've written so far) is stolen from Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. So, what I chose to do here is simply take a famous passage from that piece and turn it into a sort of psychotic round. The subtitle of this piece is "Variations on Bach" but it might as well be "Fun with MIDI."
I've been experimenting with reimagining the play as a film noir, and this piece of music (Act 3, Scene 6 of the play) dovetails nicely with that aesthetic.
In this scene, Lennox and another lord have a whispered conversation concerning the rumors (spoiler alert!) that Macbeth is behind the murders of Duncan and Banquo. What they do know is that Malcolm has fled to England and Macduff has gone to rally support against the tyrant. Scotland is now a land of fear and paranoia and Lennox delivers his bitter warning--“Men must not walk too late alone”--as a warning to his fellows in this nascent resistance.
I’ve storyboarded the scene, with a little A.I. help, as it might appear in a 1920s or ’30s noir film. Listen to the whole MACBETH project at the link in my bio.
#Scotland #Shakespeare #Macbeth #FilmNoir#Tyranny #History #Inverness
When I wrote this movement--many weeks ago, I work about two months ahead of each release--I was clearly in a Dada frame of mind. As you know if you've watched other videos in this series, I often create them by feeding lines from Shakespeare into software that will generate A.I. content or pick sometime wildly inappropriate stock photography. The result is sometimes hilarious, often disquieting, and frequently absurd. In other words: Dada.
I was having trouble approaching this scene with the three witches (aka weird sisters). The lines are so famous as to have become cliché. How does an artistic interpreter fight against the audience's foreknowledge of the subject? In this case, by cutting the words up at random and having the three witches deliver them as an experimental poem.
Uh...Enjoy?
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.
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.
In Act 5, Scene 2, of Macbeth, the Scottish nobles Menteith, Caithness, Angus, and Lennox rally their forces near Birnam Wood to confront Macbeth. They describe him as a diseased ruler, “some say he’s mad; others that lesser hate him do call it valiant fury,” acknowledging that even those who remain with him are compelled by fear, not loyalty. Caithness declares that their cause is to cleanse Scotland, to “dew the sovereign flower and drown the weeds,” with Malcolm as the rightful heir. They resolve to march on Dunsinane, presenting Macbeth’s tyranny as a sickness that can only be cured by his removal.
The track is tonally chaotic. The arpeggios on the synthesizer are purposefully out of sync with the rest of the instruments, providing an underlying sense of unease. (The arpeggio pattern is also a bit of a holdover from the first draft of this movement, which was written in 5/2, which I abandoned once I realized that was untenable.)
The drum beat is martial, as befits the subject matter, and at the very end you’ll hear a timpani come in to join the snare -- that’s a nod to the drum pattern in Gustav Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War” from “The Planets.” The video features abstract, Twombly-esque images based on the narrative arc of the scene in Macbeth.
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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