From Shakespeare, Music and Performance
Music has been an essential constituent of
Shakespeare’s plays from the sixteenth century to the present day, yet its
significance has often been overlooked or underplayed in the history of
Shakespearean performance. Providing a long chronological sweep, a new collection of essays –
Shakespeare, Music and Performance (ed. Bill Barclay and David Lindley)– traces the different uses of music in the theatre and in
film from the days of the first Globe and Blackfriars to contemporary, global
productions.
What can you expect from the book? Have a read of some snippets here.
From
David Lindley and Bill Barclay’s Introduction:
Music has played a vital part in theatrical entertainment since the very beginnings of drama. The theatre of Shakespeare’s own time was no exception, and music has continued to make a highly significant contribution to the performance of his plays up to the present day. Exactly what sort of contribution, however, has been dictated by a variety of factors: by the number and range of musicians available; by the changing architecture of theatres themselves; by the historical evolution of musical styles; by the changing expectations of audiences; and latterly through the influences of film and television, and of sophisticated technology. It is the aim of this collection of essays to explore the nature and implication of these developments from the time of the plays’ composition through to contemporary performance both on film and in the theatre.
From William Lyons’ Theatre Bands and Their Music in Shakespeare’s London:
Introduction
With the rise in popularity of public and private theatres in Early Modern London, the opportunity arose for professional musicians to find employment in many of the bespoke playhouses that sprung up on both sides of the Thames. This essay considers the various styles and sound worlds incorporated into plays, and in particular who actually played the music. When musicians could be afforded, it was important to engage the very best available and in early seventeenth-century London the principal professional band outside of the royal court was the civic ‘waits’, a type of band whose skill and versatility were well attested. Whilst it is clear that waits were far from being the only musicians to be employed in theatres, I will suggest that it was the waits who contributed more significantly to the high standards of playing remarked upon by visitors to London’s theatres than hitherto recognised.
Waits were employed principally to provide music for civic ceremony and procession, particularly attending the Lord Mayor on such occasions. In a sense, the waits provided a ‘civic soundtrack that distinguished town from country’. This aural emblem of the city came with considerable perks; the official status achieved by being accepted into the waits (usually after a lengthy apprenticeship, period of probation and then interview) meant that the musician could wear the civic livery, which signified an official and elevated social status. They were also allowed to accept non-civic employment. As highly skilled and usually multi-instrumental professionals, the waits were able to provide a variety of sonorities and volume depending on what was required of them.
Theatre Bands and Their Music
In his dedication to The First Booke of Consort Lessons Thomas Morley refers to the ‘ancient custome’ of maintaining a waits band ‘to adorne your honors favors, Feasts and Solemne meetings’ and ‘your Lordships Wayts’, these ‘excellent and expert Musitians’ with their ‘carefull and skilfull handling’ are recommended the publication as much as is their employer, the Lord Mayor of London. Morley goes on to suggest that the waits can improve upon the arrangements ‘by their melodious additions’ and hints of a second volume of pieces ‘to give them more testimonie of my love towards them.’ Here is a publication that is unique, firstly for its precise specification of instruments – the ‘Treble Lute, the Pandora, the Citterne, the Base-Violl, the flute, and the Treble-Violl’, and in its recommendation to a specific group of musicians. What Morley fails to reveal, however, is the purpose of this compilation of twenty-three arrangements or why he recommends them to the waits in particular. The assumption has to be that these pieces reflect a repertoire of an already-established ensemble and one that was, at least in the case of Morley’s collection, particularly associated with the waits.
From Bill Barclay’s Music in the 2012 Globe-to-Globe Festival
In the Olympic summer of London 2012, Shakespeare’s Globe hosted thirty-seven theatre companies from around the world to perform a different play by Shakespeare in their own language, producing an unprecedented six-week complete works cycle beneath the halos of the Cultural Olympiad. The Globe-to-Globe Festival produced a magnetic parade of wonders, each humming with resonance along London’s ethnic fault lines, leaving Bankside daily awash in linguistic rarities, cultural reunions, political lightning rods, and nationalistic celebrations. The festival was also a maelstrom of musical industry featuring rarely heard ethnic genres, instruments, and songs that dynamically served Shakespeare’s stories in fresh and integrative ways. In the deliberate absence of a common tongue, music’s role as universal emotional storyteller has rarely seemed more relevant to international communication and understanding.
The strands of discourse that swirled about the festival were many and occasionally charged; the Cultural Olympiad’s World Shakespeare Festival echoed the Olympics in further welcoming the plurality of the world to share a stage in all its harmonies and controversies, disappointing in neither. The particular glory of London’s hosting was the amplification of its own immense multiculturalism, and for one spotlit summer it held itself up to nature as the leading representative microcosm that it is. The structure of the festival was designed somewhat to enhance this effect; visiting companies were partly selected by what Festival Director Tom Bird called ‘London languages’: those that are widely spoken throughout the city. Each company varyingly brought out fellow speakers from the woodwork in a constant linguistic revolve ensuring that everyone played to crowds who both could and could not understand what was being spoken. A geographic balance was further sought to represent productions from six continents as equally as possible.
Various conventions affected everyone: subtitling (though only of short scene synopses) in two boxes far stage right and left; an allowance of recorded music if they wished – a rare embrace of amplified audio at that time in the Globe; access to Globe Associates of Voice, Text, and Movement; and a mere three days to rehearse once and perform twice. They all performed rain or shine, saw as many other productions as they could, socialized at the bar, and fully soaked in their extraordinary moment. There is a densely littered trail of press and publications detailing each production and its unique context in the festival, but although the current state of international Shakespeare performance was (through the Globe darkly) on acrobatic display, few writers have surveyed the festival as a whole.
In freely comparing the various musical approaches at play, it feels just barely possible to glimpse the state of music in Shakespeare internationally – from 1991, the birth of its oldest production, to those newly produced for the festival twenty years later. My method was to review the entire archive (I had seen sixteen of the thirty-eight shows live), and catalogue each production by certain metrics of musical approach: number of musicians, recorded music or live, musical genre, musicians’ positions onstage, and whether the production predated the festival. I particularly noted scores comprised of traditional musical styles native to their respective countries, as well as freely adapted productions that brought music into moments in the plays that typically go without. Adaptation was the most common sponsor of musical ingenuity; often the greater the freedom taken in translation, the more radical the production’s reconceptualisation of the story. In each instance these reforged versions left fresh creative spaces inviting music to assert itself and take a more substantial role in the narrative.
Those curious to see or relive the immense cultural exchange that took part in the early summer of 2012 have several options that all contributed to this chapter. There are first and foremost the productions themselves available on the Globe’s online Globe Player. There is the informative collection of essays entitled Shakespeare Beyond English; A Global Experiment (Cambridge), edited by Susan Bennett and Christie Carson. Finally there is a host of online reviews, features, and interviews chronicling Globe-to-Globe’s crowning of the World Shakespeare Festival and discussing the many ethnic pockets of London that resonated with it. As an introduction to the field, the thirty-eight productions can be roughly grouped into five families of musical approach. First, there are the through-composed productions that relied on music practically throughout, including Isango Ensemble’s operatic Venus and Adonis from Cape Town, Deafinitely Theatre Company’s Love’s Labours Lost in British Sign Language, and Q Brothers’ Hip-hop Othello from Chicago. Second are productions with an incidental musical score directly inspired by traditions native to their company’s countries: the Māori Troilus and Cressida, South Korean A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Gujarat All’s Well That Ends Well, Henry IV pt 1 from Mexico City, the Armenian King John, and the Globe’s own Henry V. A third category comprises productions that used only recorded sound and were mostly built for indoor theatre runs at home: Vakhtangov Theatre’s Measure for Measure, the Italian Julius Caesar, German Timon of Athens, Polish Macbeth, Palestinian Richard II, and director Eimuntas Nekrošius’ iconic Hamlet from Lithuania (on tour since 1997). The fourth are productions that featured strikingly little sound and music at all including the Kenyan Merry Wives of Windsor, Argentine Henry IV pt II, and South Sudan’s Cymbeline. A fifth category includes productions that for exciting reasons fail to sit naturally in any of the former groupings: the exiled Belarus Free Theatre’s King Lear and Grupo Galpão’s circus-inspired Romeo & Juliet from Brazil.
Shakespeare, Music and Performance (Cambridge University Press) is now available to buy.
Watch filmed Globe stage productions on Globe Player.