John Harris spoke about writing the music for Mary Stuart the week the play
opened.
What were your starting points?
The director Vicky Featherstone and I had quite early discussions in a café in
Edinburgh. They were very very general at that stage and that’s quite nice – you just
say what you feel about the play.
There was a very obvious trap in the script . . . not a trap, but a very obvious decision
that one could take, in that it could feel very Shakespearian and portentous and a bit
of a period piece if you weren’t careful. You could do the men-in-tights version if you
know what I mean, and I’ve never written men-in-tights music – it’s not actually
something that I think I’d be capable of doing, to be honest! Working with Vicky is
great because she knows that’s not what I do, and I know that’s not what she does.
Her whole thing was that it should be extremely contemporary: that the themes of
modern day terrorism were there and she didn’t really want to shy away from those.
Also the ways that power works and the way that power and religion are intertwined
were important. One of the things that we both felt very strongly was that there was
both a beauty and a terror to the play the whole way through, that both coexisted
almost continuously throughout. That was an incredibly important starting point for
us.
There’s a composer who’s a bit of an obsession of mine called Robert Carver who
lived in Scotland in a similar time to Mary Stuart. He’s this extraordinary High
Renaissance composer, which means he sounds like Palestrina or Lassus or any of
those continental composers of the time or slightly earlier. He writes with very, very
complex polyphony, which means multiple voices all singing at the one time; there
are a lot of intellectual games going on with the score. It’s incredibly intelligent
music.
Carver’s very contemporary in some ways and I was quite keen to use a lot of his
basic ideas, if not his actual music and the actual sounds of it. Of course it does sound
like High Renaissance polyphony and you just can’t get away from that. If that’s the
sound you want, then that’s the sound you’ll get, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted it in
the play. I was keener to take ideas from the way he composes and use those within
what I did.
I can’t see the end from the beginning when I do shows. I am not really one of those
composers that has a toolkit of sounds or instruments or even styles that they bring
along: I tend to take each job as it comes. I suppose people listening may see it
differently, but for me starting a new job is always like starting again from a new
perspective.
Did the other production elements inspire you?
They always do, they always do. I almost can’t start to think what the music’s like
until I’ve seen a set box and until I’ve heard the actors read the script through. I don’t
know what it is about the set design that I picked up on, but in the discussions with
copyright © 2006 National Theatre of Scotland
Vicky we talked a lot about the fact that it’s very modernist and extremely brutal in
some ways: three enormous walls, a vast column and a trap door and that’s it. I quite
like those kinds of set, those very abstract sets, because they are a fairly blank canvas
on which you can paint things.
The set, the music, the light and the actors must all fit together and to some extent
they must also not duplicate. For me, if you create something that basically duplicates
what someone else is doing, if for instance you create a “musicscape”, for want of a
better word, that simply describes the world that the set is describing, then what’s the
point? And the same is true if you just follow and ape what the actors are doing. It’s
something that we found in rehearsals, that if you underscore a scene you say, This is
what the scene is about, or This is the mood of the scene, it doesn’t give the actors any
space at all. So actually what we ended up doing was cutting out a lot of the
atmospheres for the simple reason that it didn’t let the actors do their job. So for me
it’s really important that music finds a dimension that nothing else can do: it describes
something; it brings something to the production that another resource can’t.
You talked about the two themes of beauty and terror as being part of your
initial discussions. Did you work from those ideas?
Yes. I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m quite attracted to this play, because –
compositionally speaking - I’m interested in those two things. You either enhance the
beauty by setting it against its opposite or you enhance the terror by supplying its
opposite. Fear and pleasure; they’re quite primal, they’re quite primitive, they go
straight to our gut instincts. There’s nothing more basic than that. When I delivered
the sound I said to Vicky, “Look, I’m really sorry about this, but I think that for this
I’ve made some of the most horrendous noises I’ve ever made for a show, and also
some of the most beautiful – and I think I’d really like to try and retain both”.
What was your process as a composer?
I really like it when I don’t know what I’m going to do. I try to find materials to start
with, but I’m not totally sure what’s going to happen. I knew that I wanted to have
resonances of15th Century music in there, but I didn’t want them to be explicit, and I
knew I wanted to play with this idea of updating the ancient, so I found an extremely
out of tune harpsichord and went and played some chords on it. I also went out and
found a countertenor, which is also very much of the period. And I went and recorded
an Elizabethan trumpet (a cornetto) which I never used in the end. I also recorded a
bass clarinet as I knew I wanted something rumbly going on, a cor anglais because it
has a kind of oboeish noise, and the organ as well. I went and hunted down these
starting materials and began working with them. I quite like the idea that a sculptor
could go and find a few lumps of wood, and whatever the lump of wood is, it’s going
to tell the sculptor how the sculpture is going to be. It’s much the same with this.
So I went back to Carver and I took two or three things from him: particularly the
theme from his ‘Missa L’Homme Armé’, which is based on a quite well known
mediaeval tune, and I took it pretty much as a straight quote. Carver does odd things,
like he writes in two keys simultaneously – another very contemporary idea. He is
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endlessly shifting between major and minor modes and if you look at the score for
Mary Stuart it also does that. It’s primitive, but it works – facetiously speaking major
equals happy, minor equals sad, like beauty and terror, those two things coming
together to make something new by constantly shifting in juxtaposition to each other.
How did you find out what it was that the play needed in terms of music?
Crikey that’s a really hard question! This sounds like a really strange answer, but in
working out what each cue is going to be you just hear the noises in your head. It’s
almost impossible to intellectualise it. You can guess where the places are going to be,
for instance there are dramatic moments where you need to stick something in – scene
changes are obvious places although not all of them. Knowing where is not so hard,
what is much more a question of gut instinct and a sort of vague idea in your head.
In terms of being in rehearsals, were there any moments that really inspired
you?
It’s absolutely critical to sit there for quite a long time. Just the way that actors are
speaking makes an enormous difference to how you think about the music. To hear
the first read-through and to hear the way they work together with their voices and to
see how they move.
Can you say more about the importance of hearing actors’ voices?
Yeah. I don’t know what it is about the actors’ voices, but the play isn’t there until
they speak. The music and the voices have to work together, even the speed at which
they talk can be incredibly important. For example, they can really give you a feel for
the pace of a cue. Simple technical things like, if you do want to write something that
goes under actors speaking, you don’t write the music at the frequency at which
they’re talking otherwise you can’t hear them! But there is more to it than that. It
really informs the pacing of the music, even the essential nature of it. You can look at
all of the sounds – the show music and the actors’ voices, even their footsteps and
other physical noises – as being part of the whole, and they must function well
together.
Were there any really big challenges in this and how did you overcome them?
I actually have to say I find all writing music for plays pretty challenging and they all
have their individual problems. Because I don’t bring a stock set of stuff, every single
play is equally hellish, it’s this whole thing that I can’t see the end of and I have no
idea what it’s going to be like until it’s done.
I think one of the challenges was that we thought we were going to need a lot of
underscore, and underscore is exceptionally tricky. It’s the difference between film
and theatre, because theatre is a live performance, what you do influences what the
actors do. So if you’re going to write underscore then you’re writing a duet with the
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actors. It’s not like film, it’s quite the reverse – in film the performances are fixed by
the time you’ve got to seeing the final cut and it’s a question of going with that fixed
object. That’s not the case in theatre because the performance someone gives two
weeks before the show opens is often fantastically different from the performance
they give on the opening night and the performance they give on the fourth night is
different from the second night. Those things are very important because the whole
point about theatre is that it’s live. That’s why a fixed, non-living, non-breathing
underscore is such a difficult thing to make work well.
John Harris was interviewed by Naomi Ludlam.
copyright © 2006 National Theatre of Scotland