“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,” (Barclay, 2017)
What was your Key Learning Point?
Whilst working on this performance, it was interesting to see how music can be interwoven with physical movement. My focus for our piece was to collate all the music into one place. To do this I chose to compose the music myself using MuseScore as it would be easier to write the music to fit what we wanted for the piece than to find music that worked for the performance.
Whilst researching the use of music within theatrical performance I discovered that music could be an integral part of many performances as it can be used to establish an atmosphere and to build tension within the performance.
Whilst many people tend not to notice music during performances, it can have an enormous impact on the overall performance. Whether the music is recorded or live it can still have an influence on the performance. (Chan, no date)
This became true in our performance. We chose to use physical theatre for our piece and not to use loads of speech. For this reason, music became highly important to our performance. I began the composition of our final score early on in the rehearsal process to ensure that there was enough time to finish it. Each scene of our piece had a different atmosphere and therefore, each section of the music needed to portray a different atmosphere. The choice of instrumentation for the piece was important as the instruments can change the overall sound of the music and the atmosphere it creates.
“The term expressionism was originally used to designate a modernist movement in German painting that arose in the late 1900’s and early 1910’s and soon transformed German music, poetry, theatre, and film as well.” (Gagne, 2012)
Here are some examples of the music I composed for our final performance:
The following image shows some the original ideas I had for the music for our piece:
Whilst composing the score for the performance, I did some research into expressionist music to fit with the expression movement we chose to use. One thing I researched was the characteristics of expressionist music, such as: high levels of dissonance, extreme contrasts of dynamics and constantly changing textures. http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/music/music_20th_century/schoenberg1.shtml
I also found some examples of expressionist rhythms that are shown in the image below.
I also found some examples of expressionist rhythms that are shown in the image below.
The Beast and I 