Emmy-winning Paul Englishby (as English as his surname suggests) is one of the Royal Shakespeare Company's most experienced composers. One recent pair of productions are the two parts of Henry IV that is the current flagship production of the RSC season (on stage, starring Sir Anthony Sher, and in cinemas).
Englishby spoke to a curious James Inverne about the business of composing for the stage.
Classicalite: Should there always be a sense of drama in music? Whether or not one is composing for a stage show.
Paul Englishby: Yes, in a word. Music is ephemeral, it's abstract, it doesn't mean anything literally in and of itself. I love that and it's very freeing. But it also impels one to impose a dramatic structure in your thinking, and ways in which to create an environment where you can create drama, tension, release. That's how I approach it.
Cl: Can the music ever be taken literally? What if a composer has a specific meaning in mind?
PE: The great era of the tone-poems spring to mind, and the tone-poem is a very useful compositional tool to get you started It's a bit like setting words, in some ways, and easier than starting from simply a blank piece of manuscript paper. Immediately you have a sort of diving-off point. But once you start, what you create is something absolutely 'other' which has its own identity. It doesn't mean anything apart from itself, even though it has sprung from some inspiration. You create a little world every time, whatever it has been inspired by. And it's quite interesting for an audience to know where something has come from, but never essential. If it becomes essential then the music isn't doing its job.
In the 1980's I went through a period where I used to go ad hear the London Sinfonietta a huge amount - they were doing a lot of new music that relied a lot on the programme notes, because the composers were inventing a completely new language each time, sometimes using extra-musical matrices and so on. Sometimes the pieces were far more interesting from the programme notes than when you actually heard them, because you could relate the two sides as an intellectual exercise but not as a drama one could be swept along by or genuinely feel.
Cl: How did you get into theatre writing?
PE: I've always done a wide variety of things, growing up in Lancashire I played with the county big-band, also was music director for the local amateur dramatics society, I wrote pieces for the local wind band and the choir and played for dance classes! Later at Goldsmith's College in London it was a hotbed of creative talent, where you could get together in a creative way with people from different departments. I started an orchestra there with people from different artistic disciplines and we ranged from light music to cutting-edge contemporary stuff. So I've always had a very functional approach to music and its different incarnations.
Cl: Bach, Grieg, Mozart, many great composers wrote for function.
PE: It is absolutely very important to stay in touch with a living, breathing audience. You need to know that you can get across the sense of dramatic story that you're inventing and have it land. Working across different disciplines within the arts puts you in touch with that audience. And you realise too that audiences want to like what you write, they are there with open ears and open hearts and are on your side. Keeping them in mind is a much better approach than writing entirely for yourself.
Cl: Unlike many composers, in your position you have the benefit of very long theatrical runs. Do you change your scores as those runs progress?
PE: It seems a no-brainer that if you have a chance to show an audience your music and then change it accordingly, then one should do it. In the concert hall, it's nearly unheard of for a composer to keep changing small details - the score is like the gospel, most of the time! But in theatre if you see things aren't quite landing you keep working. It's not about dumbing-down, it's about clarity and telling the story. It's even more changeable in film sessions, where you're really changing things on the hood to clarify things like dynamics and orchestration. Andre Previn has a great account of this kind of work in his book No Minor Chords, a great read.
Cl: When it comes to the specifics of your writing process for plays, do you use techniques from concert music and opera?
PE: Ways to approach it vary each time. For the RSC Henry IV plays we're doing now, Part One especially is such a huge tapestry of different tonal settings - you have the guilt-ridden Henry IV scenes interspersed with hilarious tavern scenes, then we even end up in Wales at one point. Which is all great and you come out feeling as though you've been on this epic journey and it's important to embrace that in the music.
So I have very different kinds of music for the different settings. When we did Richard II I had more of a poetic thread woven through the show, but this one wants to lurch around tonally and so I play with that. A lot of it has to do with the forces and instruments we use at different times.
The director Greg Doran wanted a feeling of an ancient rite happening at the beginning when we first see Henry IV; he mentioned voices, threw a few words at me that might inspire something, and so I brought in a bass singer and had bells at the beginning and created an austere, religious kind of opening. And then, of course, as soon as you have a tavern you want a band playing, and I've got a piper and a lutenist. I wrote a little songbook of tunes, and the three players in the tavern band learnt these, six or seven of them. I booked players who come from that kind of folk tradition, so it's a living thing, it's not pastiche or period, I was just writing tunes and they made them their own. They then played them back to me I tinkered with them.
Cl: But to make it all cohere, do you use themes or leitmotifs?
PE: Sometimes I'll use a thematic approach rigorously to depict character, and that will depend on the characters' journeys through the play. I approached Prince Hal thematically in the sense that he does have a restorative journey through the two plays so he has a theme, which develops as the plays go on. So there's an interesting way to approach that thematically. Falstaff, on the other hand, doesn't change, though he says he will! So for him you'd have to stick the same themes in for every time he appears. We have to be careful emotionally as well - you have to watch whether if the actor is doing an emotional job then you don't need to double it or duplicate it. Sometimes you want to reflect an emotional thread, give the audience a sense that there's more there - so Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet play and bluster in the tavern, but we wanted to highlight as an undercurrent that they actually do love each other, so I put a little low flute under there as a useful dramatic layer.
Cl: How much do you include silence, or at least a sense of space around the music?
PE: I do encourage directors not to use music sometimes. In film or TV they often use a temporary score while editing, something else of yours or something from other films, and there's a tendency at that stage for an overuse of music. But if the actors and the setting are doing the job, why put aural wallpaper in there?
And yes, space around the music can be vital. I really grappled with one music cue at the end of Henry IV, Part Two where Falstaff gets rejected by Hal (now Henry V) and it's a shocking moment. The dilemma for me was whether to have the cue after the rejection, and you're laying down a sense of a shocking, devastated sadness, or to move it earlier, over the end of Henry's speech but then to stop the music at the end of that speech, leaving a chasm of loneliness. Those things can make a huge difference.
When I used to play in pubs, one way to focus a semi-attentive audience would be to play more quietly, to just tickle the notes. You'd find that people were suddenly listening. And there's a cue in Henry IV, Part Two where the king talks about sleep - we've just come out of a tavern scene so I've done a huge diminuendo and by the end of the cue he's whispering the speech and bringing everything down and down and down, until you can sense a really actively-listening audience. At least, I don't know if it works but that's what I'm trying to do!
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