Composing Music for Slung Low Theatre

Slung Low makes installation and site-specific theatre. It’s anything but conventional, but its primary purpose is ‘a good story, well told’. Whenever music will enable us to do this, that’s when we use it.

Posts about Scoring Slung Low Shows:

Scoring the Song: Emergency Story Penguin

New Album Release: Emergency Story Penguin

Listen to the Latest 15 Minutes Live

Listen to 15 Minutes Live

How This Introvert Learned to Love Being In A Live Performance – 15 Minutes Live 2016

The Good Book

The Good Book – Film and Single Release

The Good Book – Album Release

Happy New Year 2017, The Year That Hull Floods!

Starting the Score – Flood, Part 3: ‘To The Sea’

Flood Part 3: To The Sea Goes Into Post-Production

Flood Part 3 on the BBC and New Single Released

The Themes of Flood

Flood

Two New Shows In Leeds and a Chattering Monkey (about ‘It Happened Here’)

National Commemoration of the Battle of The Somme

Camelot: The Shining City

59 Minutes To Save Christmas at Z-Arts in Manchester

What I’ve Learned (so far) from Scoring ‘The White Whale’: Part 1

What I’ve Learned (so far) from Scoring ‘The White Whale’: Part 2

What I’ve Learned (so far) from Scoring ‘The White Whale’: Part 3

How To Write Shed Loads of Music in Very Little Time (about ‘Anthology’)

New Album Release: Anthology

New Album Release: Pandemic

New Album Release: Converging Paths

On The Home Stretch (about ‘Converging Paths’)

The Music’s Not Finished ‘Til It’s Finished (about Pandemic and Converging Paths)

Working With Real Live Musicians (more Converging Paths)

11 Lessons I Learned from Scoring Mapping The City

Trailer Podcast: Beyond The Front Line

Beyond The Front Line – Trailer for a Slunglow Show

Beyond The Front Line – Up and Running

Patience and Planning Contingencies (about ‘Beyond The Front Line)

A Week of Research and Development with Slunglow (for what would become the show ‘Beyond The Front Line’

Writing Music for Theatre – Helium

There are more, but those are the main ones.


The general techniques of scoring theatre, specifically Slung Low’s shows, and how similar they are to game music:


Lost Post

Originally this post linked to a blog I’d written for one of Slung Low’s newly minted sites, back in 2009. The post no longer exists and I can’t for the life of me find a copy anywhere on my harddrive, though I suspect I may have changed a few of my ideas in the intervening 12 years.

In the meantime, since the post was written (and subsequently lost to the mists of time), I’ve scored many of Slung Low’s theatrics and written about the techniques, technologies and experiences involved in scoring new, immersive, outdoor, interactive theatre.

So, back to that post that I lost… here’s an outline of some of the research I undertook to make sure I wasn’t either repeating the obvious or making assumptions about how original my ideas were! Here they are below, for posterity.

I found an online transcript of Kurt Weill’s ‘The Alchemy of Music’, a little academic but a good read nonetheless. It’s quite dated now (written in 1936) but it really does situate the use of music in theatre in its historical context. If you like that sort of thing.

From Paul Rekk on Que J’ai Reve: Plaza Suite/Trust

From the third paragraph down he covers:

  • the use of pop music and referentialism,
  • the difference of interpretation the audience may have from the director in using well-known music
  • using music as ‘filler’ for set changes without it having relevant meaning to the play itself,
  • aesthetics and subjectivism.

He also references Greg Allen and his list of 25 Rules for Creating Good Theater on the Neo-Futurists’ site, citing especially:

Rule #21: Include music. There’s nothing better for introducing new music to people than having it accompany stage action. Take the opportunity to re-contextualize known music through performance.”

@nickkeenan also pointed out to me his own post on The Generation Gap:

What I’ve noticed about the older generation of theater artists (and audiences) is that they don’t warm up as quickly to things like sonic underscore or more than a sprinkle of sound effects in a show – while on the other side of the coin, younger artists spread it on thick, often using it just for the sake of using it, and younger audiences lose focus if words are not spoken over an underscore.

I can certainly sympathise with the latter statement. I love dialogue with underscore, but I also love it more when the underscore is preceded by silence, which really increases the music’s power to focus the audience on the dialogue.

My shout-out on Twitter even led to the discussion of the lack of writing on this topic… which then led to a post about Intelligent Sound Design on Theatre Gnosis.

And it’s beautiful – a practical and aesthetic discussion, in the form of blank verse.

3 Replies to “Composing Music for Slung Low Theatre”

  1. Shucks, thanks for the compliment!

    Do you find that doing sight specific work changes the narrative rules in any fundamental way? Where do you begin when you work that way?

    1. Good question! It would be great to know what you consider the narrative rules to be when not working on site-specific work in order to answer 🙂

  2. Pingback: Questioning a Design Aesthetic, 2000 - 2005 | Theater For The Future

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