Beyond The Front Line, the Slung Low promenade show, is now playing at the Lowry in Salford until next weekend (17th Oct).
Tonight is Press Night. Yikes!
Delegating
This show has been a lesson in delegation for me, more so than any of the other projects I’ve ever worked on, simply by being so immense. It’s epic. It wasn’t humanly possible for me to record and make all of the sound design and music for a show this size.
I’ve had varying degrees of success in the past delegating responsibilities. It’s a balancing act between time and money, skill and enthusiasm:
- Is there enough money to pay that someone else? More often than not, you get what you pay for: the bigger the budget, the stronger the candidate you can afford and the more likely the project will be completed within timescale to the correct standard.
- If the budget is tight (or even non-existent), does the job have enough intrinsic value in and of itself to give value to this hypothetical someone else?
- And, if this is the case, is there the time to allow someone else who is less experienced but still keen enough to potentially get it wrong and have more attempts at it?
Sometimes it doesn’t work out… but sometimes it does, as it did on this project! W00t! 🙂
A Different Composing Process
The main task that took up the bulk of my time was composing and producing the Requiem for Beyond The Front Line.
Normally I compose music on the sequencing programme Logic 8. Sample libraries and sound design tools do their work and I’ll end up with a finished piece, created solely on Mac Pro.
Composing the Requiem was a completely different process. For starters, we knew from the beginning of the project that we wanted to record a real live choir singing real live latin words. That human element was very important to the themes of the show.
So I started the composition process instead… with dots and lines and lyrics. The way I used to work back in the good ol’ days of the 1990’s! The programme I used, Sibelius, though it could play back the notes, couldn’t sing the actual words for me, and had a tough time playing from my preferred instrumental sampler, so the sounds were pretty basic and not terribly inspiring.
I had to ‘hear’ the music in my head so much more during this process. Once a movement was finished (there were five in all for this ‘mini’ Requiem), I’d export a midi file over to Logic to create a mockup for the director and any other members of the Slung Low team to have a listen. However, that was still oohs and aahs, not the actual lyrics.
Working with Real Musicians
Sibelius told me that altos can’t sing a C above middle C, and a G below middle C. I didn’t believe that for a second. Even I can sing that.
Which led to my first mistake… ignoring a couple of other suggestions the programme made for the sopranos and basses. A high C in the sopranos? Isn’t that perfectly do-able? At fortissimo? No? Oh dear…
But this was where the fun began – working with real singers, the fantastic ladies and gents with the Wakefield Community Gospel Choir, rehearsing and recording, working out more friendly intervals between notes, and more singable ranges.
Up against tight deadlines, I conducted the choir too fast or too slow in various places. So there was a little judicious time-stretching/contracting and editing, with a little support from the original samples… to create this:
Beyond the Front Line also features a live soprano, Rosalind Hind, who’s also an awesome violinist. She sings and plays accompanied by the recorded choir during the final section of the show, alongside a stylised, choreographed movement piece involving hospital beds being moved around a huge geodesic dome tent, called in time by the Drill Seargent.
Working with Ros has also been a great experience in the process of creating this piece of music. There’s a fluidity between live, reactive performer and set-in-stone recorded choir which adds another more human dimension to the tracks. Actually seeing the emotion in her face when she sings and hearing the real, acoustic quality of the violin reverberating around the dome as Ros weaves between the movement of field nurses and hospital beds gives me tingles on the back of the neck whenever I see it.
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Edit September 2012: Parts of the Requiem made a comeback earlier this year in Converging Paths, albeit it stripped for raw materials and reassembled in lots of different ways. Here are two of the movements re-recorded for this new show, soon to be released on digital album: