‘The isle is full of noises’: Composer conjures aural magic for ‘The Tempest’
Shhh: No “plague upon this howling,” as William Shakespeare might say.
Houston Ballet’s new production of “The Tempest” will open with an unusual noise audiences will want to hear: the effect of waves crashing ashore from the orchestra pit.
Even the wind and horn players didn’t know they could create such sounds until they saw composer Sally Beamish’s score, which instructs them to blow through their instruments for more than 40 seconds without forming any musical notes.
Recorded sea sounds play as the audience enters the theater. That morphs into the “orchestral sea sound” before
actual notes emerge from a flute, signaling the presence of the otherworldly Ariel.
Beamish has conjured other aural magic for choreographer David Bintley, perhaps solving a conundrum that has hampered dancemakers for at least a century.
In an industry that seems perennially starved for substantial new productions, Shakespeare’s late-period romance has always had the potential to become a major ballet. It offers every element a choreographer could need: a plot that swirls with wizardry, love, vengeance and redemption. A dramatic storm scene and shipwreck. A colorful island setting. Shakespeare even wrote ample songs and dance into his tale about Prospero, an exiled Italian duke-turned-magician who seeks revenge.
But ballet adaptations, though numerous, have never stuck. The lack of music on the theme may be as much to blame as the complex story, which takes place in less than a day but involves a flashback of 12 years.
Bintley, who directs the Birmingham Royal Ballet, wanted a “Tempest” score for decades — something on the order and scale of Sergei Prokofiev’s beloved “Romeo & Juliet” or Felix Mendelsson’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Rudolf Nureyev created a “Tempest” with piecedtogether music by the father of classical ballet music, Peter Tchaikovsky, in 1982. Bintley called it the funniest ballet ever made, for the wrong reasons.
“It should be put out on DVD and entitled, ‘How Not to Make a Ballet,’ ” he said. “I’m not being rude. I knew Rudolf; he was wonderful. But I sat with everybody else at the Royal Opera House and cried with laughter at the things he had attempted to do with Tchaikovsky.”
Only a few people remember it now, but Houston Ballet has a history with “The Tempest.” In 1977, then-director James Clouser hired a rock band to create the music for his three-act “Caliban,” focused on the primitive character who does Prospero’s dirty work.
Alexei Ratmansky’s recent “Tempest” for American Ballet Theatre uses the closest thing that has existed to a full, classical score: an hour of incidental music written in 1925-26 by Jean Sibelius.
However, Sibelius ignored what Bintley considers an important ballet moment in Shakespeare’s script: the ready-made divertissement of its Act 4 masque. That scene feels more natural to him than many of “those excuses for 30 minutes of dancing” that fill classically structured ballets, he said. “This is a great excuse because the masque comments on the play and the characters.”
When Bintley discovered Beamish a few years ago, he knew he’d finally found a composer whose help could deliver all he imagined.
Beamish often translates natural sounds into orchestral ones, although not as literally as she has done with the commissioned score for “The Tempest.”
“Maybe it’s like a kind of synesthesia: I hear a note and it becomes a chord,” she said. Natural progression
Notions about landscape — especially the sea — have loomed large in her work since she moved to Scotland in 1990 and felt overwhelmed by the beauty of the scenery. Scottish folk-dance music, which is rooted in the Renaissance, also crept into her system. (That, too, would prove handy for “The Tempest.”)
Beamish, who comes from a family of musicians, was destined to compose. She wrote her first scores when she was 4, drawing little flowers and faces on the music staves of a manuscript book. Her mother, a professional violinist, played them back for her.
“I think right from the beginning, music for me was a way of telling a story,” Beamish said.
She focused on the viola rather than composition in college as a practical move, assuming it would be easier to earn a living as a musician.
During her first decade as a performer, Beamish appeared with high-level chamber groups and orchestras in London. That also allowed her to meet contemporary composers. She asked them for lessons, sought their advice on her scores and often created music for friends’ recitals.
Writing a ballet was a natural progression, “but someone has to ask you. You can’t just go do it,” she said, smiling.
She didn’t know Bintley until he called, and she had no idea how their collaboration would work, but she was thrilled to tackle “The Tempest.”
“There’s so much that resonates with the imagination and what I would want to do orchestrally,” she said.
Bintley eased her through a steep learning curve with storyboards. Rae Smith’s costume designs, which were done first, also informed the score. And Beamish kept a copy of Shakespeare’s script by her side while she wrote.
Bintley respected Shakespeare’s material. He simply wanted to visualize a script he felt was already perfectly structured.
The storyboards had only a timed outline, as in, “Miranda and Prospero pas de deux, 3 minutes,” or “Prospero solo, 2 minutes.”
It was up to Beamish to decide how those scenes sounded. “In a way, it was like writing a film score, but having the pictures described to me,” she said.
She delivered fully scored audio files, one scene at a time. His tweaks were light, with comments such as, “We need more of that” and, “Do you want applause or not?”
“I never worked in an art form where you get applause during the music!” Beamish said.
Story ballet scores typically incorporate melodic leitmotifs that follow characters through a trajectory. Beamish amped up the complexity of each one as it returns. She also assigned specific instruments to each character: cello and horn for Prospero. Innocent violin for his daughter, Miranda.
Caliban’s sound required another Beamish innovation. She heard him as a saxophone because it’s a hybrid instrument and Caliban is a hybrid human/magical character. Orchestras don’t typically include saxophones, however, and Beamish wanted to stay within that realm. So she wrote unison notes for a bassoon and horn. The result sounds amazingly like a sax, she said.
She created realistic birdsong with wind instruments and found rhythm by setting some of the original songs of Shakespeare’s script to music, including Caliban’s famous lines, “Be not afeared. The isle is full of noises.”
Shakespeare introduces new characters and stories in each scene of Act I, so for the first six months they collaborated, Beamish and Bintley felt like they were creating an entirely new ballet every two or three weeks.
“And then you get to the second act, and absolutely nothing is new,” Bintley said. The script just spins each of those individual dramas out until the masque, which ties everything up.
With the masque, Bintley wanted a different kind of musicality, for 20 minutes.
“That’s almost like writing a symphony, a lot of music to be given completely free range,” Beamish said. With that element, she tried to make Renaissance dance her own, as Igor Stravinsky did with “Agon” (a score that inspired one of George Balanchine’s most sophisticated ballets).
Beamish attended her first Houston Ballet Orchestra rehearsal last Wednesday.
Conductor Ermanno Florio was ready. He has studied the score for months, working out technical questions long-distance. Florio always strives to get into the composer’s mind, but more often than not, ballet composers are long gone.
A new composition is always challenging to assimilate. Beamish’s generous use of solos creates an extra dimension of work. The musicians who will play them also have been practicing for weeks.
Beamish’s approach to harmony is “very personal,” Florio said. It’s tonal, but she uses dissonance for effect, and the rhythms are complex.
He appreciates how Beamish’s leitmotifs develop after Act I. The tunes become more complex. What was a single note might become triples, or be played twice as fast. Florio thinks that even listeners who aren’t musically inclined will sense their mood shift. Seeing the music
In the same way dancers need a few performances of new work before they’re in command of all the technical demands, Florio and his orchestra have to internalize “The Tempest” to the point where they can concentrate “on all the fun stuff that comes with making music,” he said. “It’s gone smoothly, but we’ve still got a lot of work to do. We’ve added rehearsals.”
Beamish was pleased to hear Florio and the Houston Ballet Orchestra bringing “such character” to the score. Their artistry can make or break the show for some people.
Florio’s conducting is “another kind of choreography in a way, in the way he moves to tell them how he’s envisaging the music,” Beamish said.
She has incorporated spoken word in previous scores but didn’t need to supplement Bintley’s ballet. “This is just so much more immediate because it’s visual.”
Bintley translates every nuance into movement, she added, “so you can almost see the trills, the different intervals and the rhythms. I think (dance) is a great way into new music, generally.”
Houston Ballet coproduced another big Bintley production, “Aladdin,” in 2014. That problematic show was originally made for a lessthan-stellar company in Japan. With Elizabethan literature, Bintley is more in his element.
“‘The Tempest’ absolutely needed this amplification,” he said. “Somebody had to do (with ballet) what Shakespeare wanted to do with it.”