the winter’s tale

The Winter’s Tale, from the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival’s 2014 production, directed by Sidonie Garrett. This season I took a bold leap and proposed the music be played live onstage with a trio of players: Laurel Morgan Parks on violin, Sascha Groschang on Cello, and myself performing on mallets and wind instrument. I did some crowd-source funding to cover the added cost, and the festival fans were very supportive. Both of the videos give you an idea of how we presented this onstage, both in the preshow time as well as a musician’s view of a segment in the play that transitions us through several years, simply titled Time.

The instruments I’m playing allow for a variety of sounds to be heard by the audience. The clarinet-like instrument seen in the preshow takes on the sound of a tinwhistle flute, but later in the play it becomes bagpipes and a tuba-like instrument (but more flatulent). The mallet instrument I play can at times be a vibraphone, dulcimer, or marimba. In Time, we hear both a vibraphone layer as well as ‘clockwork’ sounds that help complete the ‘time’ imagery. In addition, I play footpedals that give us bass sounds to add fullness to the trio’s sound.

The performing video seen here was shot by colleague and good friend Don Maxwell, a filmmaker living in Kansas City, Missouri.

The second video (Festival Musicians) was done during our first introductory foray into the studio, playing some of the preliminary music I was testing for the play. Laurel (violin) and Sascha (cello) are composers in their own right, and perform often as a duo known as The Wires. I loved taking advantage of some of that creative energy and incorporating into the play. While I am listed as Composer, I owe much to their contributions as the music develops and evolves, whether it’s this play where we performed live, or the many other plays that were pre-recorded in the studio (King Lear, Hamlet, The Mousetrap, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, My Name Is Asher Lev, and Antony and Cleopatra to name a few!)

Each video on this site may be enlarged to full-screen by clicking the button in the lower right-hand corner of the video.