On Thursday I had the opportunity to meet with the composer and sound designer for Twelfth Night, Rob Witmer. Rob is a guest artist based in Seattle.Tickets are available now to see Twelfth Night March 3-6 on the Alexander Stage. 

Erin: So you are the composer for Twelfth Night?

Rob: That’s right.

E: Are you also the sound designer?

R: Yeah, I am. We are creating all the amplified sound and a couple little sound cues but mostly it is composition.

 

E: Can you describe your process for Twelfth Night? How did you take a Shakespeare show and begin to make music for it?

R: Well, Chris (the director) and I talked a lot about having live music in the show. And there were a couple people he had in mind I think that played instruments like Reid, who plays the viola, and we knew we had a good singer with Randy. Sam plays guitar too, so that gave some shape to the idea of what kinds of instruments we might use. There’s songs explicitly in the text that are meant to be sung by Feste so there were pretty obvious places to do musical moments. Chris also had the idea of setting some of the text to music, specifically the Malvolio character who is tricked by this letter and becomes infatuated with the idea that Olivia is really in love with him. So I took a couple of those moments where Chris indicated, “maybe this elevates to music somehow” and after seeing Randy’s audition—he is a great singer, he is trained in opera, he can read music and can do precise vocal stuff— I just wrote something that’s a little Gilbert and Sullivan-ish, I guess, for a couple of his little monologues and I think they work really well. The style of the music is focused more on strings; we have a violin and viola in the show, we have Dan who plays trumpet and flute and Maxx on guitar. So we kept a kind of chamber music style. I call it a Celtic-folk Spanish kind of feel. There is a place in Spain called Galicia; it’s on the northern coast of Spain and it’s a Celtic region actually. The Celts settled there and a lot of music that comes out of there has got an Irish meets Spanish feel. So we’ve added some tambourines and finger cymbals and stuff like that just to give it a little exotic flare.

E: In a broader sense, what is your favorite part of the creative process?

R: I do a lot of sound design back in Seattle and that is where you can have hundreds and hundreds of sound cues, whether it’s music or ambient textures or things like that, and that part of the process really comes together in tech and I enjoy that. But for this show, since we’ve got live musicians, I think the first week of being here (I was lucky enough to be here for the first week of rehearsal and now I am back for the end) I got a sense for what everyone could do vocally and what their instruments were. I was here for a week so I would just write little cues like, “oh, we need a little transition here.” So I’d go home and write something and bring it in the next day. So I think I enjoyed that discovery of what their skills were and how to use them.

E: My last question is: what advice do you have for young musicians and theatre artists?

R: That’s a great question. I think this show is great because it is pulling people from the music department that maybe don’t always get to be on stage. I think the multidisciplinary skill of being able to read music, play it, but also understand what it means to be on stage can be really valuable. There are so many shows that do that now, for example Once where everyone is playing guitars on stage. So you might be a great actor or singer but if you also play an instrument it is a great skill to have. Or, composing gives you a great sense of timing— how music and sound fit into a play. Even if you don’t do plays with live music you might understand better how to mix a show if you are on the technical side of things. Or, how to just create your own musical bits of scoring to help support the play.

E: Great, thank you!

Rob is a Seattle-based freelance composer and sound designer.  His recent work includes Mother Courage, Comedy of Errors, and Othello (Seattle Shakespeare Company); Romeo and Juliet (Seattle Immersive Theatre); Emma (Book-It Repertory); Three Sisters, Seven Ways to Get There (ACT Lab) and The Flick (New Century Theatre). Recent performance credits include Mr. Burns – a Post Electric Play (ACT); A Doctor In Spite of Himself (Yale Rep, Berkeley Rep, Intiman Theatre); In 2013, Rob received the 2013 Gregory Award for Outstanding Sound Design.