Composing The Tempest:

An Interview with Phil Carlsen

BY: Jonathan Osborne

 

 

     As a professor of music at the University of Maine at Farmington, composer Phil Carlsen is a very interesting and, typically, a very busy man. Despite this, he generously offered up some of his time to chat with me about his work on the upcoming production of William Shakespeare’s the Tempest.

 

JO: Have you written for theater before—and if so, how often have you?

PC: Well, I did another play here—that was Midsummer Night’s Dream—I think it was 2010 that we did it? Jayne [Decker] directed that one as well. So, another Shakespeare play.I used, for that one, toy piano and cello. Those are the instruments I played, and I also had a flute and a percussionist.And, let’s see. I wrote an opera once. Not a long opera; a little chamber opera. I’ve written a ballet before, and other kinds of live-performance-sorts-of-things with music.

 

JO: What previous experiences have you had with the Tempest? Had you read it?

PC: I hadn’t read it before, so it’s been fun getting to know the play.

 

JO: That must have been pretty interesting, just jumping into the play like that.

PC: That’s exciting--getting to know something new. In some ways, it has some similarities with Midsummer Night’s Dream, where you’ve got a major character who is sort of controlling things behind the scenes. And so here you’ve got Prospero, and he’s got a spirit who’s assisting him in a lot of his activities. In Midsummer Night’s Dream we had Oberon with Puck.

 

JO: You mentioned characters—did you compose differently depending upon which characters are on stage?

PC: Yeah, to some extent.The character Ariel—Shakespeare actually says that he is playing pipes and tabor (which is a little flute and drum kind of thing). That suggested to me that I would associate the little drum sounds and a flute sound with Ariel. At least one of the songs that he sings—maybe two of the songs that he sings—have flute-type sounds. Sometimes when he comes out, or does certain things, I have that music going on for him.And the character Caliban, because he’s hauling wood around, I use the marimba sounds for him.And for some of the magical stuff, I tried to write music that suggests the magic—there’s a place where spirits come out carrying a banquet, amazing the mariners who are watching this happen.There’s a song that Stefano sings—he’s drunk. Y’know, sea shanty sort of thing.

 

JO: I was going to ask you how much diversity there is among the pieces, but it already sounds like there is a lot.

PC: The ones that are sung are a little bit more straight forward—not real dissonant or anything. Some of them sound very folksy. There’s music for the storm, some of the dances—a lot of it I’m kind of improvising so it’s different every time.There’s quite a variety, and part of the variety I think comes from the keyboard, which has a lot of sounds on it.

 

JO: Can you tell me a little more about this keyboard?

PC: It has a lot of preset sounds. One of the nice features it has is that you can do “dual sounds.” You can combine two sounds together into one—you can press a key and you’re going to get both of them. You can adjust the balance of them; you can adjust the octave level of one of those two sounds. That creates a huge number of possibilities for creating new sounds. You can split the keyboard so you can have one sound on the left side of the keyboard and one sound on the right. There are over 300 sounds. I haven’t even begun to explore all of the possibilities.There’s one song that these three goddesses sing, so I use a harp sound for that and it sounds great! There’s a music box sound that I like a lot. You play the note, and there’s a little echo of the sound that follows it.It’s fun to take a sound—like a piccolo sound—and play it really, really low. You get an instrument that you normally don’t hear.

 

JO: Is the entire score played just on that keyboard?

PC: Yeah.

 

JO: I wasn’t expecting that. I just kind of assumed there would be an orchestra.My next question for you is what have been the most challenging parts of this composition process?

PC: You know, the first thing that comes to mind is just lugging the keyboard back and forth between here [Carlsen’s office] and the theater—it’s really heavy *laughs*. But you know, it feels like musically, everything has come pretty easily. I don’t think it’s been a difficult show to write in terms of the music. The play itself is vivid and suggest musical images, and so a lot of the songs I just sat down and they came to me pretty quickly.In a sense, it’s sort of easy when you’re starting out with words. You’ve got the words to begin with, and now you write a song to go to them. Just try to write music that captures the feeling of the words, and the rhythm of the words—it’s there already, so you try to write music that brings out the rhythm in a musical way without violating the natural rhythm of speech.So, writing the music has been fun and pretty easy. The difficulty, as I said, is just lugging the keyboard around. *laughs.*

 

JO: I can relate to that. Having to carry Jared’s drums all around campus, having to carry my guitars—it’s ridiculous. One time I had to carry a guitar, a bass, and two amps all the way here from my dorm--

PC: Are you kidding? All at the same time?

 

JO: Yeah. And it was winter at that point too, of course. It was fun. What have been some of the rewards of doing a project like this?

PC: It has a lot of rewards!One of the songs that I wrote is “Come into these Yellow Sands,” and there’s a line in there “Hark! Hark! The watchdogs bark,” and there’s a response of “bow wow, bow wow.” Everybody in the cast has gotten to know the song pretty well, so yesterday they were warming up and I started playing the song and they all shouted out, together, the “bow wows.”I think with music in general that connection with the performers is very rewarding, so that’s been great. And, you know, the feedback I get from them, that’s really special. That sense that, as a composer, you’re creating something and people are appreciating it.And it’s been rewarding to get to know the keyboard better too!

 

JO: How is composing for theater different than composing for a concert setting?

PC: I guess you’re conscious of the setting that you’re writing for. The music is serving a different kind of function, since most of the attention is really on the drama itself, and the words, and the staging. The music is more of an accompaniment to it than the main thing itself.The individual musical numbers tend to be relatively short, and so none of the songs are more than about a minute and a half; there aren’t that many words. If I were writing a song to be done in a concert, with the same words, I probably would create more places in the music that would be purely instrumental, maybe repeat some of the words—treat it maybe a little bit more like a poem, where the music provides an interpretation of the words, and a commentary on the words, rather than just simply singing them.But in a play, you just want to hear the words and then get back into the play again.

 

JO: Last question:What other projects have you been working on, and what will you be doing in the future?

PC: I just finished writing a piece for solo marimba, and hopefully that will be done in a concert at the end of March. We have a really terrific marimba player coming in to do a solo concert.Jayne and I are collaborating on a play for the beginning of may for the 150th Anniversary [of UMF]. I’m going to be writing music for that. I wrote something for the inauguration.I’m conducting the orchestra this semester, and I’m going to be doing a piece in connection with Steve Pane’s Beethoven project. Something involving him and the orchestra.There’s been a lot of composing this year. It’s been a good year! There have been years where I haven’t done much composing at all. There’ve been a lot of projects this year.

 

JO: Well, that’s all I have to ask you. Thank you for taking the time to talk about your work.

 

     After the interview, Professor Carlsen showed me the score for the Tempest. It is held in a large white binder. It is clear that a lot of effort and love has gone into the project—it is as organized as organized gets. The scores for the songs themselves are placed at the front of the binder, and at the rear sits the script, with songs placed accordingly within.Phil Carlsen will perform all of the pieces live during the showings of the play-turned-musical on his newly-beloved keyboard.