1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:08,580 How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank here, will we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears, 2 00:00:08,580 --> 00:00:13,230 soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony. 3 00:00:13,230 --> 00:00:18,780 These words from the dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice are some of Shakespeare's most 4 00:00:18,780 --> 00:00:25,680 poignant on the nature of music and inspired Re-form Williams to set them for 16 solo singers in his Serenata music, 5 00:00:25,680 --> 00:00:30,960 as well as the huge volume of songs set to Shakespeare's words. His plays have inspired numerous operas, 6 00:00:30,960 --> 00:00:35,610 beginning with the fairy queen first performed in 60 90 to a semi opera consisting of 7 00:00:35,610 --> 00:00:41,040 incidental music written by Parcell to accompany an adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. 8 00:00:41,040 --> 00:00:45,630 There are many fascinating questions surrounding the role music has to play within Shakespeare's plays. 9 00:00:45,630 --> 00:00:51,570 How thoroughly with songs in the plays such as those of Festo Twelfth Night integrated into the action. 10 00:00:51,570 --> 00:00:56,220 What considerations are there in choosing music to accompany a Shakespeare production now? 11 00:00:56,220 --> 00:01:04,140 How did Shakespeare use music and song as a motif within his plays? I'm Alice Hobert and with me to discuss Shakespeare and music are Michael Dobson, 12 00:01:04,140 --> 00:01:10,410 professor of Shakespeare Studies at Birmingham University and director of the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-Upon-Avon Flat. 13 00:01:10,410 --> 00:01:15,120 Smith, a 30 year English undergraduate at the Queen's College. Adrianna Stoiber, 14 00:01:15,120 --> 00:01:19,530 a first year music master's student at new college and musical director of a recent production of the Fairy 15 00:01:19,530 --> 00:01:26,490 Queen by Purcell and Dr Simon Smith leave early career fellow and senior research fellow at the Queen's College. 16 00:01:26,490 --> 00:01:28,740 Thank you all very much for joining me. 17 00:01:28,740 --> 00:01:36,010 And perhaps we could start by discussing how you felt about the way that the music and drama combined in Fairy Queen. 18 00:01:36,010 --> 00:01:38,800 The Furqan was an interesting challenge for me as a music director, 19 00:01:38,800 --> 00:01:45,010 because my part of the operation was to make these masks at the end of every act cohesive with the text. 20 00:01:45,010 --> 00:01:48,340 And because Persil didn't set any of Shakespeare's text, 21 00:01:48,340 --> 00:01:54,760 they were just metaphorical representations how to make that sort of accurate and compelling representation of the story, 22 00:01:54,760 --> 00:01:56,680 though they were quite disparate. 23 00:01:56,680 --> 00:02:04,240 So I had a separate cast of singers and some were very direct representation, as in the wedding mask, where Himan comes to bless the marriage. 24 00:02:04,240 --> 00:02:08,710 And there's a lot of marriages happening in Act five anyway. But then there are some some are looser connexions. 25 00:02:08,710 --> 00:02:16,570 So one of the most famous songs from the opera is the plant, and it's introduced around, asks a fairy to sing it and talks about Laura. 26 00:02:16,570 --> 00:02:22,150 But we never know who Laura is or what she does. So we sort of have to figure out how to make that cohesive. 27 00:02:22,150 --> 00:02:29,290 In the way I did that was to treat it like I would treat any opera, which is all of the music was essentially a look into the characters. 28 00:02:29,290 --> 00:02:36,300 So every aria was a sort of a deeper look at tend to the themes that were happening within the text. 29 00:02:36,300 --> 00:02:40,650 So establishing character through mask, I suppose, operates a little bit like an aria in that respect. 30 00:02:40,650 --> 00:02:44,160 Would you say? Yeah, especially in the the tale. Exactly. 31 00:02:44,160 --> 00:02:51,540 So the masks were sort of these global arias, these large looks into the act that just happened. 32 00:02:51,540 --> 00:02:54,640 Or even if you think about a moment of repose in a sense. 33 00:02:54,640 --> 00:03:01,560 So the spectacle going on, the dancers singing and just sort of beautiful moments of music within themselves. 34 00:03:01,560 --> 00:03:04,620 But the Shakespeare text really moves the action along quite quickly. 35 00:03:04,620 --> 00:03:09,060 And then you get a pause at the end of every act to think about these greater themes. 36 00:03:09,060 --> 00:03:13,800 And personal did a really nice job because setting Shakespeare's taxes on a child, 37 00:03:13,800 --> 00:03:18,230 musically speaking, when you talk about metre and phrasing, it can be very complex. 38 00:03:18,230 --> 00:03:20,160 So, of course, because he used his own words, 39 00:03:20,160 --> 00:03:28,260 he was able to make these sort of sweeping phrases that perhaps the text wouldn't have been able to accomplish in the same way in that Baroque style. 40 00:03:28,260 --> 00:03:32,550 So it's a really interesting marriage of the two that changed a lot in later settings. 41 00:03:32,550 --> 00:03:39,540 But the person is kind of a nice period piece in that sense. Michael, I believe he did an amount of work on the fairy queen idea. 42 00:03:39,540 --> 00:03:46,860 If you feel you've got anything to add to this, you know, it's it's a very interesting thing that happens to Shakespeare in the later 17th century 43 00:03:46,860 --> 00:03:51,900 that certain plays look like pretexts for making them into something more operatic. 44 00:03:51,900 --> 00:03:58,980 And it tends to be the ones that got magic in them. And magic means music even in Shakespeare scripts, as they were in his time. 45 00:03:58,980 --> 00:04:07,800 And The Tempest and Macbeth and Midsummer Night's Dream all get done in this very intriguing style where, as we've been hearing, 46 00:04:07,800 --> 00:04:14,980 you get a bit of dialogue, a bit of the story, and then what is almost like the incidental music, except you get it separately. 47 00:04:14,980 --> 00:04:19,140 So instead of having music underneath the action, as we would expect in a movie, 48 00:04:19,140 --> 00:04:26,550 nowadays you get a little bit of action and then a set piece with some extra singers and dancers and special effects. 49 00:04:26,550 --> 00:04:27,630 Obviously, Midsummer Night's Dream. 50 00:04:27,630 --> 00:04:35,790 One of the things that prompts this is that it's got a great lullaby in it in the fairy sing to Titania to make her go to sleep. 51 00:04:35,790 --> 00:04:39,210 And that can work very powerfully in Shakespeare's original text. 52 00:04:39,210 --> 00:04:47,040 Also, it works marvellously in the fairy queen. One of my actress friends, Amanda Harris, is one of the only people to have done Titania, 53 00:04:47,040 --> 00:04:53,340 both in the Shakespeare in great dance production in Stratford and in an English national opera production. 54 00:04:53,340 --> 00:04:55,740 The Fairy Queen, I'm afraid, in the Shakespeare. 55 00:04:55,740 --> 00:05:02,580 She found that lullaby extremely effective in that there were a couple of performances when she did actually go to sleep and they had 56 00:05:02,580 --> 00:05:10,380 to stage managers had to rattle her power to finally get her to wake up in time to respond to the bottom when her cue came around. 57 00:05:10,380 --> 00:05:16,560 So this is some real live demonstration of the force of music and performance. 58 00:05:16,560 --> 00:05:21,990 So having looked at music as this kind of external representation of what's going on in a plot, 59 00:05:21,990 --> 00:05:31,410 perhaps we could look at how internally music can operate as part of a Shakespeare plot, maybe have something to say about that in terms of song? 60 00:05:31,410 --> 00:05:37,980 Well, I think what's interesting about the songs in Shakespeare is the role that they actually play within the plays 61 00:05:37,980 --> 00:05:45,810 because there's been a lot done to show sometimes more about on whether the songs stick in where you like, 62 00:05:45,810 --> 00:05:51,660 type things and to what extent actually any of them are relevant to the plots of the plays. 63 00:05:51,660 --> 00:06:00,670 I think something like, for example, the release of testimonies is something that is very relevant to the plot. 64 00:06:00,670 --> 00:06:04,440 She's just been accused of being unfaithful so that you've got a good reflection. 65 00:06:04,440 --> 00:06:12,570 But in a lot of them, it's more a case of no, let's have some music and then get some character singing. 66 00:06:12,570 --> 00:06:16,710 Yes. So I suppose a good example of this, perhaps we could talk about songs in Twelfth Night, 67 00:06:16,710 --> 00:06:21,330 which is a play with quite a few prominent singing experiences. Absolutely. 68 00:06:21,330 --> 00:06:27,180 In Twelfth Night, a fantastic example, because we seem to see perhaps two extremes of of music, 69 00:06:27,180 --> 00:06:34,320 degrees of integrated ness with the rest of the performance. So we looked at something like Come Away Death, which is sung by Feste. 70 00:06:34,320 --> 00:06:38,640 This is one of the moments where the text seems to be perhaps most fragmentary. 71 00:06:38,640 --> 00:06:42,270 We have this slightly peculiar situation where at the beginning of the play, 72 00:06:42,270 --> 00:06:49,680 Viola tells us that she's going to disguise herself as a eunuch and that she'll be able to to sing, but she never sings in the play. 73 00:06:49,680 --> 00:06:57,030 And so one explanation for this switch that historians have often propounded is that the boy who would have been playing that female part, 74 00:06:57,030 --> 00:07:03,930 his voice broke or that boy was no longer in the company at the time of the text that we have, which is sixteen, twenty three texts. 75 00:07:03,930 --> 00:07:08,010 And so those songs perhaps got reassigned to fester. 76 00:07:08,010 --> 00:07:14,790 In fact, it's even questionable whether come away death is entirely in keeping with the song, which was called for immediately before. 77 00:07:14,790 --> 00:07:18,870 In contrast, however, we've got other songs in the same play which seem to be so utterly integrated, 78 00:07:18,870 --> 00:07:26,100 the dramatic action that you could you couldn't really conceive of without it. I'm thinking, for example, when Malvolio comes down to Tarloff, 79 00:07:26,100 --> 00:07:34,330 so Toby and Andrew and WFA cut all in the middle of the night, Toby defies motivated by singing in his face and the song. 80 00:07:34,330 --> 00:07:39,130 Sings Farewell, Dear Heart is originally a love song called Farewell Dear Love, 81 00:07:39,130 --> 00:07:44,260 which was published about two or three years before or two years before Twelfth Night was first 82 00:07:44,260 --> 00:07:49,090 performed many times this kind of young man's love song into a song that's about Tobi himself, 83 00:07:49,090 --> 00:07:53,960 his ageing, and whether or not he should tell Malvolio to shove about it. 84 00:07:53,960 --> 00:08:01,300 Where do I mention go? No, no, no, no, no, you dare not. So this seems to be a song which is not only integral to the drama of the scene, 85 00:08:01,300 --> 00:08:09,190 but it also relies on a very fundamental level on not only audience's knowledge of the musical culture of the very early 16 hundreds. 86 00:08:09,190 --> 00:08:17,200 There seems to be a very long way away from these more fragmentary songs which are down has done so much work on really fantastic work, 87 00:08:17,200 --> 00:08:24,850 showing how songs can be very fragmentary in other places. I believe you were the accompanist for a lecture, including song by Tiffany on the subject. 88 00:08:24,850 --> 00:08:30,490 What did you think of what she had to say? I thought it was interesting. I had never because as a pianist, 89 00:08:30,490 --> 00:08:36,610 I typically encounter these songs as sort of separate entities for people will gather a bunch of Shakespeare and make a set out of them, 90 00:08:36,610 --> 00:08:43,630 but not in any sort of context other than a recital. We did come away death mysteries mine with a too big. 91 00:08:43,630 --> 00:08:45,040 We did several sightings of each. 92 00:08:45,040 --> 00:08:52,420 And one of the most interesting things I thought, which I never would have thought because I did these things out of context so often. 93 00:08:52,420 --> 00:08:59,170 You know, Mistress' mine, they talk about this sort of play on voice types because we don't know what was happening. 94 00:08:59,170 --> 00:09:05,710 And the text is sing both high and low, which could mean a lot of things. Again, pitch wise, it could mean female male voice types. 95 00:09:05,710 --> 00:09:10,780 So we don't know. So there's this interesting way composers deal with that sort of thing. 96 00:09:10,780 --> 00:09:16,000 And there's actually if you when you do them in a recital like that next to each other, 97 00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:22,240 you see other composers have fundamentally different understandings of what Shakespeare was trying to say now that we can know. 98 00:09:22,240 --> 00:09:29,350 But their interpretations of what they think, I mean, even down to things being completely joyful and completely solemn, 99 00:09:29,350 --> 00:09:34,810 the same text, especially with Twelfth Night, because I think things like come away that can be read so many different ways. 100 00:09:34,810 --> 00:09:39,400 So such an interesting thing to see the place next to each other in that way. 101 00:09:39,400 --> 00:09:46,090 Yes, I think looking at different treatments of the same text or the same Shakespeare stimulus is perhaps a very interesting thing to do. 102 00:09:46,090 --> 00:09:51,490 And maybe we should move on to ways in which Midsummer Night's Dream has become a musical entity elsewhere. 103 00:09:51,490 --> 00:09:55,840 So, for example, the Britten opera, Mendelson's incidental music. 104 00:09:55,840 --> 00:09:59,950 Michael, I believe he recently saw production of Britain's Midsummer Night's Dream in Cambridge. I did indeed. 105 00:09:59,950 --> 00:10:06,910 It was wonderful. It's a lovely piece. And of course, it's very much composed in relation to the Mendelssohn, which everybody knows. 106 00:10:06,910 --> 00:10:12,460 Mendelssohn writes the overture when he's ridiculously young, then he expands. 107 00:10:12,460 --> 00:10:21,070 It produces a complete score for the play, is performed in Potsdam in 1844, becomes pretty much compulsory for 19th century productions of the play. 108 00:10:21,070 --> 00:10:26,170 And Mendelssohn score is all about the fairies being very small and very literary. 109 00:10:26,170 --> 00:10:34,060 And there's lots of very high string music very quick. It goes along with those shortened lines that you get for the fairies rhymes within the play. 110 00:10:34,060 --> 00:10:37,420 And as I say, it's all about delicacy and quickness and smallness. 111 00:10:37,420 --> 00:10:43,090 So Britain turns it inside out and when he writes his own opera for it in 1960, instead, 112 00:10:43,090 --> 00:10:52,840 it's all about low cellos suggesting this rather gloomy sort of gothic kind of world in which the fairies aren't small and charming at all, 113 00:10:52,840 --> 00:10:57,640 but potentially sinister and sort of like and more dangerous. 114 00:10:57,640 --> 00:11:02,620 It's Titania who gives the high notes. She is extremely reactive. 115 00:11:02,620 --> 00:11:04,540 My daughter song to in this production. 116 00:11:04,540 --> 00:11:10,630 I mean, I might have gone anyway, but she complained very much that this was a road which really have no development, 117 00:11:10,630 --> 00:11:18,880 that she was kind of came on and responded to things that were done to her and then was carried off again and spent a lot of the time asleep. 118 00:11:18,880 --> 00:11:28,180 But Britain's music very much. Seems to foreground the way in which to Tanya is a victim in the story and doesn't find the love as funny at all, 119 00:11:28,180 --> 00:11:33,310 you know, they're rather gloomy in the Britain version. We're not really allowed to laugh at them for having such a horrible time 120 00:11:33,310 --> 00:11:36,970 without the lightness and sort of comedy at the expense of these young people. 121 00:11:36,970 --> 00:11:45,190 And we're not really allowed not to care which one pays off with which in the Britain version, which is not the mainstream stage history of that play. 122 00:11:45,190 --> 00:11:53,980 So it's very intriguing to see these two famous and full scale responses to that play in producing such a very, very different music. 123 00:11:53,980 --> 00:12:00,970 Yes, it's very interesting to see ways in which music might be able to suggest alternative interpretations of the same text in that way. 124 00:12:00,970 --> 00:12:05,290 I believe that metaphor measure also has interesting things to offer on this topic. 125 00:12:05,290 --> 00:12:08,890 Well, measure is an interesting one in lots of ways, 126 00:12:08,890 --> 00:12:15,490 partly because the text has clearly been mucked about with before it gets into print in the Folio in sixteen, twenty three. 127 00:12:15,490 --> 00:12:21,460 It looks as though the text we've got is already partly adapted, probably by Middleton. 128 00:12:21,460 --> 00:12:29,350 And in particular, one of the anxieties of the adaptor seems to concern the character of Marianne Angelo's jilted fiancee, 129 00:12:29,350 --> 00:12:34,720 who has to be brought into the action very, very quickly and has to agree very, 130 00:12:34,720 --> 00:12:39,820 very quickly to go and sleep with Angelo in the dark, posing as Isabella. 131 00:12:39,820 --> 00:12:45,670 And one of the ways the adaptor decides to get round this is to have a song and a boy comes on. 132 00:12:45,670 --> 00:12:54,400 The first time we've seen Marijana, she's all alone on stage and there's a boy singing an interpolated song about Fall in love. 133 00:12:54,400 --> 00:12:57,730 Take her, take the slips away that so sweetly were forsworn. 134 00:12:57,730 --> 00:13:04,300 And that describes Marianna's this figure in a sort of permanent Stacie's of pining for Angelo. 135 00:13:04,300 --> 00:13:10,690 So of course, she's going to jump at the first opportunity to get into the story and get her life moving again, 136 00:13:10,690 --> 00:13:16,360 even if it involves tricking her ex fiance into sleeping with her in the dark in a summer house. 137 00:13:16,360 --> 00:13:24,880 And there seems to be a deliberate intervention where music is providing the equivalent of a soliloquy in the later history of the play. 138 00:13:24,880 --> 00:13:29,260 It gets bizarrely expanded in that around the turn of the 18th century, 139 00:13:29,260 --> 00:13:36,190 a man called Charles Gilden decides that the way to make this play actable again is to take some personally into it. 140 00:13:36,190 --> 00:13:40,900 And Angello, while he's falling in love with Isabella, he fancies Isabella. 141 00:13:40,900 --> 00:13:43,570 He's in a desperate state over this. 142 00:13:43,570 --> 00:13:51,370 And every now and then [INAUDIBLE] say, well, I really need to take my mind off this, bring on the musicians, let's have some more of that music. 143 00:13:51,370 --> 00:13:56,950 And they stage a bit more of Dido Narnia's, which, of course, is a whole opera about a lovelorn, abandoned woman. 144 00:13:56,950 --> 00:14:00,820 It's all sort of all takes off from Teiko tape. It slips away. 145 00:14:00,820 --> 00:14:07,810 I've never seen that version performed. I must say, I'd quite like to I think might be quite frustrating to be quite unwieldy. 146 00:14:07,810 --> 00:14:14,590 Well, you do get two major works for the price of one, just done in a rather strange alternation with each other. 147 00:14:14,590 --> 00:14:22,810 I think you even had a sense of very clear that the integration of the two was quite a large managerial task. 148 00:14:22,810 --> 00:14:26,740 I think, especially when you're dealing with two things that are on the surface the same, 149 00:14:26,740 --> 00:14:31,710 but composed of so many moving parts is just always difficult, especially when you're talking about Dido. 150 00:14:31,710 --> 00:14:35,600 And yes, that's just a huge, huge thing for all the singers involved. 151 00:14:35,600 --> 00:14:38,670 It would be a huge undertaking. 152 00:14:38,670 --> 00:14:45,150 I suppose that integrating Dido and Aeneas with the Shakespeare play presumes a certain amount of understanding on the part of the audience, 153 00:14:45,150 --> 00:14:52,170 perhaps it would be worth discussing the context the 16th and 17th century audiences could be expected to be familiar with. 154 00:14:52,170 --> 00:14:57,450 Absolutely. This is a really fascinating topic in terms of precisely which audience members would have. 155 00:14:57,450 --> 00:15:04,950 Which particular frames of reference certainly is very clear that Shakespeare is often turning to classical myth for his musical metaphors or theory. 156 00:15:04,950 --> 00:15:09,000 To look at the time, Orpheus turns up in Merchant of Venice at the end of the speech, 157 00:15:09,000 --> 00:15:14,160 which we had at the beginning of the podcast, again in song in Henry the Eighth, co-written with John Fletcher. 158 00:15:14,160 --> 00:15:18,150 So the image of office music is being this compulsive and powerful sound, 159 00:15:18,150 --> 00:15:24,210 which can not only make audiences listen at the play, but also get rocks and trees and so on to come in here. 160 00:15:24,210 --> 00:15:30,180 This is quite present a lot of the time. We've also got Midas ticking away in the background all the time when we're thinking about musical judgement. 161 00:15:30,180 --> 00:15:33,900 And this is an idea which Shakespeare finds too often we think about end of Richard. 162 00:15:33,900 --> 00:15:39,390 The second, for example, Richard has kind of displayed spectacularly poor judgement for the best part of five acts. 163 00:15:39,390 --> 00:15:44,350 And then finally in prison, his music, which he's very upset by because he said it's out of tune or out of time. 164 00:15:44,350 --> 00:15:50,250 And in this moment, suddenly, despite himself to be a very good judge of music, perhaps today that seems fairly inconsequential. 165 00:15:50,250 --> 00:15:55,250 But in the context, when not hearing music very well means that you have the use of the donkey, 166 00:15:55,250 --> 00:15:58,620 perhaps this is a more significant and meaningful shift in the characterisation Richard is 167 00:15:58,620 --> 00:16:03,220 finally learning to hear properly in which he's spectacularly failed to do in earlier acts. 168 00:16:03,220 --> 00:16:06,450 And this is an image which comes up in a sentence as well as on a tape particularly. 169 00:16:06,450 --> 00:16:09,390 So this is something which Shakespeare seems to be very interested in using. 170 00:16:09,390 --> 00:16:14,490 The question then is how widely would these stories have travelled through his early audiences? 171 00:16:14,490 --> 00:16:19,560 My sense is wider than we might think, that there are vernacular reach through which these stories were being transmitted. 172 00:16:19,560 --> 00:16:25,710 And then the question beyond that, I suppose, is how do we then approach a play today in which we may not have quite the same 173 00:16:25,710 --> 00:16:30,190 context of background knowledge to bring to the playhouse or to the theatre? Absolutely. 174 00:16:30,190 --> 00:16:36,930 Maybe we should discuss incidental music for Shakespeare nowadays and how that interacts with past decisions about that. 175 00:16:36,930 --> 00:16:40,170 Michael, do you have anything to add? Well, yes. 176 00:16:40,170 --> 00:16:45,630 I mean, Shakespeare scripts, as we have them, particularly in the Folio, include a lot of musical stage directions. 177 00:16:45,630 --> 00:16:50,580 They call explicitly for incidental music at different points in the action they call fanfares. 178 00:16:50,580 --> 00:16:56,170 They call for drums and they call for different kinds of fanfare, which modern audiences can't recognise anymore. 179 00:16:56,170 --> 00:17:01,800 I mean, sometimes you get a fanfare on the cornet if you're important, but not that important. 180 00:17:01,800 --> 00:17:08,330 And sometimes you get a fanfare on the trumpet. Modern audiences can't be expected to know that a cornet means you're less important than a trumpet. 181 00:17:08,330 --> 00:17:16,350 I mean, it's a big gag in Midsummer Night's Dream that the mechanicals overuse trumpets for Pyramus and Thisbe and a ridiculously bombastic about it. 182 00:17:16,350 --> 00:17:22,500 You convey that in music, but the simple difference between and trumpet isn't going to do it for you anymore. 183 00:17:22,500 --> 00:17:28,620 Write down the history of the performance of Shakespeare's plays. Incidental music tends to expand. 184 00:17:28,620 --> 00:17:31,620 It's something producers have used a lot. 185 00:17:31,620 --> 00:17:39,750 There were versions of the comedies with added choruses and glees in the early 19th century by Patrick Reynolds Comedy of Errors, 186 00:17:39,750 --> 00:17:45,150 which is one of the only Shakespeare plays that has no songs in it at all because it's a short text, because it's quite light. 187 00:17:45,150 --> 00:17:53,160 People don't really care what you do with it has been made into a musical often the boys from Syracuse, Trevor None's famous version in the 70s, 188 00:17:53,160 --> 00:17:56,820 that of which that's mercifully still a video with Judi Dench as the and so on, 189 00:17:56,820 --> 00:18:06,210 had loads of songs thrown in in the 19th century when Shakespeare was being performed with enormous sets and lots of pageantry. 190 00:18:06,210 --> 00:18:10,710 So you need long pauses with the curtains shut. We're seeing changes. 191 00:18:10,710 --> 00:18:15,390 There's an enormous industry in producing incidental music every time the plays produced, 192 00:18:15,390 --> 00:18:18,900 which is one of the reasons why you get all that Mendelssohn used in Midsummer 193 00:18:18,900 --> 00:18:24,960 Night's Dream is they've got to keep changing the forest back into Athens. And so we just got to do something practical. 194 00:18:24,960 --> 00:18:28,140 Exactly. In the meantime, it's a very pragmatic business. 195 00:18:28,140 --> 00:18:33,390 And nowadays, when a director is going to make a choice about that setting and the design of a play, 196 00:18:33,390 --> 00:18:36,780 then they're going to commission music that supports that design. 197 00:18:36,780 --> 00:18:43,590 And it's much more a directorial choice as to whether it's going to be Strauss waltzes or music concrete, 198 00:18:43,590 --> 00:18:49,860 like that famous King Lear in Stratford in the 50s, or whether it's going to be jazz or what it's going to be. 199 00:18:49,860 --> 00:18:54,450 You can expect that one of the main ways in which the audience is going to be told what 200 00:18:54,450 --> 00:18:59,970 they're supposed to be feeling is likely to be provided by musicians as well as by the actors. 201 00:18:59,970 --> 00:19:04,680 Simon, do you think that the same ethic was underlying use of music in earlier productions? 202 00:19:04,680 --> 00:19:11,370 It's difficult to know how far musical sound worlds would necessarily have to cohere or not with the stage world. 203 00:19:11,370 --> 00:19:16,380 I suppose the obvious analogy here is if we think about Henry Beecham, the patron during Titus Andronicus, 204 00:19:16,380 --> 00:19:20,970 which is the only source we have costuming in only play in which what we seem to have is a 205 00:19:20,970 --> 00:19:26,400 nice mixture of kind of bits of Elizabethan garb with kind of Roman touches on the outside. 206 00:19:26,400 --> 00:19:31,410 An approach to stage in classical history there is not trying to be utterly specific. 207 00:19:31,410 --> 00:19:37,720 So perhaps if we were to stand out to think about music, I'm not sure it would necessarily then follow that the well being worked on the stage with. 208 00:19:37,720 --> 00:19:41,170 Necessarily here with musical numbers in quite the same way, I suppose. 209 00:19:41,170 --> 00:19:44,500 The problem here is simply we've lost so much in terms of incidental music. 210 00:19:44,500 --> 00:19:49,450 The problem is with songs, we can sometimes find them because we have the words and so we can go to musical sources. 211 00:19:49,450 --> 00:19:52,660 If all we have is music, we're not really going to find that elsewhere in the archive. 212 00:19:52,660 --> 00:19:58,000 So we have a very, very limited means to track down any incidental music, and that makes it very hard to trace these things. 213 00:19:58,000 --> 00:19:58,540 On the other hand, 214 00:19:58,540 --> 00:20:06,490 there are moments where we can think about what's going on dramatically and how particular types of music might have useful associations. 215 00:20:06,490 --> 00:20:13,570 One example might be, for example, The Winter's Tale, where we have a statue coming to life now that's going to draw on certain traditions. 216 00:20:13,570 --> 00:20:21,290 Pygmalion is obviously going to be working away there. But there's also a hermetic alchemical tradition of statues being brought to life by music. 217 00:20:21,290 --> 00:20:26,050 This type of occult chemical theory was very trendy in the early 60s, 218 00:20:26,050 --> 00:20:32,530 and James the first was even sent a Christmas card with no chemical fukin and still in children's parties today. 219 00:20:32,530 --> 00:20:36,290 Such is the enduring tradition, a wonderful, wonderful tradition. 220 00:20:36,290 --> 00:20:41,290 This perhaps allow us to speculate, well, what kind of music would therefore make sense to bring the statue to life? 221 00:20:41,290 --> 00:20:43,960 Because it's very clear from the text it's the music that brings the statue to life. 222 00:20:43,960 --> 00:20:47,110 Well, perhaps then we should be going to the alchemical music that survived. 223 00:20:47,110 --> 00:20:51,760 Michael Meyer has a collection of writings in which contains lots of music. 224 00:20:51,760 --> 00:20:56,770 Perhaps that would be inappropriate music to think of as fitting to that only context. What is alchemical music? 225 00:20:56,770 --> 00:20:59,500 What makes it different from other forms of incidental music? 226 00:20:59,500 --> 00:21:06,430 The main thing about it is that it allows alchemy to work so it has the power to turn base metals together. 227 00:21:06,430 --> 00:21:11,170 That has the power to give eternal life and allows you to unite yourself with Christ. 228 00:21:11,170 --> 00:21:16,450 Those was a kind of Christian version of alchemy happening at the time, somewhere between a metaphor, 229 00:21:16,450 --> 00:21:22,600 a clue as to how to do the chemistry and a magical force itself in the way that it's written about in these various texts. 230 00:21:22,600 --> 00:21:24,850 So they might come on the set of fugues that he presents. 231 00:21:24,850 --> 00:21:29,110 Very interesting because they're in a book called Atlanta Fugitives, which is based on the myth of Atlanta. 232 00:21:29,110 --> 00:21:32,980 And the idea is that the Lopata is the apples, which are laid out in a nice row, 233 00:21:32,980 --> 00:21:37,400 and then the two characters pursuing one another with the two figure voices moving along and consort like that. 234 00:21:37,400 --> 00:21:41,290 So you've got a very kind of heavily programatic composition. 235 00:21:41,290 --> 00:21:46,840 It's a wonderful text because my sort of clear description, precisely what symbolic work it's doing. 236 00:21:46,840 --> 00:21:50,230 And that really tells us how much symbolic work can be placed on things in the period. 237 00:21:50,230 --> 00:21:54,610 I mean, I suppose a far more obvious example of that would be something like lacrimal by Darwin, 238 00:21:54,610 --> 00:21:58,120 where we've quite simply got the volunteers represented by the Knights rolling down the page. 239 00:21:58,120 --> 00:22:02,200 So music could certainly bear a wide range of symbolic ideas, I think, in the period. 240 00:22:02,200 --> 00:22:06,130 And so that would be how the community. But of course, you'd have to know. Yes. So that was what was going on. 241 00:22:06,130 --> 00:22:09,580 Otherwise, you just had some rather nasty tricks that actually comes to light. Yeah. 242 00:22:09,580 --> 00:22:15,220 Or you just noticed that you studs on your tablet had just had to go in between. 243 00:22:15,220 --> 00:22:21,640 Yes. I think topics were a huge way that people in that time period would recognising they'd have recorded music. 244 00:22:21,640 --> 00:22:26,740 So fanfares, the terror motif or death motif that they knew from operas that they had seen. 245 00:22:26,740 --> 00:22:33,040 I just think they became so powerful and emblematic, much more, much more than if we heard jazz, the things we associate with that. 246 00:22:33,040 --> 00:22:37,240 It's just a completely different sound world that I find it very hard to imagine. Absolutely. 247 00:22:37,240 --> 00:22:44,560 This kind of literally entrenched illusion is quite, I think, inimical to some of the ways that we like to use music today. 248 00:22:44,560 --> 00:22:49,000 But maybe we should use that reflection and take it into Shakespeare's text. 249 00:22:49,000 --> 00:22:53,260 What do you think Shakespeare means by allowing the characters to sing? 250 00:22:53,260 --> 00:23:04,030 I think that to the songs in Shakespeare performed some low status characters that often prefaced by an instruction to say, let's have some music. 251 00:23:04,030 --> 00:23:10,150 I think there are two very interesting characters who sing on stage who don't fit that context. 252 00:23:10,150 --> 00:23:15,520 And these are just very different ways because Desdemona is singing when it's 253 00:23:15,520 --> 00:23:21,790 just her immediate companion on stage and it's happened in a private setting, 254 00:23:21,790 --> 00:23:28,300 which makes it doesn't happen in a chamber acceptable because although she's performing, the world that they're performing in is a very private one. 255 00:23:28,300 --> 00:23:35,660 Yes. Whereas with Ophelia, you have a young girl singing actually by bawdy songs before the court. 256 00:23:35,660 --> 00:23:41,200 Denmark, which is actually very fact of the music that she sings, 257 00:23:41,200 --> 00:23:47,110 is signifying her madness because it's against all the etiquette that she would have been brought up with. 258 00:23:47,110 --> 00:23:53,980 The song she sings are all the folk songs from ballads, and there's a lot about sex or love that she sings. 259 00:23:53,980 --> 00:23:59,920 And most people don't work on trying to associate the things that she sings with things that happened in her life, 260 00:23:59,920 --> 00:24:02,800 that she sings about a journey that somebody has died. 261 00:24:02,800 --> 00:24:08,620 And it doesn't quite match up because she's saying that you love who's died but hasn't died at the time, that she's still alive. 262 00:24:08,620 --> 00:24:12,370 But her letter has stuck to the sort of the sort of confused things. 263 00:24:12,370 --> 00:24:19,060 But actually, to some extent, it's not so much the symbolism of what she's singing about. 264 00:24:19,060 --> 00:24:23,560 It's the very fact of her singing on stage before these people. 265 00:24:23,560 --> 00:24:29,320 That is how Shakespeare uses that. Yes, that's a really interesting link through that from the Ophelia songs. 266 00:24:29,320 --> 00:24:34,090 Back to what Desdemona sings, whether it's on being a popular ballad, incredibly, 267 00:24:34,090 --> 00:24:37,510 surprisingly, all of the known exemplars of this ballad and there are many. 268 00:24:37,510 --> 00:24:42,340 The period that also, from my perspective, about a woman who has been unfaithful, so in fact, 269 00:24:42,340 --> 00:24:45,850 something incredibly powerful, I think is going on when there's too many things that she is taking. 270 00:24:45,850 --> 00:24:53,050 What if it were to be sung by essentially a song about how she is unfaithful and turning it into a complaint of her having been forsaken? 271 00:24:53,050 --> 00:24:56,830 To talk to the about is a complaint to the lover forsaken of his love, 272 00:24:56,830 --> 00:25:01,450 and she makes a complaint of her lover, forsaken of her love, and the gendering is entirely switched. 273 00:25:01,450 --> 00:25:08,470 So this seems to me like an incredibly powerful way of reworking populism, not just powerful because it would be visible to an audience. 274 00:25:08,470 --> 00:25:15,010 Perhaps the general has been changed, but she's taken essentially a sum which men can use to moan about how they don't trust women and 275 00:25:15,010 --> 00:25:19,030 turns into something which instead Desdemona can use to complain about how badly treated her. 276 00:25:19,030 --> 00:25:24,410 Yes, but in both cases, I think it's that embedding a popular song into the text that allows him to make those shifts. 277 00:25:24,410 --> 00:25:32,740 Well, so there's a portion of it because she actually introduces the song as a song that she's heard from her mother's made Bulgari. 278 00:25:32,740 --> 00:25:39,020 So she's actually putting it into someone else's mouth. But it's also an old song, so you've always got it from somewhere else. 279 00:25:39,020 --> 00:25:46,720 She talks about what in her mind, and I think that's an interesting link to their music and magic in there's something else going on there that she, 280 00:25:46,720 --> 00:25:54,070 to some extent is knowing by singing about. I don't think she sort of knows what Awesomes is thinking without actually really knowing it, 281 00:25:54,070 --> 00:26:00,160 perhaps music or accessing different parts of your cognition, which I suppose is operational in the Affinia example as well, 282 00:26:00,160 --> 00:26:05,290 because it's perhaps a way of acknowledging madness or not acknowledging it, then revealing madness. 283 00:26:05,290 --> 00:26:07,870 That May was a behaviour alone could not. 284 00:26:07,870 --> 00:26:13,190 There's another interesting point about the context in which it's sung is that it's the only song in Shakespeare, 285 00:26:13,190 --> 00:26:24,160 I think that is actually repeated media sitting at the end when she has just been killed by her husband, who's obviously the bad guy with. 286 00:26:24,160 --> 00:26:29,890 So she actually sings it when he he's treated very badly. She sort of is this forsaken mother. 287 00:26:29,890 --> 00:26:33,940 And actually that echoes it's also to what I do of music. 288 00:26:33,940 --> 00:26:37,690 It brings in this sense of echoing what Desdemona has already gone through, 289 00:26:37,690 --> 00:26:42,610 which is already echoing because of conditions of fidelity and fidelity is already echoing what's happening. 290 00:26:42,610 --> 00:26:50,470 The play just sort of ties everything up really nicely and carries more meaning than all of the other songs. 291 00:26:50,470 --> 00:26:50,920 Yeah, 292 00:26:50,920 --> 00:27:02,350 and you can see why Verdi should pick on Othello and make it into such a very successful operatic adaptation that Turlough and very simply takes. 293 00:27:02,350 --> 00:27:08,080 That takes the way music is already working in that scene and sort of extends it to the whole play. 294 00:27:08,080 --> 00:27:14,920 Except he makes the play much more polla because as well as Desdemona singing a version of the Willo song, 295 00:27:14,920 --> 00:27:24,550 she's given a prayer to the Blessed Virgin, which is the musical counterpart to the other big thing that he puts in, which is the Yorgos credo. 296 00:27:24,550 --> 00:27:28,720 He has a Yorgos sing a whole aria about. Yes, I'm a kind of demonic atheist. 297 00:27:28,720 --> 00:27:35,710 I know, you know. So I'm I'm absolutely the opposite of Desdemona musically and ideologically. 298 00:27:35,710 --> 00:27:42,370 On the whole, opera sort of revolves around these two poles of what he sounds like and what Desdemona sounds like. 299 00:27:42,370 --> 00:27:50,830 But it's much more closely related to the way the original play thinks about music than some of the other Shakespeare based operas, I think. 300 00:27:50,830 --> 00:27:56,230 Yes. I suppose maybe we should bring round a discussion of Shakespeare being a trope within music itself. 301 00:27:56,230 --> 00:28:01,780 There have been so many different uses of his texts and dramas in musical culture that we have today. 302 00:28:01,780 --> 00:28:04,730 I think perhaps you could comment on that. 303 00:28:04,730 --> 00:28:13,440 I think Shakespeare, when I find it or play it or when the text is used in recitals that I've played or concerts that I find, 304 00:28:13,440 --> 00:28:15,260 there's a powerful sense of self consolation, 305 00:28:15,260 --> 00:28:22,340 which I think speaks to I think whether it's you're mad and you're singing about it or you're sad and you're singing about it or you're angry, 306 00:28:22,340 --> 00:28:31,910 angry, not a mad sense, mad, crazy, angry that either way, the Shakespeare text is so powerful and one set to music is in a positive sense. 307 00:28:31,910 --> 00:28:39,200 The self-indulgent nature of music magnifies the words and also turns them inward in a really special way. 308 00:28:39,200 --> 00:28:47,180 As a musician myself who has never performed Shakespeare play, I tend to think of it as quite declamatory as actors speaking to an audience. 309 00:28:47,180 --> 00:28:55,760 And when that is set to music, I tend to see that turn inward something and it adds a new dimension to the text. 310 00:28:55,760 --> 00:29:02,990 So as a musician, I find it is always a treat because it's the text that we all know typically really raised to another level. 311 00:29:02,990 --> 00:29:08,180 And in every sense, with every composer, it's quite different. And that interpretation is always fascinating to me. 312 00:29:08,180 --> 00:29:13,940 Yes, I suppose we could look perhaps to parallelism between the way that musicians use Shakespeare and Shakespeare uses music, 313 00:29:13,940 --> 00:29:21,920 and both are appealing to a sort of a trope of common experience in a sense, and that Shakespeare, so prominent in our society and culture generally, 314 00:29:21,920 --> 00:29:27,680 that music drawing on it is likely to achieve perhaps a greater resonance there by similarly, 315 00:29:27,680 --> 00:29:31,580 the use of song in Shakespeare and music will likely, I think, again, 316 00:29:31,580 --> 00:29:36,200 just allows a different resonating chamber, as it were, to offer it, 317 00:29:36,200 --> 00:29:41,020 although it must be said that occasionally the way in which this is carried out may seem quite bizarre to us. 318 00:29:41,020 --> 00:29:46,850 I think, like you were talking earlier about a sort of pastiche of China being used in the original version of the fairy queen. 319 00:29:46,850 --> 00:29:47,480 Well, yeah. 320 00:29:47,480 --> 00:29:54,620 I mean, in a way, it makes perfect sense in the late 17th century context that one of the masks which we've heard about in the fairy queen, 321 00:29:54,620 --> 00:30:00,950 the culminating one for the marriage of Theseus and Ippolita, the fairies turn up in court and say, 322 00:30:00,950 --> 00:30:06,920 you know, there are fairies, you know, will kill your incredulity. We'll put on a show for you right here, even now. 323 00:30:06,920 --> 00:30:09,050 And the show they put on includes this huge, 324 00:30:09,050 --> 00:30:16,730 spectacular set piece set in China with Chinese people singing about how great it is in China and how they're all faithful lovers. 325 00:30:16,730 --> 00:30:21,770 They all have the art of peace. And look at our lovely ceramics and here are some orange trees. 326 00:30:21,770 --> 00:30:27,950 There's this whole sheen was very spectacular because for a 17th century audience or a 17th century audience, 327 00:30:27,950 --> 00:30:36,600 China seemed to be this place that was like Arcadia, where people clearly had lots of time on their hands and just made lots of lovely ceramic vases. 328 00:30:36,600 --> 00:30:42,040 So, of course, it was a place of harmony and peace personally, clearly never heard any Chinese music. 329 00:30:42,040 --> 00:30:45,880 They seeing Orthodox European Baroque music to each other, these Chinese characters. 330 00:30:45,880 --> 00:30:50,390 And they probably didn't look very convincingly Chinese either. But it's this extra space. 331 00:30:50,390 --> 00:30:55,130 It's this place that is neither the forest nor the court. It's magically exotic. 332 00:30:55,130 --> 00:30:57,340 And of course, opera lovers exoticism. 333 00:30:57,340 --> 00:31:05,210 It's only Madame Butterfly except a bit more cheerful to do the Far East on stage because we all think we have escapism. 334 00:31:05,210 --> 00:31:12,050 That's what we like. That's one of the things music can do for us. It can take us out to somewhere else that we can't otherwise reach. 335 00:31:12,050 --> 00:31:17,870 Absolutely. I must admit, I was tickled, though, in our discussion of this earlier when you mentioned that a further relevance of the orange 336 00:31:17,870 --> 00:31:22,190 trees could be found in the fact that the patron of this production was William of Orange. 337 00:31:22,190 --> 00:31:26,840 So the mask written for the ages 15, 20, 30. 338 00:31:26,840 --> 00:31:31,790 Yes. Yeah. And he and Mary were great collectors of Chinese porcelain. 339 00:31:31,790 --> 00:31:37,100 So having lots of that on set, of course, is kind of like it brings us back to a common theme in this discussion, 340 00:31:37,100 --> 00:31:41,780 which has been the root of pragmatism at the bottom of a lot of artistic decisions. 341 00:31:41,780 --> 00:31:47,780 I think you were talking about that in terms of decisions made today with a lot of Shakespearean productions that use music. 342 00:31:47,780 --> 00:31:50,180 Yeah, I mean, certainly the Royal Shakespeare Company, 343 00:31:50,180 --> 00:31:56,480 who have a charter to keep on doing Shakespeare plays over and over again, also have a policy that they always use live music. 344 00:31:56,480 --> 00:32:02,210 So they've got a set number of professional musicians who live in Stratford-Upon-Avon and they've got much else to do. 345 00:32:02,210 --> 00:32:07,610 So, of course, they're going to produce scores for those musicians, possibly supplemented by some. 346 00:32:07,610 --> 00:32:14,180 Mohideen, if they decided to go for a particularly opulent sound and bring in a few more string players. 347 00:32:14,180 --> 00:32:18,380 But usually it's a band of about four or five, often not visible. 348 00:32:18,380 --> 00:32:24,560 I mean, often the music is piped into the auditorium anyway, which rather spoils the sense of liveness. 349 00:32:24,560 --> 00:32:31,100 But of course, we're not in the 19th century anymore. There isn't an orchestra pit that used to be an orchestra pit in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. 350 00:32:31,100 --> 00:32:40,190 But of course, it's now being rebuilt to have a thrust stage so you can still do fun things like having musicians under the stage as Antony Cleopatra, 351 00:32:40,190 --> 00:32:47,690 where we hear cornets under the stage and the soldiers don't know what's going on and decide, well, it's the God Hercules abandoning Antony. 352 00:32:47,690 --> 00:32:54,440 That's obviously what that would stop. So there are effects like that with bringing musicians on stage. 353 00:32:54,440 --> 00:33:01,470 There are some economic consideration. If musicians appear on stage amongst the actors, they get paid extra. 354 00:33:01,470 --> 00:33:04,160 Yeah, I have an old old friend who works at the Globe from. 355 00:33:04,160 --> 00:33:09,620 Time to time, and if he has to actually cross the stage thumping a drum rather than just sitting at the back thumping a drum, 356 00:33:09,620 --> 00:33:16,340 he gets a slightly higher rate of pay, which may discourage the use of procession's with drummers in them. 357 00:33:16,340 --> 00:33:21,410 So I realise we've got this far without discussing The Tempest, which is a play with a lot of music. 358 00:33:21,410 --> 00:33:28,280 So perhaps let's move on to that is actually reasonably unusual to have what we do have for The Tempest, 359 00:33:28,280 --> 00:33:32,570 namely what appear to be songs composed specifically for the first production, 360 00:33:32,570 --> 00:33:37,250 perhaps around 16 or nine, six in 10 at the Golden Blackfriars by Shakespeare Company. 361 00:33:37,250 --> 00:33:43,010 And these songs by Robert Johnson, different Robert Johnson to the one he sold his soul in the 20th century. 362 00:33:43,010 --> 00:33:49,370 This one was a lutenist, eventually becoming a lutenist. James is caught but working in Denmark for many years before that. 363 00:33:49,370 --> 00:33:54,800 Many of the songs that we have, Shakespeare plays, are songs which appear to have been composed elsewhere and then integrated. 364 00:33:54,800 --> 00:34:02,900 But we seem to have with full faith and faith. And where the bee sucks is the original settings by Johnson in a 17th century manuscript. 365 00:34:02,900 --> 00:34:08,540 And that's quite fitting for a play which seems to put music at the heart of its dramatic purpose. And in such striking ways. 366 00:34:08,540 --> 00:34:13,460 It's interesting, again, a play which seems to be engaging with ideas of otherness, indifference, 367 00:34:13,460 --> 00:34:17,990 perhaps not quite using the same geographical locations as these later examples we've just mentioned. 368 00:34:17,990 --> 00:34:24,920 But it puts music at the heart of the way it seems to be working through those ideas in The Tempest and the songs, all variables. 369 00:34:24,920 --> 00:34:29,270 And I think largely I don't speak much alone. 370 00:34:29,270 --> 00:34:35,910 Things like Where the Bee Sucks is actually the way of introducing the character soliloquy. 371 00:34:35,910 --> 00:34:40,650 Exactly. And there's a sort of sense that because there's some magical beating, you actually get it in song. 372 00:34:40,650 --> 00:34:45,920 Well, the spoken word and it's such a lovely one, which seems to be more or less automatically redundant, 373 00:34:45,920 --> 00:34:52,340 we're kind of waiting for everything to be tied up. And we have this peculiar moment where Prospero's having his robe taken off and 374 00:34:52,340 --> 00:34:55,730 we get the song that it seems to do and very little apart from delaying the end, 375 00:34:55,730 --> 00:35:00,050 if we imagine it as a moment, which is, is that to give everyone that voice, 376 00:35:00,050 --> 00:35:06,470 which he perhaps hasn't had so much, I don't think that's quite a nice way of thinking about the play and be emphasising 377 00:35:06,470 --> 00:35:09,850 how significant music can be to the dramatic shape of something like The Tempest. 378 00:35:09,850 --> 00:35:16,490 Yeah, again, it's that using music to reach to another dimension and kind of get I mean, Aryal is almost pure energy. 379 00:35:16,490 --> 00:35:22,550 You can't quite tell what gender area is. And that varies very much over the play's performance history. 380 00:35:22,550 --> 00:35:26,000 And this is something composers have repeatedly taken up right down to Thomas. 381 00:35:26,000 --> 00:35:30,950 Ardeche, of course, does a whole lot of the tempest whenever that was about 10 years ago, 382 00:35:30,950 --> 00:35:38,480 in which Ariel has the most extraordinary and punishing high notes and really does sound like almost like something completely inhuman, 383 00:35:38,480 --> 00:35:43,100 almost like electricity rather than a character. But is that written for very high? 384 00:35:43,100 --> 00:35:51,900 Sacramento's wearing, as I remember it, extremely dayglo yellow and black costumes look like some sort of wasp. 385 00:35:51,900 --> 00:35:56,720 Interestingly, the other kind of musical threat to that band, the one which does the most sometimes interesting cultural work, 386 00:35:56,720 --> 00:36:01,160 is obviously Caliburn speech and actually take note of this kind of noise. 387 00:36:01,160 --> 00:36:10,280 It sounds and sweet at which you might remember it in the Olympic closing ceremony, I believe, as this kind of epitome of Shakespearean beauty. 388 00:36:10,280 --> 00:36:16,430 And I think that's a perfectly fair reflection in the text. And yet it's in the mouth of a character who is not perhaps framed in quite those ways. 389 00:36:16,430 --> 00:36:22,460 Quite how we then think about that speech and what that tells us about Caliban, I think is open to discussion. 390 00:36:22,460 --> 00:36:25,850 But it seems interesting that the music seems to be associated with everyone. 391 00:36:25,850 --> 00:36:30,410 Caliban, take on it, perhaps slightly polla figures, and yet it's kind. 392 00:36:30,410 --> 00:36:33,800 He's the one who demonstrates the most appealing response to music in the play. 393 00:36:33,800 --> 00:36:39,800 As you mentioned, the second that musical judgement is such an important thing to an audience, what other plays do you think? 394 00:36:39,800 --> 00:36:43,730 We see musical judgement play an important part in defining character? 395 00:36:43,730 --> 00:36:48,740 Because it's an interesting question. I don't think it's across the Shakespearean corpus because it's interesting to see it 396 00:36:48,740 --> 00:36:53,000 both in a history play and not you get something slightly like it's in Hamlet when, 397 00:36:53,000 --> 00:36:57,560 yes, he plays the recorder on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 398 00:36:57,560 --> 00:37:03,770 but that's more about a pun about being played like a record which isn't quite as aphoristic, I think, of Shakespeare, the phrase might become. 399 00:37:03,770 --> 00:37:08,210 But that's more about the performance skill. But that's certainly in Hamlet. 400 00:37:08,210 --> 00:37:12,050 There must be other examples where they must do that. So yes to start. 401 00:37:12,050 --> 00:37:16,640 Yes, yes. That man who has no music in his soul is a bit for trees and stratagems and spoils. 402 00:37:16,640 --> 00:37:21,080 One of the reasons we're supposed to recognise that Shylock is a complete outsider is that 403 00:37:21,080 --> 00:37:26,150 he wants his house soundproofed so that he can't hear any music coming in from the streets. 404 00:37:26,150 --> 00:37:33,410 And he talks in the trial scene about his hatred for Antonio being like the response of somebody to bagpipe music, 405 00:37:33,410 --> 00:37:37,460 which he says makes some people involuntarily urinate. 406 00:37:37,460 --> 00:37:43,850 And of course, we all know that's true of bagpipe music, but it's interesting that he that he brings it up. 407 00:37:43,850 --> 00:37:44,270 Yeah. 408 00:37:44,270 --> 00:37:54,350 That the Shakespeare canon is permeated by the expectation that music is going to be valued and that people who value music are the ones to trust. 409 00:37:54,350 --> 00:37:57,080 And then indeed that music is good for you. It's therapeutic. 410 00:37:57,080 --> 00:38:03,780 And Cordelia, has it played to King Lear in the recognition scene and that's what brings him around and enables their. 411 00:38:03,780 --> 00:38:07,980 Very brief moment of reunion to take place. 412 00:38:07,980 --> 00:38:15,930 I think it's interesting that Shakespeare appears to have lived briefly in the same house as Thomas Morley, who may have contributed it was a lover. 413 00:38:15,930 --> 00:38:25,230 And his last to as you like it in fifty ninety nine is rather nice idea of Shakespeare more commonly wrote. 414 00:38:25,230 --> 00:38:29,520 The setting of Come Away and Play in Shakespeare apparently quite liked it. 415 00:38:29,520 --> 00:38:33,810 So we think we know what characteristics of that would you say. A notable. 416 00:38:33,810 --> 00:38:41,610 It's very simple, very folksy. It was the first setting we did at this lecture recital in Morley style, but it was quite profound in its simplicity. 417 00:38:41,610 --> 00:38:45,180 Settings later became more modern and it really wasn't. 418 00:38:45,180 --> 00:38:51,210 I was on an interesting time that someone sings who isn't quite an enlightened person is important. 419 00:38:51,210 --> 00:38:57,420 In fact, the only time someone sings outside of a mask is Bob singing to himself to consoled himself on his mind himself in the woods. 420 00:38:57,420 --> 00:39:03,120 And so interesting. I feel like that's the moment where because you kind of don't like bottom, or at least I didn't if I have a body. 421 00:39:03,120 --> 00:39:08,460 And then at that moment that's when my view of him really changed and I kind of felt for him. 422 00:39:08,460 --> 00:39:14,640 Well, I suppose we should perhaps have an heir to the magical connotations of that song as part of his transformation. 423 00:39:14,640 --> 00:39:18,770 Maybe he's not singing. Maybe he's he hollering at that stage. Yes. 424 00:39:18,770 --> 00:39:22,740 Abscesses, which may have some bearing on how good a judge of music is. Yes. 425 00:39:22,740 --> 00:39:28,350 I saw production last week in which he has a line with the Today Show and he says, I have a good day for music. 426 00:39:28,350 --> 00:39:35,880 And the lines, the structure was added. Let's have some Bon Jovi, which is a choice about how you rate his musical judgement. 427 00:39:35,880 --> 00:39:41,470 It's about the nearest equivalent. We've got the Toms and the bones, which is to actually bring on the tongues. 428 00:39:41,470 --> 00:39:46,860 And the bones is a terrible good eerie music that the tones on the bones, you know, this is the percussion. 429 00:39:46,860 --> 00:39:51,810 Oh, it's like fire tongs. Yeah, it's like playing the spoon. 430 00:39:51,810 --> 00:40:00,540 And otherwise he's singing the song. He sings in the original When the Totani wakes up is is about birds and he just doesn't get the point of cuckoos. 431 00:40:00,540 --> 00:40:05,460 What point does he infer for the you. He just doesn't understand the joke in the song lyric about, 432 00:40:05,460 --> 00:40:13,680 about how nobody wants to hear the cuckoo and therefore who would pay any attention to say foolish things could be so stupid. 433 00:40:13,680 --> 00:40:17,100 Well, I suppose that's another interesting example of music or musical allusion, 434 00:40:17,100 --> 00:40:23,130 being able to provide a further voice to the fact that the character actually speaking to a lovely moment, in fact, 435 00:40:23,130 --> 00:40:28,500 in The Tempest when one of the characters come ashore and he's terrified about the lantern and he sings songs 436 00:40:28,500 --> 00:40:33,030 like The Might of this one where the action is made and the songs were about people having died or drowned. 437 00:40:33,030 --> 00:40:35,430 And that's just going to be joining us in another. 438 00:40:35,430 --> 00:40:41,400 But what he can't articulate verbally, which is I'm terrified and I might die, is coming through to the music. 439 00:40:41,400 --> 00:40:44,280 Yes. I suppose that returns to our discussion about Fiddler Desdemona, 440 00:40:44,280 --> 00:40:51,310 a sort of music providing an outlet for maybe thoughts above or below consciousness in some way. 441 00:40:51,310 --> 00:40:56,060 Right, well, I think we should probably wrap up at this stage. Thank you very much for your contribution today. 442 00:40:56,060 --> 00:40:57,980 I really enjoyed speaking to you all. 443 00:40:57,980 --> 00:41:04,910 And hopefully our listeners will also have enjoyed our conversations on Shakespeare and music for this 100th anniversary of his death, 444 00:41:04,910 --> 00:41:07,108 a special episode of In Our Spare Time.