¶In Conversation

Claire van Kampen - Director of Theatre Music

Could you explain your role as Director of Theatre Music at the Globe? What would you consider are the important aspects of your job?

The Director of Theatre Music looks after all the music throughout the theatre season in its overall context. That can be anything from what’s happening in the plays i.e. writing or arranging the music for them, to advice on which composers will be involved in the season. That’s essentially my job: to be an interface between the world of composition and theatre.

I am not really involved in the administration of the musicians in each play - I have an excellent assistant who helps me with that. The second half of my job is to be involved with the productions - as a musical point of focus for the players that are involved and to serve as a liaison point for management. There needs to be somebody there in a management capacity that can talk music talk with the musicians which, I think they find very important. I find it important because I can understand what the musicians are talking about. Often you do have to translate because actors and musicians do not speak the same language: their training is nothing like the same. The skills of musicians and actors do not really, in any way, comfortably fit together. I don’t think they ever did, even four hundred years ago. I doubt it was ever primarily actors playing the instruments, although as today actors might have had special musical skills. Musicians were always considered an elite group of people. I have no idea how they were paid - whether it was in proportion with actors. Musicians are a very specific group of people that need looking after in a different way - that, primarily, is the job of the Director of Theatre Music.

That job also extends to managing the kind of music that is needed in the creation or rehearsal of the plays. That can be anything from accompanying dance classes to arranging classes for the company. I like to teach the classes myself, as it keeps me in touch with the acting ensemble. I think it is important to see how they are progressing through rehearsals; you can lose touch with that very quickly. Part of my involvement with the show is actually writing music to the plays. I don’t think you can do one side without the other. For example, I would not read a script and then come in six weeks later with the score. Some composers do that but I never do - I just can’t get ideas that way. That’s why, in many cases, when you have a Director of Theatre Music, s/he’s usually a hands-on person. Very, very rarely would it be a purely academic person. I have Philip Pickett and Keith McGowan advising me on early music research. I myself would write up to two Globe productions a season, and maybe bits of music for other things throughout the year.

Which plays are you composing for this year?

Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. Each play will require me to take a different approach as a composer. Antony and Cleopatra, will be a lot more to do with archiving, researching and assembling the right kind of instrumentation than it will be about writing anything particularly original. But Julius Caesar is an early play, arguably the first play at the Globe. We don’t know that music was particularly developed as part of what they did at the Globe then. The play does start with the feast of Luperacal, which in Elizabethan England was still being celebrated clandestinely. Luperacal was prohibited by the Church, but it was a recognised feast and there was folk music in it. Of course, we have lost all our folk music culture so that’s something the Globe always throws back whenever I start a season - I’m always faced with ‘there was other music here; what was it?’ because we’ve lost the resources for finding folk music in our culture. It is the job of the composer to discover, or reconstruct what it might have been - that’s certainly the approach I plan to take with Julius Caesar.

Antony and Cleopatra is going to be an Elizabethan production, set in an Elizabethan style - we’re not going to Ancient Egypt or anything like that, so the instruments in both productions will be of the period of the plays.

After you have done your research what is the basic process of composing?

There are two aspects to writing music for plays. You have the internal aspect (as I call it) which is the music that the play dictates in stage directions: the writer may have called for a song and/or written the lyrics of the song… There may already be a song written. In The Merchant of Venice, I wrote the music for a song whose lyrics were already in the text. All that internal music has to be really discovered and placed in its correct context, just as I did for The Merchant of Venice.

The External music is how you shape and give a context to the production as a whole. It can serve many functions: it can link passages together, changes of scene, or changes of location. In The Merchant of Venice last year, you’re moving from Venice to Belmont. The external music is very important because nothing is going to change on stage: you’re just going to have two more characters come out and tell you that they are in Belmont. If you didn’t hear that line, you have to have a context - if you are continually changing from Venice to Belmont, you’ve got to feel different. The audience should feel - ‘I must be somewhere different; it sounds as though I must be somewhere different’: that’s a very important process and very difficult, certainly with the later plays. By the later plays – such as Antony and Cleopatra - music starts to become terribly important in terms of delineating locational context in storytelling. For example, in Antony and Cleopatra there is a description of hautbois underneath the stage in an atmospheric way. So we know that by that time - the period of Antony and Cleopatra, A Winter’s Tale and Cymberline - all the later plays - music had been used in an atmospheric, evocative, and magical sense. It had become something that may be used in a supernatural way. In A Winter’s Tale, music is used to bring the statue back to life. In the earlier plays, that doesn’t happen; you have to approach the plays in a slightly historical context. You have to hypothesise as to how the author might have been in his thinking, based on how complex the story is. That’s a very elaborate answer, isn’t it!

Basically, you start internally with the world of the play. A Winter’s Tale, was set in an African-esque setting. That setting will tell you immediately the instrumentation you need: you’ll start to move into marimbas and drums and percussive elements - you won’t use violins and cellos and sophisticated Elizabethan court instruments. The style of it is more difficult and, again, that can only come from the outcome of rehearsals - watching people working and seeing the emotional content of the work as it progresses.

It is very hard if you are working on a comedy. You can easily get the music wrong if you start writing it too early. You have to wait till the actors start to settle and then you see how you can add, not only support to the story, but also a counter point. For example, in a lot of the Shakespearean comedies you don’t need to support the humour by writing funny music because usually the physical comedy - the nature of the wit is so strong. Normally, you have to support a theme that’s full of pathos running underneath - the sad side of the play, not the funny side - and that darker side takes a bit of time to develop. I find writing music for comedy much harder than writing for tragedy, and I think I have written an equal proportion of each.

Do the demands of the Globe Theatre space influence the music you create for the productions?

Yes, the space effects it a lot. When I first came here, I thought there were absolute limitations. For example, you can’t use keyboards: acoustically, they simply don’t work. There is too much open air and it swallows up the sound - the sound decays. The keyboard produces a sound which is too short, too quick. You have the same problems with certain stringed instruments like violins. I’m never very happy with violins in the Globe they sound thin and they don’t sustain, unless you’re using them in very quiet passages of speech and then, they eerily can become too pre-dominant!

At first I though the demands of the space might be constrictive, but actually, what the Globe allows you to do is explore fully the instruments that were functioning during the time that the Globe was built. The Globe’s architecture is built very precisely on something called the Golden section principle. Most of our modern concert halls are not built using this technique anymore, but you will find this technique in places like St Paul’s Cathedral, the Whispering Gallery (which is a very good example) and most old Italian churches… If you go to Florence or Sienna, they are all built to those classical principals - for example, St. Mark’s church in Venice.What that means, basically, is that there are a certain group of instruments that respond to that kind of architecture. The best known ones are the early form of trumpet and trombone. Another instrument which responds very well is called the cornet, which is kind of a curved recorder with a kind of trumpet mouth piece. These instruments all respond to the acoustics because they are sympathetic with the same principles of architecture. If you explore instruments that use a particular kind of harmonic series, they work in the Globe in a way you would rarely hear them anywhere else - most of the musicians that play them agree that it is a fabulous acoustic space for those instruments. Of course, another thing that works well is percussion because the attack is very clear and crisp and you can get some fantastic sonorities on any wood based instruments like the marimba - any tuned percussion works well. So actually, far from being limiting, you have to re-think what your technique is about as a composer and stop using your favourite things - usually from the twentieth century - and start exploring other ranges of instruments. Then I don’t think it is problematic. Actually, the most effective instruments we use here also work well with the human voice - the spoken voice - better than a lot of modern instruments, even better than modern brass, which can be slightly overwhelming. If, for example, you are doing the pre-show music and you stop the music and the actor has to start that first scene, it is quite difficult to adjust your hearing after the blast of modern brass instruments. It is a delicate balance, and you can only find out by process of elimination: you try something and you realise that it’s not quite right, and funnily enough you start getting back to what you might have heard four hundred years ago. To be quite honest, there is still so much more to be explored in a contemporary way by composers writing for the plays--not just playing music of that period, but by writing new music, particularly for period instruments. Then that’s endlessly more interesting rather than saying, ‘Well I can’t use a piano’ or, ‘I can’t use my sampler, or my thousand favourite sounds that I’ve recorded from my last film’ or something! It’s a whole different style – like writing music under water!

How do you choose your musicians?

Various means: there is a core group called the Musicians of the Globe, who initially provided us with our early music players, particularly the woodwind and the brass element, and they in turn have players who they regularly play with. Gradually, you start to build a family of people all of whom like playing here in response to the space. Some musicians don’t respond to it, though most do. It isn’t for everybody, but it is for any musician that wants to be a performer rather than sit in studio with a newspaper. If you’re like the latter, then I wouldn’t even bother turning up to your band call, if I were you, as you’re in for a nasty surprise! I think it’s really for the younger player: you have to be prepared to play in a heavy costume in the heat or a too-light costume in the cold. It’s all that – you’ve got to be prepared and able to play from memory for no extra money! You have to be confident about memory. Younger players will normally be better at that than older players, who have ceased to need it. When we are younger and are at music college, everything is learnt from memory. For the keyboard player, every single thing you do is from memory; you are used to it. I think memorisation gets harder as you get older, so playing at the Globe is really for the younger player.

I look for people who can focus. I’m not really interested in people who are only here for an easy life, because it isn’t an easy life, it’s hard work. If your playing is not focused in practice, you will be exposed by the acoustics - you can hear things very clearly. I listen in most days - not every show - but I like players who are consistent. Obviously, consistent about turning up, as well - it’s helpful! I do expect a certain discipline, because I feel being a musician brings, automatically, an incredibly competitive environment. If you get a job, then half the job is being extremely reliable. It’s kind of a knife-edge situation: people are depending on you. Attendance is really important.

I like a flexibility of mind. I like it if you’re in a technical rehearsal and the whole company is on stage and there is a cue that just doesn’t quite work yet, and I can shout up from my position on stage, ‘Why don’t you just change the ending to these few notes?’ I like a player to go ‘Yeah, fine, we’ll try it’. I don’t like it when a player will block that: ‘Oh no, we didn’t try that in a band call.’ That attitude doesn’t interest me. The musicians have got to have a very flexible approach to changing because you can change an entire score - it can be completely changed from the first band call to the last preview. Though it rarely is, it can be, and you must teach the musicians to handle that, they don’t learn that normally. That’s a very foreign thing for musicians: to change from what you’re set. Unlike acting, music is very set; it is a very precise skill and for the theatre, you are asking them to be imprecise yet clear, and to play well. It is hard, but I look for that flexibility. I look for a good-natured, patient, flexible and creative kind of approach.

I also see if they can improvise, if they can do something that’s improvisatory - if I can say, ‘play something that’s like an emotional outburst, maybe starting on A flat and ending on G’ a 7^th higher. A lot of players would think you are just barking mad (and maybe they all do!), but they’ll have a go and if I like it, I’ll tell them. I think they like that: the players like the freedom. If they don’t like it, they don’t come back! Gradually, we are building up a group of people that we are thinking of much more as our family.

Last year you were able to integrate the musicians into the acting company. Would you mind telling us a little bit about that?

A lot of effort has been made, unlike any other theatre I’ve worked for, including the RSC and the National - to integrate the musicians into the company. That can’t be done throughout the rehearsal period because we just don’t have the money to do that and the majority of the musicians’ time would be wasted. But I think they sense that their opinion is valuable. We ask them for feedback; we like to know what they think about their house agreement, if they think there is anything that they feel doesn’t work… They sit in the Green Room, they don’t sit in separate rooms. In all other theatres there is a band room for the musicians. You don’t generally mix with the actors unless you decide to, and even then it is a bit ‘separate camps’, unless you’re the Music Director and a floater. But that’s not in any way ideal circumstances. When Mark (Rylance) and I came here, we really wanted it to be different. The big first step was the negotiation of a contract that recognised the fact that everyone was on pretty much an equal kind of wage and the piece of pie that you carved up for the musicians on a pro-rata base; represented that fairly. In other theatres the actors usually know that the musicians are paid more than they are and that’s always the first bone of contention. The first bit of conflict starts when the actors see the musicians downing tools in the middle of the scene for a tea-break, so we also negotiated a four hour session instead of a three hour session. It avoids that awkward tea-break situation. Little simple things like that count hugely when everybody’s tense; our negotiations avoid the big rows. I think those tiny, tiny details build up a composite picture that the musicians feel is very performance-friendly and they don’t feel different from the acting company. So far it’s worked very well!