17. Bill Barclay on Shakespeare and Music

Former Director of Music at Shakespeare's Globe, Bill Barclay, tells Anjna all about the place of music in Shakespeare, and passing the proverbial torch to the next generation of theatre-makers. 

Transcript

Anjna Chouhan:                Welcome to Shakespeare Alive, a podcast from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

                                                My name's Anjna, and we're joined today by composer, director, performer and producer, Bill Barclay. I'm not sure where to start with Bill's accomplishments, because I'm pretty convinced that there isn't anything he doesn't know about, although he's far too humble to say so himself. But at the moment, Bill is Artistic Director of Concert Theatre Works, where he creates and tours productions for full orchestra that also combine actors, dance, puppetry, and film. And naturally, between 2012 and 2019, Bill was Director of Music at Shakespeare's Globe.

                                                So Bill is a leading international voice on Shakespeare's Music, and he's traveled far and wide to talk about his specialty, The Music of the Spheres. He co-edited Shakespeare Music and Performance for Cambridge University Press in 2017, and he has a forthcoming anthology with Oxford University Press on the subject of Shakespeare and music. So, Bill is joining us from Mexico. So, our connectivity was somewhat ropey when we had this conversation. I've tried my very best, but please do forgive any variations in audio quality.

                                                It is such a pleasure to have you with us, Bill. We usually start these conversations by asking how you came to Shakespeare. What was your route to Shakespeare, Bill?

Bill Barclay:                         I had an amazing Shakespeare teacher in high school, and he introduced me to the plays by doing a play every year, but also to the actor training at Shakespeare and Company, which is in western Massachusetts. I was really drawn to that line of work and left high school and then spent 10 years at Shakespeare and Company really developing that aesthetic. And while I was there, I got extremely interested in the music of Shakespeare and ended up composing for lots of their plays while I was acting for them and that's just sort of how it happened. Fast forward 15 years later, and music and Shakespeare has kind of taken over my life.

Anjna Chouhan:                Sure, it definitely has. Can you tell us a little bit more about the place of music within Shakespeare?

Bill Barclay:                         Music is quite an invisible part in Shakespeare because, of course, music is incorporeal. It's dissoluble, it's invisible. Most productions that people see of Shakespeare today have canned music, recorded music, and they don't have live musicians on stage, so we are a further data point away from Shakespeare in making music less visible. But of course, in Shakespeare's time when he was alive, no one had any experience of disembodied music.

                                                Disembodied music, which is music that where you can't tell the musician or the singer playing, the that the music that you're hearing, disembodied music providence of the fairy world, the music of spheres, magic, sorcery, witchcraft. It would be very strange for them indeed, metaphysical for an Elizabethan person to hear music and not have any idea who was playing it or why they were playing it. So music is very tied to person, to function in the Elizabethan imagination, and Shakespeare employees musicians so much more frequently in the world of his plays than we tend to do today.

                                                This is typically because of the economics of theatre. It's expensive to have extra cast members. Most of the players require quite a hefty cast list already. Most theatres are reticent to hire an extra five or six people, or even one person to be an onstage musician. But music and musicians specifically are such a huge part of Shakespeare's ... The way he presents a story, the way he creates eventfulness in the theatre. What I've tried is to really remind the audience how integral the musicians are into the experience of the play. And when we do that successfully, it just makes the whole event of the play come alive in such a magical way that I hope it inspires more theatres to take that approach.

Anjna Chouhan:                I'm sure it does inspire many people, Bill. And it's interesting that you're talking about this idea that music is disembodied for many of our experiences today, but in Shakespeare's day, the musicians were so central to not just the actual experience of listening to music, but the experience of being in a theatre. And you just said there that actually the music's part of the action. But I'm also thinking about in Henry IV, where you have the Welsh lady and she sings, and that's the extent of that instruction. How do you deal with things like that?

Bill Barclay:                         So very often the director has already decided what they want to do at this moment. And very often they've already caught this moment before the composer's hired. But if the director wants to feature the moment and has not cut it, that it's the composer's job to understand basically what is the function of this moment in the play. That may sound obvious, but there are so few songs in Shakespeare that very often it's common enough for the composer to just go, "Oh, I want to write a beautiful song and maybe show off a bit." But that's really not the point.

                                                This moment is extremely touching because it's right in the middle of the B plot of all the machinations about how they're going to take over the throne, Westmoreland and Northumberland and Owen Glendower, and it's actually quite a very strange scene, to be fair. But in this moment we have this lovely, "My lady speaks no English. I, no Welsh." And the song has to tell the story of this, this love story among different people, fundamentally different tribes within England at that moment.

                                                And so the song is sung by a woman who doesn't have any lines to say, lines to say the audience understands, has an important job to communicate something ineffable to the audience. Either she has a beautiful voice and we understand that music is her love language, or she's so authentic in singing that we understand what makes that relationship tick. Either way, the song is a break from us following the galloping horse that is Shakespeare's iambic pentameter. And the break should be a welcome break, and it should be a moment when we just realize something unique about these people. It's not long. It should only be maybe 40 seconds, a minute long. But it's a very, very special moment, and oftentimes I'll get involved when I was director of music at the Globe, and if the song is cut, I'll then go to the director and plead the case for including the song, because it's such a great opportunity for the audience to relax a bit and just listen to a beautiful tune.

Anjna Chouhan:                That brings us back to this magic or that disembodied power within music itself. I was just thinking, Bill, about the end of the Winter's Tale and thinking about this romance play, and the scene where Hermine's statue comes to life and there's there's music playing in the background. And when you were talking it made me think how little we have background music in Shakespeare. That idea that there's something underscoring. It comes up in the merchant of Venice.

Bill Barclay:                         And if you want music divorced from the musician, it's either from magic or for revelation or fairies or witchcraft. In that moment in the Winter's Tale, of course, it is magical. Paulina is creating this magical [inaudible 00:07:57] agreement between the people. And it is one of the examples of the disembodied music that signifies the invisible world. We're unconcerned with who's making the music. The music happens magically, the statue comes to life. Leontes drops to his knees. All is right in this world of suffering and pain.

Anjna Chouhan:                You have toured the world with your talk, The Music of the Spheres. And I wonder if you could just tell our listeners a little bit about that. The sort of harmony and that magical quality within music from an early modern understanding of it.

Bill Barclay:                         The Elizabethans inherited the Neoplatonic philosophy of the Music of the Spheres, which is that the planets are singing pitches that are inaudible to us, but is the song of creation. Many cultures have a similar theory, which is quite odd that it's shared, but that the planets are basically revolving in celestial beauty and harmony. And in fact, Plato's concept was that the sirens that would sing Odysseus mad, it's those sirens that are sitting on top of the planets humming constant pitches, and that's the music of the spheres. For them, as I mentioned before, disembodied music was Celestial music, because that was what magic was. Magic was the song of creation that you hear maybe in a moment of divine revelation. Cleopatra, at the end of her life when she hears Antony calling for her in her dream, "I dreamt there was an Antony. His voice was property as all the tuned spheres."

                                                So even at the end of Pericles, where a character has a disembodied experience and he gets reunited with his daughter Marina and he hears the music of the spheres. So here we have a person in ecstasy, and when they're in ecstasy, they can actually hear the invisible music that is celestial music. Elizabethians felt that that was completely factual. That you could commune with the most beautiful music of the heavens in moments of highest revelation. The music we're meant to make on earth was always meant to imitate the celestial music. So we should play music as beautiful as possible. We should use the harmonic series to try and tune us to the intervals that are found in physical science. We should tune everybody towards the stars, towards the perfection of the stars.

                                                That was very much in vogue in the time and references to it are littered all over Shakespeare's plays. Not in the songs themselves sometimes, but the characters will make side comments on it. I think one of the woodsmen says a duke senior in As You Like It, I think he says it of Jaques. "If he compact of jars grows musical, we shall have shortly discord in the-

Anjna Chouhan:                In the spheres.

Bill Barclay:                         Now of course today, music isn't about beauty much of the time. The 20th century has created this huge lineage through obviously serialism and atonality and all the different genres of music that are about aggression or dissonance or exploring the boundaries of what music is, and all this has its place in time. But it's important to realize that Shakespeare when he thought of music was thinking about sweet sounds. And this isn't to say that dissonance and noise doesn't have a place in modern productions of Shakespeare. It's more to say that you wants to create dissonance, you have to know that you are cutting quite aggressively across Shakespeare's own toolkit, and that can give a production a rawness and an energy and a vibrancy and a relevancy that's actually quite powerful [inaudible 00:11:43] starts to sing a beautiful song, Come Away Death. Old and antique song.

                                                What Shakespeare is intending here is a tuneful respite from the gallopy horse of his major [inaudible 00:11:55]. Simplicity is mastery. And this is what's really the hardest thing to communicate to composers of Shakespeare. Showing off musically by the composer, flexing his muscles, is really not an authentic Shakespearian gesture. The tunes that Shakespeare imagined to be used in the plays were tunes that already people could hear on the street corner. They were tunes that were around for 100 years. They were melodies that everybody knew. It's just that Shakespeare was writing new poetry to familiar songs. So there wasn't the presence of a composer trying to reinvent the wheel. It's just more like the whole community with this common bedrock of a few hundred songs that are always trying to emulate the music of the spheres, and to emulate the music of invisible worlds. That was the main gesture and performing music within the plays.

Anjna Chouhan:                And from your perspective as a composer, when you're trying to engage with this narrative of the music of the spheres, but simultaneously communicate to audiences that they're listening to music that's meant to be familiar, but that's also supposed to connect them to this divine cosmos around them, how does one begin to start doing that, to start that communication?

Bill Barclay:                         Oh, goodness. Well, I don't know. Typically you have to study the things that I was just rattling on about. And then let your intuition work on you in quite a subconscious way where a melody might come to you. I try using older melodies. I try riffing off of a melody that maybe everyone will know, an old spiritual or an old folk song, and then turning it around Shakespeare's words to make it sound like an old song, but without the audience going, "Is that Elvis, or is that Coldplay, or is that Roy Orbison?" It's quite difficult to do. When it's done best, it's a new tune, or it might be a patched together old melody, but it sounds easy. It's beautiful, it's easy, any actor singing it can own it and make their own.

                                                And this is really the other challenge about it, Anjna, is that it's the actor that has to do the song. So if you've written a song that the actor is uncomfortable with, if you've written it in a range that the actor is struggling with, if you've written it in a way where it doesn't get along with the other musical elements on stage, like for example the singer is far from the band or can't hear the track, you're in a situation where the actor is not comfortably selling the moment. And that's another indication that you're not really doing your job effectively.

                                                It's one thing to write a beautiful song, but it's another thing entirely to create the environment whereby actor feels like they can really do something beautiful in a live performance. And that's kind of about personal skills, and it's about confidence building, and then create an open dialogue where if they go off pitch or if they lose their way, or if they have vocal fatigue, you can step in during the run and work with them on making sure that the song will still survive as the production evolves. So it's a really special ... Composing for Shakespeare is really altogether a wildly different art form.

Anjna Chouhan:                And also it sounds to me as though it's vaguely comparable to potentially how Shakespeare and his company will have worked with one another, in that it's more organic and it's responding to specific individuals, the individual actors, the musicians, and what their needs and what their skills and ranges were. That you're speaking directly to them. Not just that Shakespeare was writing songs that they were familiar with and that they could perform for audiences, but also lines and bits of dialogue and bits of business that's specific to them. And it seems so much more personal when you talk about it that way, in the realm of music that you're designing, composing and navigating around an individual actor. I think that's a really magical experience.

Bill Barclay:                         That's absolutely right. You really do have it. It's about a practical problem to be solved. Actual putting down of notes on a page is almost incidental to the effortlessness that you need to achieve in the final product.

Anjna Chouhan:                We're just going to pull us for a quick break.

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Anjna Chouhan:                You're listening to Shakespeare Alive with me, Anjna, and I'm talking to Bill Barclay, former director of music at Shakespeare's Globe.

                                                Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your experience of composing specifically for the globe, and that space. Because it has its own unique performance practice parameters.

Bill Barclay:                         Yeah, I did 130 shows there as director of music, and I composed about a dozen productions. It's extraordinary in a world where we are dealing with technology in the theatre everywhere. We're just in a digital world now in the theatre. It's amazing working in a space where you were entirely working with analog logic. You have natural light, you have acoustic instruments, and the singers are not going to be amplified. In the original practices rubric where you are using only instruments Shakespeare would recognize, clothing Shakespeare would recognize, that is the most extreme version of the Globe experience. And it's actually really rare for the globe to operate that way. Most people who have only seen a show or two at the Globe don't realize that the Globe may only do an original practices production once a year. And certainly there were years when we didn't do any when I was there.

                                                It's very special to get to operate in that toolkit, and just to speak with regard to the music and original practices for a second, when you hear some of London's Renaissance specialists playing a tune in five and six parts that that was written 400 years ago, and vibrating that the shams and the dulceons and sackbuts and hurdy-gurdies, [inaudible 00:18:47] and tabors, just electrifying. It's completely transportive. Audiences can't see these strange instruments. The players are in costume, they're moving while they're playing, the sounds are foreign, the tuning is foreign, the construction of the music feels like something that most people have never listened to before. And it really is just ... It's like a rocket ship taking off. And for me, there's nothing like it. It's very special and it's very rare.

                                                And so we've recorded some of that music because it's just so rare that the Globe, even the Globe, will do productions like that. And the truth is because it's just very expensive. But it's too bad because it's extraordinary. Audiences go mad for it. The production really can take off if all the elements are pulled together. And those are some of the most rewarding experiences I've had at the Globe. Watching audiences, their faces with delight as they hear these new sounds, and they see these actors excelling at this language, it really comes alive in such a beautiful way.

                                                One of the qualities of early instruments before technology really made them sound better, for lack of a better phrase, is they have very piercing timbres. Just for example, the sackbut is a Renaissance trombone. So we know [inaudible 00:20:12] that the bell of trombone flairs quite a lot. The bell of the sackbut flairs a little bit, but not quite as much. Same with the recorders. Sometimes the recorders don't flair at all on the bottom. Sometimes they flair a little bit, but they don't flair as much as say a modern oboe or clarinet does. The result is that these instruments have a more piercing sharpness, and a directionality that's more marked. Such that if I play sackbut facing you and then I moved the bell of it say eight meters to your left, you hear only about half as loud of a sound.

                                                So when you combine Renaissance instruments together, you have a sharper, thrilling, brighter, slightly piercing sonority. And in a resonating chamber like the Globe, which is all oak, all of that wood, so all that piercing sound buzzes and bounces around. You literally have a musical sensation that thrills the blood. It might not be as loud as seven trombones on stage, but it completely does something alchemically different to your body and the vibrations that you have in your body, than say a group of modern instruments would. And that's what's so unique is people stare at the band and they just go, "Oh my God, it's all unfamiliar. It sounds unfamiliar. It feels unfamiliar. It looks unfamiliar." And that's why in the interval, or before the show starts, or the jig at the end, we will bring the musicians down to the audience to let the audience hear it up-close, see it up close, appreciate all the craftsmanship that goes to the instruments and the musicality, because it's so thrillingly strange. And it's wonderful to hear that music in that venue. It does something to you. It certainly does something to me that no other musical experience does.

Anjna Chouhan:                And you used the word alchemical, which I think is a wonderful word to reach for, Bill, because it reminds me of that cosmic harmony you were talking about that disembodied, angelic, heavenly sound. And it does become visceral. It does transport you to a different kind of world. And I guess on a slight tangential note to that, it's worth talking about the fact that you had set up the candlelight concerts in the Sam Wanamaker Theatre as well. It's a very different kind of space, but the instruments would have sounded very different in there too. Can you tell us a little bit about that space and working with the music in there?

Bill Barclay:                         Sure. So the indoor theatre, the Jacobean theatre that was built in 2014 has an indoor acoustic, which is completely different than the outdoor open anarchic Globe inside. Inside of the Wanamaker we can make very small sounds and have it heard by everybody. Also the musicians follow how the actor's breathing, when the actor takes a pause, when the cue line for the next actor comes in. It's a different kind of exchange between the creators, and the audience feels right on top of everything in the Wanamaker because no matter where you sit, you are no more than eight meters from either an actor's voice or from the musician's instrument. So really, 320 people are right on top of the action in a really dynamic way.

                                                Because Shakespeare was using this theatre very late in his career, too late really to make that big of a difference to Shakespeare, but it made a huge difference to 12, 1610, 1612 all the way up to the 1640s Shakespeare's company was [inaudible 00:23:59], because the romances, which Shakespeare we think did experience indoors, all has so much more music in them. And the Jacobean plays that follow, and the Caroline plays that follow, all feature much more music. Marston's plays require more music. Duchess of Malfi, John Webster's plays, John Ford's plays. They make better uses of music than even say Shakespeare. An early history cycle, Henry V.

Anjna Chouhan:                I was watching a video on your YouTube channel, Bill, where you were talking about the connection between music today and I guess wellbeing, and how being able to connect with music makes you a better person. Could you just talk a bit more about that, because it's fascinating.

Bill Barclay:                         Well one of my themes of my life is music as medicine, and music has always been used medicinally. And that reality has so crept into our lives in, again, invisible ways. Because we turn music on to regulate our mood all the time. It just goes unrealized through most people that this is medicinal for our mental health. And if we realize that it is actually medicine, and if we give it that respect, we will probably use it more often, or could use it more intentionally to align us behind certain objectives.

Anjna Chouhan:                Do you have a favorite song from Shakespeare's canon? A song or a piece of music that he refers to that you're particularly fond of?

Bill Barclay:                         I love Take O These Lips Away from Measure for Measure. I love O Mistress Mine from Twelfth Night.

Anjna Chouhan:                You like the pensive ones.

Bill Barclay:                         Those two songs hit direct. There's so bittersweet. They just remind us that life is fleeting and that a song must end and the world must go on. For me, this is all about the practice of mindfulness. The songs are meant to be short. The moments are meant to be fleeting. Life is short, and beautiful moments must be savored because they're special. They treat the subject of how fleeting life is. But in those songs, it's melancholic. It comes across as quite a complicated that we have to enjoy things before they're gone. It just speaks to my heart.

Anjna Chouhan:                Oh, well the youth the stuff will not endure.

Bill Barclay:                         Exactly right, Anjna.

Anjna Chouhan:                I'm conscious that this is an enormous question. What comes to your mind initially when we talk about Shakespeare now in the present? What do you think the relevance of the position of Shakespeare is?

Bill Barclay:                         When you were asking the question, the first thing that it made me think about was we need to ask young people to reinvent Shakespeare all the time. Shakespeare, the plays are meant to be played. And there are so few people who know how to play more than the very youngest of young people. Some of the best Shakespeare I've ever seen has been performed between five and eight year olds. If you've never seen it, Anjna, I have to tell you, it is just the most incredible, ebullient, riotous, anarchic, beautiful thing in the world, seeing very young people take these words and scream them to the hills.

                                                Every generation discovers their own way of making Shakespeare speak to us. And after this pandemic period, I just don't know. I don't know that the same theatre makers are going to step up to the bat who've been making Shakespeare for 30 years, and answer that question for us. And I don't really want one of the people who steps into the arena in a post pandemic theatrical world to tell us what Shakespeare's relevance is. I want to see other people, younger people step in there and make the case for Shakespeare. So I'm very interested in seeing what happens.

                                                Actors take it a little too seriously to metabolize the headaches du jour, and immediately state and solve the world's problems on page. I'm very hesitant about the confidence of those approaches, and indeed the self-importance that theatres often cloak themselves with to be the people who will solve the issue. For example, Anjna, I will not go and watch one play about COVID-19 or one play about being locked inside. I hope that we don't literalize Shakespeare. I [inaudible 00:28:44] in 2022. I hope we don't see productions of Measure for Measure where they're kicking Pompey and mistress over done out of the bar because they're violating lockdown rules in a pandemic. Do you know what I mean?

Anjna Chouhan:                I know what you mean. On the nose.

Bill Barclay:                         I'm afraid, Anjna. I'm afraid of theatres on the nose responses, and telling us what this thing is that we just experienced together. People will allow Shakespeare to be timeless and not attempt to make him answer for the sins that we've just committed to ourselves.

Anjna Chouhan:                Maybe that's a lesson that we're still figuring out, Bill, quite how to do that. Moving on from that. Is there anything within our collections, Bill, that stands out to you?

Bill Barclay:                         I love the archival collections of photos from old RSC productions. Professor Nick Walton and I on several occasions have gone through looking through the Timon of Athens photos back when I was directing a production of it in Boston. And it's just amazing that they're so well kept in that you can go and research all the different people who play the roles. There's several great photographs from different scenes from each production. And also the expertise that you and your colleagues have about those productions. It's just incomparable to be able to go back in time and to see all the different interpretations of those and how well that those interpretations exist in the photo archive and in the program archive. It's a real gift to theatre and to researchers everywhere.

Anjna Chouhan:                Well, I'm so pleased that you got to look through all of that, and talk through all of it with Nick who also loves Timon of Athens. So you're in great company there.

                                                What do you think we ought to be collecting now to represent Shakespeare in the 21st century?

Bill Barclay:                         Collect pictures of magnetic poetry from people who have the Shakespeare magnetic poetry sets.

Anjna Chouhan:                Do you have one of those magnetic poetry sets?

Bill Barclay:                         I used to have one. But of course, since I've absconded to Mexico, I didn't bring it with me. But I absolutely adored them. It's one of the best pieces of Shakespearian tat out there. And they've done very yeoman service on my refrigerator in the past, I must say.

Anjna Chouhan:                So your suggestion would be for people to photograph their own renditions using the Shakespeare magnetic poetry kit, and that we could somehow archive those?

Bill Barclay:                         Yes. When they really think they've got something, I think they should send it in. That what would be my suggestion.

Anjna Chouhan:                I am on board with this suggestion. It's fantastic. Bill, what is the nature of your relationship with Shakespeare going forward?

Bill Barclay:                         The truth is that I don't really know. I'm interested in directing more Shakespeare. Theatre is not a very commercially viable economic model. And it's difficult to do even in boom periods. But in bear markets, where there isn't a lot of money going around for mid-range efforts, I'm not quite sure how much of it is going to feel like it's the thing that I need to be doing.

                                                I've composed for Shakespeare so much that I don't see myself as being eager to compose much more for Shakespeare. It's a fairly bruising way to make a [inaudible 00:32:11]. Typically you're hired last and you have to do a lot, and the pay is typically not very good. So in terms of the next step in my career, I'd much rather be doing things that give me a little bit more personal growth and also allow me to make a little bit of a better living. Composers are not paid well at all, and theatre composers are paid even less well.

                                                There's a little bit of an economic problem, and then there's also a larger macro economic problem of how much work is there going to be in the theatre in the next five years? At the moment, I do much more with my company Concert Theatre Works, which produces shows with actors and full orchestra. And I have about 12 shows that orchestras can hire. And I bring the show out to orchestras and we will produce a big show with actors or puppets or film or dance, with [inaudible 00:33:02] onstage. Three of those productions are Shakespeare centric, and I'll probably keep producing Shakespeare shows like that [inaudible 00:33:09] orchestra because there's just so much wonderful orchestral music inspired by Shakespeare. And it's really engaging for an audience to hear some of the speeches alongside some of that music. That's been a very gratifying genre for me. I call it concert theatre, where you sort of meet the text and the music in a concert hall. You're not doing the full play, but you are giving a wonderful sense of the rhapsodic and musical nature of the poetry. And I do find that very freeing.

Anjna Chouhan:                Well, it sounds like there's lots of adventure ahead for you, Bill. What if our listeners want to find out more about the concert theatres? Where would you like to send them?

Bill Barclay:                         It's concerttheaterworks.com.

Anjna Chouhan:                Well Bill, what an absolute pleasure it has been to speak with you. Thank you for joining us on Shakespeare Alive, and all the very best of luck for your adventures moving forward, with or without Shakespeare.

Bill Barclay:                         Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation and best of luck to you too. Thank you for having me on.

Speaker 3:                           Thank you for listening to this episode of Shakespeare Alive with Anjna. Join me next week when I speak to Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri of Jadavpur University. If you'd like to find out more about the houses, collections, research and education activity of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, head over to our website, shakespeare.org.uk, where you can also make a donation to help us fulfill our mission to share Shakespeare's legacy with the world.