Director Laura Hackman’s production of Twelfth Night, produced by the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, was loosely set in 1920s New Orleans. The songs I composed for the production took their inspiration from that setting, borrowing from the blues and other forms and harmonies. Writing a hard-grinding in-the-box 12-bar blues with Shakespeare’s poetry for lyrics has got to be one of the biggest kicks I’ve ever gotten from writing music. It was just a huge amount of fun.
The music I wrote for this production doesn’t go much beyond what usually gets written for productions of the play, and focused on a couple of songs for Feste. And therein lies a story. Feste’s character is a jester, a clown, and I didn’t get to meet the actor playing him until well into the process. I’d assumed that a clown would be cast as a lighter baritone or a tenor, and so I’d written all the songs pitched for that range. When the very talented actor introduced himself with a deem, booming basso profundo voice, I realized I’d have to transpose everything, and in a hurry. Luckily, his voice turned out to be so low that he just took the songs down an octave, and that was that.
This production, in the summer of 2008, was done outside in the meadow at Evergreen House. It was actually my job for a few weeks in there to hang out in a gorgeous field next to a museum and play with Shakespeare and the blues. That was some kind of luck.
