Number two: things learned from a week-long workshop about how audiences hear in the theatre.
1. That recorded sound is different than live sound, and that amplified sound is different than un-amplified sound.
If a sound comes through a speaker it is a different thing than a sound that comes directly from its source to the ear.
I'm sure there are sound engineers who will argue this point, coming armed with all sorts of anecdotal evidence about audiences who were fooled by a well placed speaker or another cleverly used piece of technology. For me it is beside the point. Yes, I know that I have the power to fool an audience if I choose, but isn't that deceit?
In the last few years I've been developing a prejudice against recorded music. Now I find that prejudice expanding to include all pre-recorded sound (and video, possibly.) Theatre is a medium who's primary attribute is its live-ness. It is crucial, I believe, to exploit that live-ness at every opportunity.
I may easily be accused of being judgmental but I find the choice to use pre-existing, recorded music to be an especially lazy choice.
(The question of whether its better to have no music or recorded music is a fair one. I understand that budgets rarely permit musicians. To that I can only say that it is up to the artist to decide if they're willing to mount a production that is fundamentally compromised. I've certainly done it, but, the more I do it, the more I regret it.)
2. There is good reason to use the words "noise" or "music" or "sound" as specifically as possible.
I worked with a sound designer once who was annoyed when I asked for a piece to be "less noise, more music" He argued that that noise and music were the same thing looked at through different lenses. I appreciate the thought but in the context of making work, I believe its useful to have different words to express different things. I'd rather argue for hours about whether a particular piece is music or noise than to throw them both into the same pool and pretend that they are the same thing.
3. If a scene is made, and then scored, it's already dead.
The sound of an event is not an after thought.
I went to Soho Theatre to see Orphans by Dennis Kelly. The production had some serious flaws, chiefly among them was the music. There was, for me, an enormous and tangible gap between the event on stage and the music being piped in through the speakers. It was crystal clear at this moment that a director and cast created a scene and then sometime later a composer came along and added some music on top of it.
Not that this is always a recipe for disaster - Nino Rota's music for Fellini's Amacord stands out as an example of music so deeply ingrained in the scene that it is difficult to imagine them separately.
In the Soho Theatre production, sadly, this was not the case. I wish I was sophisticated enough to understand why this was the case. I think it had to do with a few things: First: the music was a kind of generic, cinematic suspense theme that droned on and on in a repetitive loop while the scene progressed. Second the music had, built into it, a kind of thunder-clap effect, heavily laden with reverb, that clearly didn't belong in the room with the scene because nothing else in the scene was drenched in the same effect. Third, the music was played through speakers hung from the grid. This is not atypical in anyway but somehow, in this space, it has the effect of the music coming from a very different place than the voices - both literally and figuratively.
And so I move forward with a renewed interest in collaborating with composers and artists in a way that eliminates the traditional hierarchy. I'm developing an idea that artists should all be responding to directly to the stimuli, without extra degrees of separation. If a production begins with a space, then both performers and composers should be responding directly to the space. It should not be the case that a writer responds to the space, then the actors respond to a writer, then a composer responds to the actors. In that situation there are a full two degrees of separation between stimulus and aural event.
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