Sound World - Audio Blog with Mark Van Hare

Hello all! Up next on the Chemistry blog is a podcast from our composer and sound designer, Mark Van Hare. Listen below as he takes us through every step of composing of one piece of music for the show. Mark talks us through his initial conversations with our director, Katie Lupica; the creation of concept tracks to explore instrumentation, tempo, and tone; and the journey from concept to actual cue to be used in performance. 

Full podcast here:

Or read and listen to highlights below:

On creating a concept track….
"In our early conversations [with director, Katie] about this play we really talked about the music helping tell the psychological journey of these two characters, and how that relates to the experience of falling in love and the gap between any two people - the impossibility of and two people really fully understanding each other, even people who are not suffering from mental illness. After Katie and I talked about the themes and how we want music to function in the play, my next step was to start choosing instruments, choosing samples, and essentially creating a concept track. The idea of a concept track for me is: without addressing any particular moment in the play, I write a...piece of music that gets at the tone of the play, that starts addressing some of those themes, and that is very dense. It's full of thematic material. And as a composer I have access to the full range of sounds in the world, which is pretty overwhelming at first, and so the concept track is really an attempt to narrow in on the sounds that we're interested in using and the feel that we want to establish for the sound world of this play. So I'm going to play a little bit of this concept track, and while it plays listen to the voicing of the two characters. For me, the piece starts very much in Jamie's world with these sort of high, fast, percussion elements; and then a little later on we start hearing Steph. For me, she's very much under water. It's all about breath and being submerged."

On isolating themes…
"Katie and I started talking about that electric piano music as essentially a love theme or the kind of glue that binds Steph and Jamie together. I was able to pull two tracks out [of the concept track] that isolated that element, so we could hear it full on by itself. So here's the first one:

"And here is the second track I was able to pull out for that love theme element:

On music in action...
"So now I want to talk about the third step in all of this, which was taking the music that I'd written and using it to address a specific moment in the play, and the moment I want to look at is the transition from Act 1 to Act 2, and this transition has three parts to it. There's the first part, which has Steph talking directly to the audience and talking about this budding relationship that she has with Jamie. The second part is the actual transition…and then part three is Jamie ringing the door buzzer and sort of interrupting the music, and that brings us in to the next scene."

Chemistry opens in just one week, on May 27!
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Behind My Forehead - Playing Steph

In Chemistry, I play Steph, a character who is suffering from Major Depressive Disorder. She has attempted suicide multiple times, practices self harm, has been prescribed a laundry list of anti-depressants, has been in and out of psych wards, group therapy, psychiatry and psychology offices alike. However, she refers to these aspects of her life with razor sharp wit and a bald honesty. 

As an actor, I can research these topics until my finger tips are numb. Though I can learn to define the chemical breakdown of Serotonin (I'm pretty sure that's absolutely something Steph would do, being a young lady obsessed with the chemistry that has made her this way), this kind of research can only get me so far in understanding the complexity of a character's dreams, hopes, and fears.

So I turn to visual research. When I work on a show, I often create a Pinterest board as a way to understand the subconscious mind of a character, as well as filling in some visual gaps in the physical world they live in. In this board, a few key images and ideas are repeating. 

• I became fixated on the back, what someone's naked back looks like. There is a vulnerability which Steph's boyfriend, Jamie, exposes through revealing his back to her. 

• I wanted to find an image that expressed that aspect of chemistry that is a collision, an explosive force, bright and colorful, like the initial spark between Steph and Jamie. I found images of Holi, a traditional Indian festival of colorful powders being thrown. 

• One of the most prevalent images in Chemistry is this idea of a giant ocean hovering above the ceiling. The way Steph tries to collapse the ceiling with her mind is passive, and reminds me of Ophelia allowing her garment to drag her to the bottom of the brook. 

But the point of my Pinterest page has less to do with explaining the thoughts and feelings of the character I play, but rather to do with getting at something deeper that maybe cannot be explained by the text of the script or the work in rehearsal. It simply allows for more complexity by adding a layer of research that lives somewhere in the back of my mind as a picture. Because people don't tend to dream in words and phrases, they don't have objectives that are sentences "I want to kiss him," they simply see the image, or little movie, running in their mind, that feeling of kissing someone.

To get an idea of what's going on behind her forehead, take a look at Steph's page here...

https://www.pinterest.com/loestar/chemistry-the-play/

(Note: I did not write the captions beneath the images)

- Laurie Benning Roberts