The Sound of WOOL

As a composer, I pay a great deal of attention to the sound of theatre.  With text, that attention takes me beyond the meaning of the words to their rhythm, cadence, pacing, and phonetic properties.  Words are both semantic objects and sound objects, and sometimes these two roles are delightfully at odds.

 

WOOL experiments with dense overlays of recorded speech that force the listener to either choose their own path through the texts, or to listen from a place in which the emotional tone of the whole comes through more than the specific meaning of any one of the simultaneous parts.  The choice to have a sound design world made almost entirely of text reflects my intention that WOOL, like any story, is as much about the words with which it is told as about what the words are saying. 

 

WOOL also contains a large amount of music.  Following the theme of emotional honesty that followed me through the creation of the script, I set out to be perhaps the only show on the Fringe circuit (judging from past experience) that has permission for all of the music that it uses.  I was lucky to receive an enthusiastic go-ahead from two Scottish ensembles whose music I began loving while living on the Isle of Mull: the folk revival group Jock Tamson’s Bairns, and the eclectic vocal/string quartet combo Mr. McFall’s Chamber.  The show also contains historical recordings of Gaelic folk music from the collection of the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh, through the permission of Greentrax Recordings, through whom they are published. 

Jock Tamson’s Bairns – http://www.jtbairns.com/

Mr. McFall’s Chamber – http://www.mcfalls.co.uk/

Greentrax Recordings – http://www.greentrax.com/

 

---

WOOL mainpage

Script Excerpts

Reviews

Photos

Blog



Theatre Mainpage

AlexEddington.com HOME