Скачать или смотреть Lucía and Pedro talk about composing "Double, Double Toil and Trouble" from Shakespeare's Macbeth

Click here to listen to the album: bit.ly/Echoesofnature

This live recording of the two symphonic song cycles “Nine Shakespeare Songs” and “Echoes of Nature” is the culmination of our collaboration as artists and composers-in-residence with Orchestra of the Swan. It is a great honor for two composers from Argentina and Portugal to be selected to write Shakespeare songs for his city’s orchestra and to perform and record them at the church where he was baptized and buried—the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, UK. The two song cycles are conducted by Bruce O’Neil, who is nothing less than the music director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC).

Shakespeare has been an enormous part of our lives. We were married on his day, read Sonnet 23 at our wedding ceremony, and acted in the Shakespeare workshop at New York’s International House in six productions of his plays. We wrote three of these songs for those productions.

We have selected nine songs from varied plays—dramas, comedies, and fantasies—including some of his most emblematic works. Some songs have a distinct “older flavor” with clear allusions to the music of Shakespeare’s time, but performed with a modern chamber orchestra and with instruments that did not exist in his time, such as celesta and Portuguese guitar. This is an example of Transclassical Music™, a term Lucía Caruso coined to describe a style based on classical music techniques, improvisation, and elements from different cultures and eras in a variety of genres, integrating classical and world instruments. As an example of this, several Indian scales are used in “Double, Double Toil and Trouble,” although an Indian musician may not recognize them in this form.

“Double, Double Toil & Trouble” (from Macbeth IV, 1) - by Lucía Caruso & Pedro H. da Silva

Shakespeare famously used iambic pentameter in his plays, however, this famous scene of the witches brewing their magic potion is in trochaic tetrameter—in other words, each line has seven poetic feet. Perhaps the more modern sounding of this collection of songs, we used a lot of modulation and drastic meter changes. Since the text references several prime numbers—three, seven, thirty-one—which are considered to have magical properties by numerologists, we used prime numbers exclusively in the rhythm and in the microscopic and macroscopic structure of the piece. This is the most esoteric and fantastical of the works in this cycle, creating a foreboding otherworldly atmosphere appropriately representing the black magic of the three witches’ ungodly brew.