Laura Henry interviews Best of Both Worlds composer Diedre Murray.
LAURA HENRY: How did you become a musician?
DIEDRE MURRAY: Music chose me. I was born to music. Back in the day there was a toy called Melody Bells. My earliest memory is crying and demanding Melody Bells. Then I started hitting glasses with pencils to hear the different pitches. I come from a family of artists. My mother was a dancer, and my great aunt played a ragtime piano in a speakeasy during the Alaska gold rush. To protect herself she carried a revolver with a pearl handle.
LH: What led you to the cello?
DM: When I was seven, I saw a Bette Davis movie. She played a violin and fell in love with a conductor. So I asked my mother for a violin, but she said violins squeaked. I asked for a cello, and she gave in.
LH: What brought you to jazz?
DM: My parents used to play John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Duke Ellington. But I went to the High School of Music and Art in New York City, which meant classical training. And I lived with my aunt for a while, and her husband was a classical guitarist, so over there I heard only classical music. But on the radio I heard pop music, the Beatles, the Temptations, Joni Mitchell, Barbra Streisand, Crosby, Stills and Nash. When I was going to school, I started playing my cello like a bass to make money in nightclubs. I also sang, and people called the songs I sang jazz. So my musical influences are like a thick soup – many sounds percolating in my head. I don’t write in any pure form. I like to break down walls between genres. Nothing is really pure jazz, pure gospel, but bits and pieces of all those things I soaked up. I have my own style now.
LH: How do you use music in a theater piece?
DM: Music is part of the narrative. Music tells a story. It sets the emotional journey you want to take the audience on. It’s also another character in the play. When someone gives me a script, if I can hear sounds in the back of my mind when I’m reading, that means I can musicalize it. The unconscious mind does the work. The conscious mind has a technique, but the Muse creates. So I sit down at a piano, listen to the Muse, and start playing.
LH: How did you go about writing the music for Best of Both Worlds?
DM: Diane and Randy like to put oppositional forces in motion, forces you would not think could go together, like Shakespeare and gospel music. But Shakespeare is magisterial, and they wanted the majesty of a gospel choir. Also, Shakespeare is a great storyteller, and good jazz tells a story. The hardest thing about theater music is writing the musical subtext for the play, not the songs.
LH: Why?
DM: It’s one thing when you have a set piece, everyone’s singing. They’re all presentationally doing a song. That’s the easiest part. It’s all the other stuff. Think about a movie – there’s music going on practically the whole time. Where are the characters? What are they feeling? What’s the subtext under the words? What do they really mean? Leontes feels sexual jealousy. What does sexual jealousy sound like? I don’t know, but the Muse whispers in my ear. She creates the leitmotifs. You let the subconscious take over.
LH: How would you characterize the music for Best of Both Worlds?
DM: It’s gospel inflected, but not pure gospel. There’s R&B and hip hop, but deep down, the DNA is jazz. But it’s so diffuse it won’t sound like jazz.
LH: What do you like about working with Diane Paulus?
DM: Diane is fiercely intelligent; she’s not afraid to do anything. When I met her, she was doing guerilla theater in New York. I’m an improviser, she’s an improviser. If it doesn’t work, throw it away. Do something else. Rethink it. Reimagine it. What can we do to bring the audience closer to the story
Laura Henry is a first-year dramaturgy student in the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
