Music Instrument Design for Edward II. Our wonderfully talented Director of Music, Bill Barclay

Music Instrument Design for Edward II. 

Our wonderfully talented Director of Music, Bill Barclay has built some unique instruments for our production of Edward II. In this blog he tells us about these instruments and the three different worlds of sound he has created for the production.

Christopher Marlowe’s dark history of Edward II still reverberates loudly today both in its powerfully modern assertion that love is love, and in the incompatibility between vulnerability and the corridors of power. To help tell the story of these contrasts that ripple through time, I’ve built two new musical instruments that provide natural reverberation in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which has a warm yet dry acoustic. These devices play alongside a raft of ethnic and period instruments to create three contrasting palates of sound.

The first world of sound: war, rebellion, dissidents, and political pressure

The first sound world describes the sounds of war, rebellion, dissidents, and political pressure. This is achieved through the creation of a steel cello, which is an instrument I first encountered in Boston built by musician Matt Samolis, also known by his stage name Uncle Shoe. I was infatuated with his creations and had used them in theatre before, but this is this instrument’s debut in the United Kingdom. With Matt’s guidance I’ve constructed a new kind of steel cello bespoke to the Sam Wanamaker. 

This is how it works: several large deep ride cymbals and metal rods are bolted to a large stainless steel resonating sheet, which amplifies the metal objects as they are bowed and struck. The instrument is capable of a wide range of sounds which are almost entirely below the frequencies of consonants in speech, making words intelligible over a rash of haunting textures. Amazingly, the instrument often sounds synthesised – digital, even – metallic, industrial, dark, and yet shimmering. Matt and I used to play it for sound meditations in long beautiful drone concerts, and yet it can also distort to provide an incredible lexicon of theatrical punctuation. The whole band takes a turn on it, but it is chiefly played by Music Director Rob Millett, and it is played throughout the production.

The steel cello is complemented by a bass drum, field drum, and Sarah Homer’s contra alto clarinet – a rare instrument lower than the bass clarinet which gurgles at the low end of the hearing spectrum under the steel cello’s reverberant strokes.

The second world of sound: love

The second sound world was meant to contrast with the first as much as possible in order to depict the love between Edward and Gaveston as incompatible with its oppressive cultural antipathy to homosexuality.  For this world we lean on Tunde Jegede’s kora – the West African harp, chiefly from the griot storytelling tradition of Mali.(A griot is a West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, or musician).

The kora melds with a swarmandal, a Hindu harp the characteristic buzzing from its sympathetic strings. To fill out this pan-ethnic texture, we use a hammered dulcimer and a bass dulcimer, instruments that are from all over the world, though perhaps most prominent in music from the Middle East. These three harp-like instruments from around the world emphasise the beauty, the universalism, and perhaps the exotic presence that define love so unabashedly in this play. The textures these strings make with each other seems to chime perfectly with the candlelight, and lend an extraordinary atmosphere to the Playhouse.

The third world of sound: the church

The third sound world is of the church. Here the tubular bells,accordion(mimicking an organ),cello, and contra alto clarinet form a league of ominously low, yet sinuously melodic instruments that collect like vines around the ankles of the play’s characters – powerful yet beautiful. Also in this world is the singers, who at various moments intone the Latin prayers of the Requiem Mass, as if the death of Edward I (Longshanks, Edward II’s father), still looms over the cracked glass of our protagonist’s troubled reign.

The second original instrument is the spring machine. Two long helical springs are attached to the theatre’s back wall, and connect directly to the heads of two frame drums bolted to the face of the music gallery. When the springs are rubbed and struck, we discovered that the sounds that pour out of the drums are unearthly, unsettling, and hard to mentally place. For weeks I had been seeking sounds for the play’s horrible final scenes that were truly original – sounds that could only mean this peculiar horror. We tried attaching a double bass to the springs, and had 4 springs start on each string, going into four drums. The sound was amazing but I could still hear the double bass, and the sound was too familiar.

When we took the bass away and hung the springs to a hook instead, it focused the sound much more on the strange sounds of the springs themselves, which we then tightened to amplify the signal. This revealed the coups de grace: when the drum heads are struck with a mallet in a heartbeat pattern, the heartbeat flows to the back wall and out the drums again, creating an analogue looping system. The intention is to recreate the sound of hearing your own heartbeat thudding in your ears, as you imagine the worst. The secondary intention is to allow the truly horrible parts of the story be truly horrible, by preparing our subconscious with unsettling sounds that have no preconceived identity. We don’t want you to be listening to the ‘music’ here – we want the sounds to unsettle the psychological anticipation of Edward’s grisly demise.

Once the act occur, there is no need, or room, for any more music in its final pages. The stage stays mostly in darkness, the characters have their comeuppance, and silence seems the only appropriate ending. We are still processing the horror, and the tragedy, and after two hours of steady building to this moment, it feels right to go out with these solo odd springs.

Other instruments used in the show include the tagleharpa, a medieval bowed three-string harp made for the Globe by a Russian instrument maker in Karelia. This undergirds the ancient character of Old Spencer and provides a bit of the dark ages as an important colour for the older generation of this world. Paul Johnson also plays several ethnic flutes:

• Kaval-  a Bulgarian wooden flute
• Tambin -  the national instrument of the West African Fula
• Bansuri-  a common North Indian flute
• Bombard-  a loud double-reed member of the shawm family used to play Breton music
• Portuguese and English bagpipes

Occasionally Paul plays the bagpipes against Sarah Homer’s soprano saxophone – an entirely modern instrument but ones whose timbre, when mixed with the pipes, creates the sensation of two fanfaring trumpets.

Finally, the Nyatiti, the lyre from Kenya, makes a few important solo appearances. This instrument means ‘daughter-in-law’, and it is the female counterpart to the maleness of the West African kora. The two harps provide contrasting emotional colours – the kora in act 1 when love is free, and the Nyatiti in the second half when it is not.

The ambitious nature of this score is testament to the dozens of shows played at the Globe by these four incredible musicians; indeed, the score has been composed for their unique multi-instrumentalism. There is no other person in London who could double on kora and cello than Tunde Jegede, nor any other player than Music Director Rob Millett who plays the dulcimer at an expert level, yet can learn how to work magic from something so new as a steel cello. Paul Johnson and Sarah Homer each in turn provide similarly original contributions that speak to their true uniqueness as players.

The overarching goal here was for the Globe to do what it does best – be inventive, embrace the parameters of acoustic music, and lean heavily on the unique experience of its core artists. I remain a student of period music at the Globe, but only in service of bringing period sounds together with improvisation, new instruments, living composers, and surprising orchestrations.

In collaborating in this way, we attempt to fabricate an entirely unique sound world that can only define the world of this play, here, right now.

Edward II is in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse until 20 April. 

Musical instrument photography by Hannah Yates 
Edward II production photography by Marc Brenner