Music adds dimension to a production. A director’s choices of music and sound can deepen emotion, heighten tension, or enhance the themes of drama. Director Lyn Lee and Sound Designer Kim Jones have drawn on classical pieces to evoke the perennial themes of ongoing daily life that run through Thorton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece Our Town. However, these works of music come from places that the audience might not immediately expect.
The church scenes of Our Town show the heart of the town, Grover’s Corners, where the folk gather to celebrate, to mourn, and to congregate in spiritual community. Lee and Jones have brought the grandeur of classical works such as Richard Wagner’s Wedding March from Lohengrin, arranged by Kevin MacLead, and Felix Mendelddohn’s Wedding March, performed by Bertalan Hock and conducted by István Bogár, to evoke the joyous celebrations of the town. A big classical feeling in a little local church.
The stirring sounds of Handel’s Largo bring a robust warm tone to the community church in Grover’s Corners. These sounds, played on the pipe organ of St Paul’s Episcopal Church, New Hampshire, USA, have been generously provided by Mark Pace. An organist and music director, Mark plays every week for his local congregation, formerly in New Hampshire and now at First Presbyterian Church in Knoxville Tennessee. The fact that his performance can be so generously and enthusiastically shared from across the globe, to provide a warm and local feeling to a church service, echoes the intent of Thorton Wilder’s play; everyone’s local town, everywhere in the world, shares the same ongoing themes of community and every day life that are perennial to the human spirit.
However, most surprising of all are the preludes to each act, original pieces of music created for this production by a very local composer. Leo Bosi is a member of the cast, playing Joe Crowell Jr. and other roles. However, audiences will also be treated to the new music he has written especially for Our Town.
Leo recorded his first piece in 2008 and in 2013 he heard one of his compositions played on stage for the first time. His music has featured in such diverse productions as Stories for Grommets (Children’s Storytelling, 2013), Romeo & Juliet (UTS, 2020), and Wild Thing (Flight Path Theatre, 2021).
After being cast, he approached Lyn Lee and said that he wanted the opportunity to contribute more to the production. Lyn, always keen to foster talent, agreed with enthusiasm.
Leo thinks of music as a tool for complex communication, as subtle as speech and a powerful tool for expressing non-verbal concepts. It can contextualise and draw out the deeper themes of drama. He says he has ‘had a number of experiences that cannot be adequately described by words but can be captured vividly through music.’
Each of the three pieces Leo contributed to Our Town was a prelude to the three distinct acts of the show. The first piece, Ups and Downs, aims to capture the essential themes of the show, of living and dying and everyday life, through its rising and falling cadences.
The second piece preludes the second act which is about love and marriage. Leo says ‘this piece went through a number of different iterations before Lyn and I found something that fitted the sense of youthful joy and excitement of the second act.’ Listen to the first part of the piece and you may be able to make out sounds similar to wedding bells. This was not a deliberate inclusion and emerged entirely out of trying to find ‘what the act sounded like.’
The third piece adopts a jarring tone compared to the melodic and grounded pieces that come before, floating about with both dissonance and calm. It is a drastic change that evokes the sudden transition from life into death that occurs between acts two and three.
The music of Our Town has helped to bring Lyn’s vision to life. Lyn, Kim, and The Guild Theatre would like to thank the composers who have so generously provided their work for this production.