Hamletmachine

The temping jobs have slowed down and I'm finding myself with more time to read, write, think about space and time, create music, and write letters. I'm working on multiple things simultaneously, spreading out a like a root structure beneath the soil, and each of the projects are equally related and distinct. One project is the design of some kind of sound/musical accompaniment for a production of "Hamletmachine" at the University in the fall. "Hamletmachine" is kind of like the William Burroughs of experimental/avant-garde theatre in that the text reads like "Junky," it's weird and violent - ala Burroughs shooting his wife "accidentally" - and nobody really has any idea how the "play" has stayed around so long, which is certainly the same thought that came to me when Burroughs died of old age in 1997 (or thereabouts).

"Hamletmachine" proposes something like an apocalyptic environment in which distorted versions of Hamlet and Ophelia conjure up a near-Derridean deconstruction of Shakespeare's famous play. Jeff, Howie, and I are working to make a sound design to accompany the performers as they try their hand at this challenging performance piece in November. We've started with plenty of time to spare, which was smart because there is plenty to work with. I've assumed the role of dramaturg - my kind of dramaturgy, see older blog entry below - and Jeff and Howie will actually be making the music. I've looked into the circa-11th-century/12th-century Hamlet myth written by Saxo Grammaticus, which seems to hail from a slightly older version of the tail that was probably passed along orally and in song by the people of Iceland and Denmark. I've also starting looking at the music of those people as well as the music theory at work in early 17th-century England (it is believed that Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet" around 1607) in order to develop some musical materials to work with. Jeff came up with the excellent idea that since Muller's script felt like a deconstructed (again, we're tossing this term around in a way close to but not exactly identical to Derrida's famous notion of deconstruction) version of Hamlet, then why not look at the music of the historical times conjured by the text and break down the elements to use in our sound design. We found a lot of interesting information about experiments with monophony and polyphony in early choral music, as well as the stuff that I've been interested in all year, which deals with notions of music and how the philosophers, theologians, artists, and scholars of the 16th- and 17th-century connected music to the workings of the universe. A particularly fascinating example of the information yielded from this search is that the early Danes and Norsemen believed that there was a giant Mill that sat on the ocean floor (think windmill but underwater), and that the Mill's turbulence is what set the cosmos in motion. Anybody who is familiar with my fascination of windmills may be able to imagine the excited look on my face when I found out that piece of history.

Presently, Jeff, Howie and I think that what we'll be able to do is set up create a musical instrument that we'll be able to play, live, during the performance so that we can do a real-time soundtrack for the piece. This "instrument" might consist of a keyboard whose keys are each connected to a sound or a series of sounds that we make based on the information we collect along the way and that we come up with during the collaborative effort. I'm attempting to write an essay about this entire process and get in published in a journal about music and the moving images that is coming out from the University of Liverpool.

Any information you all have about "Hamletmachine" would be useful for us, and all questions or comments would probably help us to in that they would make us think more specifically about certain aspects of the project. Please share your knowledge.