News that the Royal Shakespeare Company is going through with cuts to its music department, shrinking one of the last bastions of theatre music composition, production and performance from a team of seven to four, sounds the latest alarm for the place of live music and musicians in theatre. The RSC’s cost-saving comes at a time when bands for touring shows and West End musicals have been reduced from orchestral forces to handfuls of players. Who needs live performers when technology can do it all for you?
It wasn’t always this way. There’s a whole genre of theatre music by composers from Purcell to Birtwistle that’s rarely, if ever, performed as audiences experienced it from the 17th century onwards. This “incidental music” for the theatre wasn’t incidental at all – it was crucial to how drama was brought to life, from Shakespeare to Goethe. Working in collaboration with writers and directors to create the atmosphere of text and story makes scores like Mendelssohn’s for A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Grieg’s for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt predecessors to what film and video game composers are doing today.
