DIrector: Juliette Carrillo
Scenic Designer: Mel T.
Costume Designer: D. Larsson McCanna
Lighting Designer: Jimmy Balistreri
Sound Designer & Composer: Aerik Harbert
Photo Credit: Paul Kennedy
Men On Boats was my thesis production, and boy what a ride it was! This was the first time that I have asked to be credited as composer as well as sound designer due to the amount of music needed for the show.
As a baseline I felt that the show had three primary needs: environmental effects for camping scenes, music to cover the transition from scene to scene, and music with roaring water for the navigation sequences. Music from the show is meant to evoke traditional American folk at various levels: there are some songs sung during the show which I wanted to be the most ‘period’ sounding, transitions which would use real instruments accessible during the era which sounded somewhat period accurate, and then the navigation sequences which would include instruments that weren’t accessible at that time period and only needed to drive action forward rather than sounding of the same ‘world’.
The director would later introduce the concept of presenting the show through a Brechtian lense; for our purposes that meant that we weren’t hiding the fact that we were in a theater, putting on a show. Something that the director was very interested in was incorporating Foley into the show and using the actors as the artists; early on there was also an idea that actors would be playing all of the music of the show, but time, budget, and my own composition process shelved that idea, and all music ended up being played back through QLab.
As an extension of literally showing the audience that they are in a theater with all the ugliness that can entail, we placed the audience on the stage with with performers in a modified tennis court configuration. Everyone could see all the speakers, all the lights, the fly rails, bare walls, props tables, everything in the wings of the space, everything that the audience is normally blind to behind the facade of the proscenium. This required a massive system from me to cover the full breadth of our stage, particularly once I determined that I wanted to spatialize parts of the sound in order to move water around the room and give a sense of motion that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to achieve practically with the movement of the boats. Microphones were added in order to compensate for the loudness of the navigation sequences, to provide vocal effects for specific moments in the show, and to cover for moments where actors were clear on the other side of the stage with their backs turned. You can find my full show paperwork here to see how everything shook out in the end.
Here is a sample of the river navigation sequence at the top of the show. There is a build in for the leader of the expedition to make remarks with underscoring before the journey proper begins. This sequence required breaks to have each boat introduce their respective members, so the music stopped on a dime to accommodate. Due to the variable nature of how long it took for events to happen in each navigation sequence I created looping content which allowed everything to run in sync in the background and bump in or out as necessary.
Here is another sample of a river navigation sequence from the show. Again, due to the variable nature of how long it took for actors to complete transitions from performance to performance, I used loops synced to each other to allow for smoother transitions from one piece of musical content to another. Due to the structure of the scenes I landed on a pattern of creating a looping sequence to vamp over transitions, a ‘calm’ looping sequence that may play over the top of a scene or once danger has passed, and then a ‘main’ loop which covered most of the action of a navigation sequence and would receive variations in content (usually transposing up or a slight change in pattern) to shift with events occurring on stage.
Music in this show was created in a hybrid style: some instruments are real life instruments played by me, others are programmed virtual instruments. I originally wanted as much of the music to come from real instruments as possible, but time got the last laugh, and programming virtual instruments simplified the looping process for navigation sequences. Still, I was able to record all non-looping transitions and intra-scene underscoring using real instruments. With even more time I would have liked to build out the transitions with an ensemble of folk instruments, but my trusty guitar features primarily.
Here is a sample of the underscoring from the show that laid underneath spoken lines during pivotal or remarkable moments in the show. This particular sample shows the tail end of the crew arriving in the Grand Canyon for the first time and then shifting to a new scene where the leader of the expedition makes wistful remarks of the journey so far.