My Composing Process: Small Mouth Sounds (2022 Penn Players Production)
Dear Readers,
In late January 2022, I got an email from a dear friend and collaborator. Her name is Esther Cohen and I have had the pleasure of composing two scores for plays that she has directed: From Up Here (2016) and The Wolves (2017). We both were in the same undergraduate class at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 2018. I really enjoy working with Esther because she is a brilliant director, a wonderful collaborator and puts great importance on musical scores in her theatrical productions.
Esther asked if I was interested in composing the score for a play by Bess Wohl that she is directing for the University of Pennsylvania theater group Penn Players titled “Small Mouth Sounds”. I immediately said yes.
The First Zoom Meeting
From the get go after receiving her email, I read through the play and absolutely loved it. During our first Zoom conversation, Esther told me that the music in “Small Mouth Sounds” will guide the audience through the play and also extend the transitions. She singled out gongs, singing bowls, woods, breathing and rain as sonic elements that would be important for the play. “Small Mouth Sounds” takes place during a weekend retreat in New York state, during overcast and rainy weather.
She pointed out that each character should have a musical motif that the audience can associate with them.
Joan and Judy: Joan exemplifies pleasure and fun versus anger. Judy exemplifies strength and control versus forced weakness.
Alicia: Feels big feelings. Chaotic.
Ned: Not sure if he is an optimist or pessimist. Thoughtful, beaten down by the world.
Jan: Has a certain optimism, with sadness. A woodland sprite. Wide-eyed and bright.
Rodney: Passive aggression. Toxic positivity. Lots of breathing.
The play itself provides detailed sonic cues. For example, the first scene the stage directions read “A gong rings. The sound of a microphone switching off. The sound of pounding rain.” Esther brought these stage directions to my attention, and suggested I use them as creative starting points.
The Scoring Begins
While I was reading the play, I started to improvise on my Godin Seagull M4 Dulcimer. It is basically a dulcimer that can be played like a guitar. It has one double string and two single strings. So I was improvising on this, and landed on this free-form melody that goes from D to C#. It stuck with me, first off because I love major 7th chords, but also because it carried this free, existential quality to it due to the lack of a real meter. I thought it would work well for the Teacher role. The character are never actually seen, just heard. They act as a sort of omnipresent presence.
With this musical idea, I put together the first two demos for “Small Mouth Sounds”:
The first demo cements a number of musical ideas for the score as a whole. The baritone ukelele picking and the tin whistle are elements that became critical to the score’s soundscape. I tuned the baritone ukelele so it resembled the tuning for the Seagull (i.e. D, A, A, D). This way, I could very easily create a drone quality to the picking (especially with the two middle strings doubling on an A). The play specifies that the Teacher plays a recorder. I don’t currently own a recorder, so I used a tin whistle that I bought in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2020. It is tuned to D so all this worked very nicely. It plays the Teacher’s theme, with an additional second half of the melody (that goes to G major, or the 4th of the key). It has a folk quality to it.
The Ethereal Demo experimented with the soundscape of the first demo, and added synth strings and a more atmospheric soundscape. This demo became important when I composed the “You Are Not Alone” monologue cue. I definitely drew from the overall feel, and also the chord progression of the piece. Especially when I change to a C major chord near the end of the demo.
Another Texture
With those first two demos sketched out, I really started feeling that the sound of the score was taking shape. On February 1st, I created a texture, utilizing the seagull, my Godin acoustic electric, the baritone ukelele, a mandolin, my flute and bottles. After creating the texture, I created individual audio files for specific sonic elements (these are called “stems” in composing lingo).
Full texture:
Individual stems:
So I’m getting even closer to the final sound of the score, and very critical sounds and textures came out of this composing experiment. For one thing, the “High Countermelody” became an important second melody for the Teacher, and appears very prominently in “You Are Not Alone” and also near the end of “A Vacation From Yourself”, in addition to some other places. This melody was born purely out of improvisation. I was playing my acoustic electric and decided to try playing at the very top of the instrument’s range, and this descending melody (which hits the major 7th C#) just appeared.
Another important musical element that came from this texture was the bottle rhythm. Over the last couple months I have been collecting beer and wine bottles that are different sizes. The point is that each bottle’s base note is different, and then I can fill bottles with water to get to desired pitches if need be. For the bottle rhythm, I used the Juggernaut wine, Samuel Smiths Pear cider and Allagash White bottles to create the rhythm. This appears throughout the score for the play. Esther made the point that it is literally a small mouth sound which is quite cool.
Finally, the eighth note rhythm was created using tambourine, a small drum, and tic tacs. I then took the raw recording and ran it through a number of FX to arrive at the rhythmic element that ended up in the score.
Raw recording without FX:
The tentative flute texture was eventually utilized at the end of “Unravelling”. I slowed it down to add a distorted quality to it.
So this texture was incredibly lucrative. When I’m starting on a project, I just create a big file in my digital audio workspace Logic X and start playing around with sounds, textures and instruments. That’s how sketches like this texture are born.
Character Themes
There are five distinct character themes in this score, in addition to the Teacher theme which also acts as an overarching theme for the whole play. For the character themes, I needed to tap into each character and what their individual sound would be. I got a lot of info from Esther during our first meeting, and after reading the play a number of times, I was really starting to picture the sound for each character.
Judy and Joan’s theme was one of the first that I composed. It is a folk melody, that carries both optimism and sadness. I first composed it on the guitar on February 6th and recorded a quick voice memo with my phone. Then, two days later, I recorded a proper demo with mandolin and guitar and tin whistle.
This melody became a key sonic element in the score as a whole. It appears in multiple cues and carries a lot of emotional weight. I credit that specifically to the move from Em to EM/F# to G. It’s a common chord progression, but is quite effective. It feels as if you’re traveling from the darkness into the light.
Jan’s theme had an interesting sonic progression. I initially composed it for the piano, but it sounded too sorrowful. So, I instead orchestrated it for a series of folk instruments (mandolin, guitar, autoharp, baritone ukelele) and then it felt right. It had a nice mixture of folk whimsy and sorrow. I initially composed a long form theme, but only ended up utilizing the first bit in the score itself.
For Ned, I once again improvised on the guitar (this time a classical one from Spain). I settled on a chord progression that initially wrestles with minor chords (Am and Em) before eventually arriving at F major and G and then resolving to C. This was my attempt at painting the pessimistic and optimistic elements of Ned’s character. Notice that the chord progression begins with C / Am / Em / G and then on the repeated phrase the Em disappears and the theme skips to the G major. It is becoming more optimistic in other words. My first demo has me singing multiple vocal lines. For the cue “My Question Is Sort Of...Big”, I replace most of the vocals with multiple flute parts that I improvised.
Alicia and Rodney’s themes go hand in hand. They follow the same chord progression (D to C) and also speak to one another. This is because the two characters have a fling during the play and are therefore narratively intertwined. Rodney’s theme is orchestrated with singing bowls (because they are obsessed with meditation) and Alicia’s theme sounds like a phone notification (because she is constantly trying to reach out to her ex boyfriend via her phone). The Alicia theme demo I have below is an early one, before I settled on the phone-notification-like theme. Her theme was one of the hardest to crack. This early version has the same general feel (the repetitive driving beat was kept for the eventual final version) but I wasn’t sold on the keyboard melody just yet. Rodney’s theme has been the same since the beginning of the composing process.
Scoring the Play
By mid-February I had all the character motifs sketched out and was ready to start scoring the play. Esther provided me with a fantastic write up, detailing what exactly she wanted sonically for each transition that required music. I used this as a map to compose the 13 individual cues for the play.
Esther gave me suggestions for sounds that I can utilize in the score. Namely: rain, woods, streets, mosquitos, cicadas. Luckily, I already had a large sound library of soundscapes that I have recorded over the years. I used street and city recordings of Barcelona, London and Berlin that i recorded in 2019 and 2020, in addition to a street right by my house in Villanova, Pennsylvania. I used recordings of woods that I recorded in Maine and Scotland. Water recordings from a pontoon boat in Maine and the waves from the coast of Northern Ireland. Rain sounds from North Carolina and Villanova. I recently recorded close-up birds sounds outside of my house by a well-attended bird feeder. For all these recordings, I used my trusty Zoom H4N handheld recorder. It is durable and easy to carry.
I did not just put the raw recordings in the score. In some cases I did, but most of the time I utilized specific editing techniques. I added reverb, and a bit of distortion. I pitched some recordings too, and added specific EQ to either cut out the high or low frequencies. In doing this editing, I added a musical quality to the live recordings, and also created a sonic bed for the musical elements to lay on. “Unravelling” feature dozens of live recordings stacked on top of one another and moving in all directions. The result is a chaotic sonic experience that reflects the feeling of that moment in the play.
Another technique that I utilized in the scoring process was to slow down audio files and in doing so create a synth-like distorted quality to the music. Specifically, I am referring to “Teacher Feels A Little Blue”, which features a recording of Joan and Judy’s theme that has been slowed to 60 beats per minute. When you slow down a live recording, you can hear little sonic artifacts.
Throughout the score, I utilize breathing as a rhythmic element. The play frequently refers to breathing, as a form of meditation, and a couple moments actually line up with characters breathing on stage.
In Wohl’s text, she specifies the sound of a “hungry growl of a bear”. I created this sound by crafting a sample instrument out of a sound I like to call “bottle breaths”. Basically, I recorded myself playing each of the bottles and then stacked all those recordings on top of each other so I formed a dissonant cluster chord. Then I fed that file into a sampler in Logic X and created a playable sound which you hear during “What Was My Question?” and “At The Shore of a Vast Ocean”.
For the “You Are Not Alone” monologue cue, I actually scored to the performer’s voice. Esther recorded the monologue being read during rehearsal. That way, I could get both the length and tone right in the musical score.
When performing the “Teacher’s Original Composition”, I purposefully played the tin whistle semi-badly. The Teacher isn’t the best at the instrument, but they are passionate about it.
I performed all the live instruments myself, to give the score an improvisational, intimate feel. By panning the individual tracks around the stereo image, I was able to make it feel like multiple musicians were playing at once. Also, there are points in the score where you can actually hear me moving around before and after recording an instrument. This further breaks the fourth wall of music production, and makes the audience feel like they are physically with the musicians playing the score.
I invite you to listen to the score with an analytical ear. Keep an ear out for the different character motifs (specifically in the climactic “At The Shore of a Vast Ocean”), and pay attention to the musical use of natural the street soundscapes. This score is meant to envelope the reader, I like to think of it as a sound world in addition to being a score.
The Bows
As a closing chapter to this blog post, I wanted to discuss the bows cue titled “Small Mouth Sounds” .
It is the culmination of the entire score. The track itself actually has bits of prior cues hidden throughout. I sped up and slowed down cues and utilized them as a textural element. It also has every character theme in it too. Some themes are more hidden than others, but all the motifs are there.
From a production prospective, I experimented with recording some elements through a baby monitor. So, the tin whistle and baritone ukelele picking that you hear at the beginning doesn’t have any actually processing on it, that is the natural, tinny sound emanating from a baby monitor.
Overall the bows track is entirely enveloping and provides emotional closure for the play.
Thank you for reading this blog post. If you have any questions about how I scored this play, or about the score itself, feel free to email me at nicholasescobarcomposer@gmail.com.
Your’s Musically,
Nicholas Escobar
The Sounds of “Small Mouth Sounds”
Guitars + Strings: Mandolin, Godin Acoustic Electric Guitar, Seagull M4 Dulcimer, Autoharp, Baritone Ukelele
Woodwinds: Flute, Tin Whistle, Wooden Flute, Harmonica
Objects + Percussion: Wine and Beer Bottles, Tic Tac Container, Tambourine, Breathing, Snoring, Rain Stick, Small Drum
Soundscape Locations: Berlin, London, Barcelona, Villanova (Pennsylvania), Pamlico River (North Carolina), Lake Thompson (Maine), Island Magee (Northern Ireland), Rosslin Glen (Scotland)
(Some of the) Electric Sample Instruments: Piano, Upright Bass, Contrabass Clarinet, Tibetan Singing Bowls, Indonesian Gamelan Gongs
