Playing Music for the Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”

Saeko Saeko Shibayama Cohn describes her experience collaborating with director Barbara Renold to provide music for Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”

On May 13 and 14, the Shakespeare play, “The Tempest,” was performed under the directorship of Barbara Renold at the Threefold Auditorium, in Spring Valley, NY. With three of my chromatic lyres (Salem concert lyre, Salem tenor-alto lyre and a Choroi Diskant Lyre, which has a one octave extended range beyond a standard soprano lyre), a chrotta made by Helmut Bleffert, two glockenspiels, metal instruments made by Georg Ehrenwinkler  and numerous miscellaneous instruments (such as psalteries, a wooden box, and percussion instruments) which I inherited from the anthroposophic music therapist Marion Van Namen and the Waldorf music teacher Andrea Lyman, I played music and sounds for the entire play, which was over three hours. It was an interesting way to experiment and “let sound” many of these instruments, which I had gathered during the lockdown, dreaming of the day when they could resound in public. The only conventional instruments I used were my silver flute and my son’s violin, which were necessary in some scenes. What is usually done by a single piano, required the use of many instruments! 

Thanks to the director, who gave me clear ideas about what she wanted, ideas gradually came to me about what I would do with my instruments. Because each instrument has its own tonal quality, timber, and pitch, I knew exactly what tones I wanted from it – even if, as with the chrotta, I could only play the open strings. It simply felt that each instrument was a being and that I was just lending a hand. Along with incidental music, it was wonderful to play composed music on my lyres – just little snippets from Renaissance-period lute music by composers like Emmanuel Adriaenssen and Michael Pretorius. For those, Petra Rosenberg’s two lyre music collections, “Gitaar-en luitmuziek” and Telemann en tijdgenoten Muziek voor lier solo,” proved to be excellent resources. (Both titles are available on the LANA website.) Because I had already played pieces in these books over the last few years, I knew exactly what music in which key was needed in what scene. The biggest compliment I received after the performance was that someone thought that there were ten musicians in the back!  

As Shakespeare’s character Caliban says in the play, “[…] the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears […].”