Gorgeous Avatar by Jules Horne

Gotta Sing... Jon Beales

Jon Beales
Composer

With great difficulty, Jon Beales was surgically prised from his piano and laptop and diverted into the dressing room. With recent work including musical direction for the Royal Lyceum's 'Laurel & Hardy', it seemed the right time to ask:

Q: How did you get into this fine mess?
I've worked with Philip, the director, a few times before, and he approached me because of my background as a theatre composer but also a musical director in musical theatre. This piece needs some musical theatre input for the end of act one, so I was brought on board for that, and other work on underscoring and other musical bits.

Q: What's the route into composing for the theatre?
I've no idea! Obviously as a musician you learn from quite an early age, depending on what instruments you play, and I didn't know what I wanted to do at all. I fell into theatre by total accident. When I moved to Edinburgh, 13 years ago, I met other musicians who worked in theatre, and they asked me to do bits and bobs, and it all went from there.

Q: What are the... um... peculiar challenges of this production?
The peculiar challenge is your script! The most exciting bit for me in theatre is either new writing or devised work, because you're not in awe of the classics, and it's excellent being on board for the first-ever production of a play. The specific challenge of this? I met Philip and he briefed me on what the script demanded - obviously he'd picked up a lot of the references in the script, lyrics of music theatre, and the works of the great Richard Rodgers. I've worked quite closely with lyricists before, and you knock ideas back and forward a bit, but Philip was off in Japan and I decided not to here... [J: Very wise!] Not being scared of writers, but because I'd already got some musical ideas in my head, and there were some quite quirky things happening with phrase structures and rhymes and internal rhymes, and I was quite excited by that, and didn't really want to lose it or knock it into a standard 4-8-12-bar pastiche. I liked the quirkiness of where it was going, looking at the words and not asking other questions, just going for it on my own a little bit. Another peculiar challenges of this job it's a prerecord. You're trying to find ways of fooling the audience into thinking it's a beautiful live band behind the set, that the set could rise at any moment and there's an orchestra out there. That would be fantastic.

Q: What are the best moments for you in this job?
It's fun to do. You're playing. OK, there are stresses and deadlines… but there's lots of variety. This is unique. I won't get similar challenges in another script. Every day's different, but you're playing. Good fun.

Q: Composing to deadlines - what's that like?
It's the only way I work! Today's tech week, and I was finishing recording to CD at one o'clock lunchtime today, to hand over to the sound guy for this evening's session. I work to deadlines a lot like that. You can give me a deadline and I'll get it there. I won't be prepared or organised enough to get it in any earlier!

posted by Jules Horne @ 5/03/2006 11:50:00 AM