March 4th AM

From Loz Kaye- Composer and Musical Director for Little Leap Forward

Yesterday I started back on work for 'Little Leap Forward'. Actually it has been a while so first of all it was all about getting back in to the right head space. I did an initial part of research, gathering some sounds and composing last year. I knew I that I had to get ahead of the game, given that autumn 08 would be taken up with teaching and a residency at Trestle Theatre, and that I would be on stage with 'In the Shadow of Trees' in December. I can see from my sound files that some of the material I wrote was back in August last year. It has the character of an old friend that needs some time for reaquaintance.

For those of you who are less familiar with Horse + Bamboo's work, although we primarily describe ourselves as a visual theatre, each piece has music running throughout it specially composed. The music is a key part of the unfolding of the narrative, and an insight in to the states of the characters as well as setting the sense of place and mood.

Still, we kicked off by looking at the animation sequences with Bob, Steff and Jonny. Really lovely, and ideal for getting back in to the mood. Of course they are going to require some precise writing and timing, film requires much 'tighter' composition than theatre. Increasingly our process has been more and more dominated by the discussion of timings, which is inevitable with recorded music, The software we are using now for playback allows a lot more flexibility than a simple CD player, but even so the material itself is set in stone.

The planning ahead we did for Veil really paid off. Both in a practical sense because it meant that I had to do much less rerecording and altering of tracks, and in a more abstract 'getting the rhythm of the show' sense.

So I have been going back over the discussions we had a few weeks back about the script and how it divides up in relation to different sections of music. At present the script has 9 scenes. For me the job is to identify the rhythm of the story telling, what sections require what type of music and where shifts of mood are. So I have a structure of blocks of certain types of mood and music - and how long we estimate them lasting. They tend to be 1 minute, 2 minute or 3 minute chunks. Of course this is rather crude and there will be flow and transformation within these blocks, but it gives me a structure to work to.

The sense of time is crucial- after all time is music's proper element, it is what it exists in. Also I need to have an idea how quickly I need to establish a particular feeling, or what is the rhythm of winding something up to a finish point. The musical problem I often have when working in theatre is that if we discover that - for example for the scene to work it needs, say, 30 seconds more music, that changes everything. What might be interesting for 1 minute can be deadly dull over 1 minute 30.

Going through the script once more I reckon on there being 45 separate sections of music and sound effects. At this point it always seems rather daunting, particularly as I want to break the back of this before I go off to Denmark for a week on the 31st. Or in any case we need to be getting a lot of the music in to the computer system which is running the show in the week before rehearsals (the week starting the 13th of April). So, on we go...

I will be twittering about my ongoing work on Little Leap Forward, and my artistic process in general. You can follow me as LozKaye on twitter.com .