New music for Twelfth Night: Reconstructing musical associations for the 50th anniversary performance of Shakespeare at Maynardville, Jan 2006

Abstract

In January 2005, Federico Garcia Lorca's play Blood Wedding was staged in Cape Town as a collaborative dance production by two local companies, La Rosa Spanish Dance Theatre and Free Flight Dance Company. While involved in the process of writing, rehearsing and performing in the ensemble that supplied the live music for the show, a number of questions repeatedly surfaced, and I began to search for their answers. How many settings of Lorca's poems exist? Were there other settings of the ones that we were busy with? Surely settings of Lorca's songs would be valuable, and some record must be kept, perhaps by a trust preserving his works, or by the present holder of the copyright? Furthermore, how important was it, for the sake of artistic integrity, that the songs be set in a musical style that is ‘authentic', or at least relevant, to the author? It was clear that the only people who knew precisely how the music for our production came into existence were the members of the band, and that our efforts would not be published under the present circumstances. No documentation, other than the musicians' performance notes, exists to this day. Were another company elsewhere to stage Blood Wedding, they would have no ready means of discovering any information regarding the musical style of our production – information which could prove valuable in making creative choices for a new production. Yet this seems to be a normal situation in the world of theatre.

Shakespeare in Southern Africa Vol. 20 2008: pp. 13-23