Duncan Sheik: Awakening Spring with Rock
“Spring Awakening” shocked its audience with its candid exploration of adolescence when it made its stage debut in Germany in 1906. Repeatedly banned, Frank Wedekind’s play took another decade before the play could be performed for the first time in English.
Left to right: Jonathan B. Wright (Hanschen/Rupert), Jonathan Groff (Melchior), Skylar Astin (Georg/Dieter), and John Gallagher, Jr. (Moritz). Photo by Joan Marcus.
Today, “Spring Awakening” has critics and audiences of all ages abuzz — as a musical. Not your typical Broadway fare, where characters break into song mid-narrative, the revival gives new edge to its once-scandalous themes by expressing them through alt-rock riffs, rhymes, and rhythms.
Racy and Fresh
The current staging (which spent eight years in development) aims to appeal to modern tastes. When lyricist Steven Sater asked his friend and frequent collaborator Duncan Sheik to compose the music, Sheik enthusiastically signed on — with one condition. “I’m not a big fan of recitative in musicals, when the actor sings something that should be spoken,” he points out. “Steven agreed that the music should work in the context of the narrative but not be dependent on it — that the songs should exist on their own.”
To say they succeeded is a gross understatement. Sater’s lyrics and Sheik’s score — composed and recorded using Logic Pro on his Mac — offer up an infectious, energetic, at times angry, always irresistible suite of tunes teeming with the pain of growing up.
At Home on an iPod
“When this play was written, teenagers had no way of releasing their angst,” says Sheik. “Of course there was no rock music, which is how teens today express what they’re going through. Our conceit in the show is to let the adolescent characters have a catharsis through indie-rock music.”
Sheik made sure his score appeal not only to the typical crowd that fills Broadway seats but to youngsters more commonly zoned into MTV. Says Sheik, “I wanted my music to not be out of place next to Fiona Apple and Coldplay on someone’s iPod.”
To avoid the dreaded formula whereby characters talk one minute and sing the next, Sheik and Sater agreed that their songs would exist parallel to the dialogue. Sheik acknowledges a creative debt to the film “Dancer in the Dark.” “Steven and I were very impressed with the way [director] Lars von Trier handled the musical sequences, which are about Bjork’s fantasy world, her interior monologue,” he explains.
“In ‘Spring Awakening,’ the kids sing not to each other or directly to the audience — they’re in this sort of alternate universe where song happens.”
What Isn’t Apple?
Sheik has been using Macs for so long that he’s momentarily flummoxed to describe how the Apple platform aided his composing process. “I’ve been on Macs since I was 14,” says Sheik. “I love Apple. So it’s hard to say exactly what is the role of Apple technology in my life. What isn’t it? I wake up every morning and turn on three or four Apple computers in my house. It’s how I communicate with people, it’s how I make music — it is my life.”
Working with Sater to score “Spring Awakening” was a case of close partnership carried out at a respectful distance. “In the old days,” recounts Sheik, “lyricists and composers would sit around a piano in a smoky room and come up with songs. But,” he adds with a laugh, “Steven and I are much more solitary people. We don’t want to work together in the same space. So the technology helps us fake that togetherness.”
Composing in Logic Pro
Many of the show’s songs came together surprisingly fast. “My working relationship with Steven is simple,” says Sheik. “He would write a lyric and email it over to me. If I was suitably inspired I’d make a demo and email an MP3 back to him that same evening. With the technology we’ve got, that’s a very cool thing.”
Sheik would first find a chord progression that, in his words, “has some intrigue and in some way suggests a melody.” As for choosing the instrumentation, “when you have an angry song like ‘Bitch of Living,’ you’re not going to do it on harp and mandolin,” he says. “You have to choose instruments that relate to those emotions.”
Duncan Sheik chats with actors Jonathan B. Wright, Jonathan Groff, and Lauren Pritchard during rehearsals. Photo by Doug Hamilton
Sheik composed on acoustic guitar and piano and in Logic Pro on his Mac, then arranged the songs in Logic Pro. “I’ve been using Logic for ten years,” he says. “It has become second nature to me. I can move around in it really fast, and I find editing to be incredibly intuitive. And Logic Pro has grown to be such a powerful program — I can do all this fancy stuff with plug-ins. It’s a very helpful and efficient way of recording.”
