Duncan Sheik: Awakening Spring with Rock
Making Music
The recording studio in Sheik’s New York loft includes a Power Mac G5, MacBook Pro, and a 22-inch Cinema Display, among other tools. The kit even went along to rehearsals. “I brought the whole system,” he says. “I liked having my Cinema Display to work on.” While his Power Mac G5 supported Sheik’s “serious composing work,” his laptop served for administrative tasks like word processing, emailing materials back and forth with the producers, and browsing in Safari. He used iTunes to create the MP3s he emailed his lyricist.
The high-energy sound of “Spring Awakening” is a blend of the show’s nine-piece band (strings, guitar, drums, piano, harmonium) and pre-recorded tracks. All the electronic music for the show was developed on Macs using Logic Pro, Propellerhead Reason, and Ableton Live. During the off-Broadway run, the electronic tracks play from a PowerBook onstage; on Broadway, those tracks played from an offstage sound console, mixed live each night by the sound engineer.
Left to right: Jonathan Groff (Melchior), John Gallagher Jr. (Moritz), Jonathan B. Wright (Hanschen, Rupert), Skylar Astin (Georg/Dieter), and Gideon Glick (Ernst/Reinhold). Photo by Joan Marcus.
Sheik also used Logic Pro to produce and record the original cast soundtrack album. “It’s a fabulous recording studio tool,” says the musician. “I never would have been able to make the record without Logic Pro and its editing capabilities.”
Tools for a Young Cast
Production stage manager Heather Cousens relied on her iBook and the theater office’s Power Mac G4 to handle the myriad detailed tasks her job entails. She copied rehearsal CDs in iTunes, logged cues in Excel, created contact sheets in Word, tracked script changes in FinalDraft and drafted complex daily performance reports in FileMaker Pro.
Ultimately, her role is to support the creative team. “Duncan comes from the rock world, and rock musicians don’t compose on paper,” she says with a laugh. Instead, “he would record himself singing and playing guitar in his studio, using Logic, then bring in a CD for the cast to learn from.”
Or if the composer was still developing a song, he would bring his guitar to the rehearsal studio and work it out with the music director, actors, and musicians. “At the end of the session, we would record what they’d done in GarageBand,” says Cousens. Throughout the show’s development, she used iTunes to copy dozens of CDs so every actor and musician had each new vocal or instrumental part he or she needed.
Adds Cousens, “I feel lucky to work on something that’s so creatively different. It’s highly unusual for musical theater that the information coming in and out of our rehearsal room wasn’t paper-based. But our actors were so young, and many of them — and our musicians and composer — weren’t from a traditional musical theater background. So trying to use traditional methods, like paper scores, would have hampered their creativity.”
Burning CDs and downloading tunes to iPods were much more productive. Says Cousens, “GarageBand and iTunes allowed me to quickly and efficiently turn the information around so the composer, director, playwright, actors, and musicians could take home something to work on. The Mac tools were invaluable in facilitating the collaboration inherent in a fast-paced development process like ours.”
A Moving Experience
For Duncan Sheik, it’s all about the music. “I’m just so appreciative that I get to wake up and write and record music, and stay up late and make more music,” he says.
His work on “Spring Awakening” has been a highlight in his already impressive career. “Sitting in the audience and watching this show is the most gratifying experience of my life,” he says. “It’s not a question of how successful it has been,” he quickly adds. “We have this really talented group of people working at a very high level. I’m thrilled with how it turned out — and I’m just really moved by this show.”
