For a scoring session last fall, composer Elliot Goldenthal chose the Hammerstein Ballroom, a beautiful, sonorous space, and the only recording studio in New York City which can comfortably accommodate a full orchestra. If the adjacent post-production studio was a little cramped on that occasion, with members of the crew of “The Tempest”, Goldenthal's sound recording team, and a white furball, which director Julie Taymor introduced as her new puppy, there was also an invigorating intensity. Goldenthal conferred quietly with his collaborators, joked with his musicians, and sometimes stood before the monitor with Taymor, his partner of 25 years, to watch a few seconds of film quickly mixed with the music that had just been recorded.
Goldenthal discussed his original music for “The Tempest” after the film's U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival in October. "Sometimes when I work with an orchestra, that's only one piece of cloth," he says, recalling the scoring session. "Afterward, I knit the whole thing together so that there are various textures."
Goldenthal, who won an Oscar for his score for Taymor's “Frida”, eschewed period music for Tempest. "There were songs composed in Shakespeare's time by Robert Johnson, who worked with a boys’ choir – and the music exists" he says in a telephone interview from New York City. "But ‘The Tempest’ is not a frozen museum piece. It's contemporary and timeless in the sense that it reflects unchanging human patterns, everything from revenge to deceit to forgiveness." The composer, known for his inventive orchestration, put aside the music he had written for Taymor's theatrical productions of the play.
He did, however, revisit Shakespeare's verse. "Other than the fact that hearing the text a couple of thousand times, I would get a better understanding of what Shakespeare had in mind," he jokes, "I thought about the characters who are multi-dimensional but distinct and individual. For example, I chose for the most part instruments that you can find in the earth, like hollowed-out trees, hence the didgeridoo" An Australian Aboriginal wind instrument, the didgeridoo has a low, haunting sound. "It's an instrument for Caliban," Goldenthal says, "and, of course, for Caliban, there's skin, so I also use percussion." Taymor's Caliban is caked with earth and half-clothed; Prospera calls him "Thou earth, thou!" A drum accompanies his speech in Act I, ii, notes Goldenthal. "He says, ‘This island's mine,’ and then – bang! 'By Sycorax my mother, which thou tak'st from me – bang! Musical punctuation…"
The sprite Ariel's instrument is the glass armonica, a shaft encircled by glass bowls, invented by Ben Franklin. "I use it in many of my works," Goldenthal notes, "because it has ethereal overtones"
“The Tempest” score also features guitars and steel cello, which can be amplified like a guitar. These instruments are "knitted" with many others during the storm sequence. "You hear choirs of amplified guitars," Goldenthal explains, "and a full orchestra." Late in the picture edit, Taymor decided that the final soliloquy should be set to music. "It wasn't originally intended as a song," Goldenthal says. "It might have been Shakespeare's last words on the stage as an actor saying a farewell to his company." The resulting "Coda" named for a musical passage that provides a definite conclusion to the essential parts of a movement, is seven minutes long, and sung by Beth Givens. "To float those words so that it didn't sound like too much of a jump from Helen Mirren to a sung vocal was a big challenge," the composer recalls.
Goldenthal admits that Taymor's habit of temp-scoring with his past film music is a "problem" but the smile one often hears in his voice returns when he's asked to recount other aspects of their collaboration. "She is an excellent director in the sense that she understands the creative side, and gives one leeway to express it," he observes, "but she also understands practical matters. If I suggest we do something in another key but we have 45 minutes of recording time left in two days, she's able to move on."