As a project, Bandersnatch lead me all over the place: from original composition, to pre-recorded music, to live music performed by a live band of actors. I experimented with signal processing and heavy editing. In all things, we sought to achieve a high level of spectacle. The clip at the top of the page is an original composition entitled "The Storybook Theme" and it was one of the first melodies I wrote for this show.
Bandersnatch
The above tracks are the cues as they were played back during performance.
Bandersnatch Co-written and Directed by Brandon Smith
Scenic Design by Kåte Schultz-Meyer - Lighting Design by Devon Farnsworth and Ryan Moore - Costumes by Lauren Payne - Technical Direction by Don Henschel
This theme was one of the final melodies I wrote before abandoning the original composition altogether-- It was inspired but the heroine of the show who dreams of being a hero and goes rogue to try to take on the Bandersnatch by herself.
I chose the music we elected to use because of it's almost Norwegian feeling. It has a very epic, vikingishness to it that fit the play better than anything that I had written. From the beginning we were sure to try and avoid what we called the "Disneyfication" of the show. We really needed something that would marry up to the dark eclectic comedy aesthetic.
I abandoned the idea of recording original music on the piano. It felt like I gained something in thematic depth, but lost something in specificity. In an effort to get that specificity back I decided to write music for multiple people on folk instruments. This seemed like a really good idea-- we would gain the gritty primitive feeling of folk instrumentation (very much in line with the show) and we would also have the added spectacle of a live, somewhat Brechtish, band.
I like to keep crude videos when I'm writing incase something happens that I might want to revisit. These two are examples of experimentation (and a touch of writer's block) with a melodica.
Playing with simple instruments lead to the video you see below. We thought the idea was cool. It had merit. It had everything we wanted it to have, but it simply exceeded the realistic constraints of what we could expect from our actors with little or no musical experience.