The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later was a life changing experience. The play is comprised of a series of interviews conducted in Laramie, Wyoming 10 years after the murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998. I composed original music for our production based off of simple melodies. The audio on this page underscored a brief slideshow that filled in details covered in the original Laramie Project.
This show isn't an easy one to watch. It forces the viewer to confront sentiments that are casually overlooked. The atmosphere I tried to capture was one of isolation and abandonment. The tracks were occasionally laid over the top of the sound of a breeze.
The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later
The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later Directed by Laura Jefferson
Scenic and Lighting Design by Don Henschel - Costume Design by Elizabeth Lewandowski
The music is written in a progressive, linear mode. It grows and swells, and the melody itself is repeated, but its never repeated with the same dynamic and this leads to a feeling of being propelled forward by the crescendo at the end of the recording. At the end of the play, the audience is left with that crescendo and the image you see here-- a mosaic of Matthew Shepard created out of pictures of our students working on this show.
I ended up recording a number of different sessions for this show and cutting them all up to achieve the right effect. When asked about it by a patron, without thinking I responded "Its just as much about the notes I chose not to play as it was the ones I did." And that was the most honest answer I ever gave.