Nicholas Bone’s son was about eleven when the seeds
of an idea for what would become Lost in Music began to take hold. This got the
director of Magnetic North theatre company thinking, about what music meant,
both to him, and to his son’s generation.
“I was thinking about maybe doing a show for
a younger audience,” says Bone. “My son had asked when I was going to do a show
that he can come and see, and I started to think about what might interest him.
At the same time, I was seeing his engagement with music start to change, where
he started to make his own choices about what music he liked.
“That took me right back to being eleven, and
starting to do exactly that, and realising you could make your own choices and
that you didn’t have to like everything, and didn’t have to like what other
people liked, but you could start to form your own taste in music. For a lot of
people that becomes a really formative thing.
“The music you start to listen to at that point and
all the things that come with it – who your friends are, how you dress, how you
speak – becomes such an important part of how you develop as a person. I could see it starting with him. That’s such
an important period of your life, and music is so often a central part of all
that. To do something that was about teenagers and how they relate to music,
but using music within it, seemed a really obvious way to try and look at all
the things raised by all this.”
The end result of Bone’s ruminations is currently laid
out in the theatre space of North Edinburgh Arts, the community venue tucked
away behind Muirhouse Library. Here, on two stage areas beneath a giant model
moon, four musicians are rehearsing Lost in Music, a new piece for Bone’s
Magnetic North company, which uses the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and
Eurydice to illustrate the pure primal power of music in a show designed for
young people.
On one side of the room, Jill O’Sullivan wields,
not a lyre, as Orpheus did to charm the rulers of the underworld into bringing
his dead wife Eurydice back to life, but an electric guitar. This accompanies
her sung narration of the story, bolstered by drummer Alex Neilson who plays
his kit beside her. Opposite them, Emily
Phillips and Claire Willoughby accompany O’Sullivan and Neilson on vocal
harmonies before breaking into a skronky instrumental interlude on clarinet and
saxophone.
O’Sullivan first came to prominence as the frontwoman
of Sparrow and the Workshop, who released three albums of what could loosely be
defined as alt country rock. More recently, she has been one half of bdy_prts,
the electronic duo led with co-vocalist Jenny Reeve, who also fronts Strike the
Colours.
Neilson has been a ubiquitous figure with assorted
band-based projects over the years, from Scatter, through to Directing Hand and
nouveau-psych-folk troupe Trembling Bells, who released six albums over a ten-year
period. Neilson has also played with the likes of Bonnie Prince Billy, and
writes for The Wire, the long-standing monthly digest of sonic adventurousness.
Phillips is a classically trained singer, who has
also worked with the physical theatre-based Company of Wolves. She is also a
member of music theatre collective, Hanbury and Groves, who last year devised a
children’s show for English Touring Opera. Like Phillips, Willoughby is a
performer/musician, who plays saxophone with The Nevis Ensemble, and has worked
with theatre companies including Stellar Quines and Catherine Wheels.
Seated beside Bone watching the band go through
their paces is Kim Moore, who has co-written Lost in Music, and is effectively
musical director of the show. Moore first came to prominence as one third of
chamber pop trio Zoey van Goey, and, inbetween theatre and dance commissions,
currently writes and records pastorally inclined electronica as WOLF.
Moore first worked with Bone in 2012 on Linda
McLean’s play, Sex and God, and initially hooked up with Magnetic North
following an open call for composers. It was a similar process with the
ensemble of Lost in Music, which will be joined by young people from
Craigroyston Community High School for the Edinburgh dates of the show, and
from Glasgow Kelvin College for the Glasgow ones.
“Over the last two years, Kim and I have been
interviewing teenagers about music,” says Bone, “and then in the final
development period it’s been focussing very much on young musicians in
particular, and talking to them about their relationship with music.
“It’s fascinating, because musicians have this
amazing shorthand. They have this ability that’s different to actors. I don’t
quite know what it is, but they have an understanding, and I suppose it’s
because there’s a formality to music, so they create a structure that people
can work with and play around with, and I think it’s really fascinating when
you see great musicians doing that.”
Music has always played an important part in Magnetic
North’s way of doing things from fairly early on in the company’s two-decade
existence. This has included the likes of The Dream Train, a collaboration with
the late playwright, jazz pianist and out and out polymath, Tom McGrath.
Magnetic North also produced visual artist David Shrigley’s ‘opera of sorts’,
Pass the Spoon, featuring a score by David Fennessy.
More recently, Bone has collaborated with composers
Matthew Collings and multi-media artist Jules Rawlinson on digital opera, A
Requiem for Edward Snowden. Bone and Magnetic North are also developing a piece
with Hanna Tuulikki, whose vocal compositions form part of her artistic
practice following periods heading up bands Nalle and Two Wings.
If the Sister Sledge referencing Lost in Music is arguably
part of a bigger wave of theatre and music becoming more joined at the hip, the
show’s fresh look at the Orpheus myth is the latest in a long line of latter-day
interpretations of the story, from Jean Cocteau to Nick Cave.
“The Orpheus story has been set to music so many
times,” says Bone, “and I suppose it’s the ultimate story of the power of
music. This man thinks he can use music to bring his lover back to life again,
and almost succeeds. That’s become the core of the piece that threads all these
different elements together. There are live songs, there are these recorded
voices, and then there’s this story being told.”
Is it a story that Bone’s now fourteen-year-old son
could appreciate? Bone isn’t sure.
“People kept saying that’s age group is a really
hard audience,” he says, “and I’ve no idea if this will be of any interest or
not. I guess we’ll find out when we start performing it.”
Lost in Music, North Edinburgh Arts, March 1-2;
Platform, Glasgow, March 6-7.
The Herald, February 26th 2019
ends
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