In the Red and Brown Water by Tarell Alvin McCraney

For In the Red and Brown Water, music was crucial in four ways: singing, signaling moments of magic, invocations of rituals and spells, and world building and establishing our location in the Louisiana bayou.

The script notes a “sad melody” to play throughout, one that can be hummed, whistled, and have words put to it. I composed leitmotif and taught it to the actors. The simplicity of the theme allowed it to be malleable, and was hummed in the opening as a durge, at the end of the first act in a neosoul style, and at the end with lyrics to it. Listen below for a demo of the melody with sound effects sampling Christian Scott Atunde Adjuah’s album Ancestral Recall.

Heavily relying on granular synthesis, synthesizer design, composed music, and in-world sounds, moments of magic easily slipped into an ethereal “otherworldly” aesthetic. We played with the text, which referenced clicking bones heavily. Listen below to a snippet of one of the “magic” textures.

Playwright McCraney’s note remarks on the distinct influences that West African story telling has on this narrative. To that point, in moments of rituals and spells, we heavily used West African drumming, both prerecorded and composed by myself, and often both combined with live instrumentation. Listen below for drumming I composed.

Though there was not much in the vein of the sounds of the bayou, we did heavily research Louisiana projects music in an effort to be accurate to the music that would be listened to in this play. Using a combination of Louisiana rap and neosoul music, we scored the show throughout with music that was both honest to the intimate sadness of the play while still injecting energy into the show at crucial moments. Each transition was accompanied by a line, referencing the song changing, and the “DJ” changing the song. Listen below for the big party scene. We used both the songs and their instrumentals time aligned to allow space for the actors to speak. Because we didn’t know how long we would need to sit in each song, we opted to make transitions instead of building a mix of all the songs. We used samples from West African drumming and music to glue together the songs, in homage to the drumming in the rest of the design.

Please use headphones when listening to mixes. Effects were remixed from qLab in Logic Pro X using Dolby Atmos Rendering to attempt to recreate the spatial location of speakers.