Puppet Macbeth was performed in the Kronauer Space at Adams House (Harvard University) in December 2002. The directors / puppet-makers, Moss Bittner and Emily Carmichael, asked me to produce a score and sound effects for the production, which I played live via laptop during the performances.
I tried to match their vision for Macbeth’s Scotland, which tended toward the spooky,
the ethereal,
and the carnivalesque.
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I also put together some spaghetti-western-inspired, quasi-Scottish,
hip-hop-informed, war marches.
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And I embraced the opportunity to experiment more with musique concrete, sampling a refrigerator to evoke the phenomenological shifts when Macbeth starts seeing ghosts (and then playing with the sound in between scenes),
grabbing and amplifying the sound of Moss knocking on a table to simulate the pounding on the castle door (and then, again, playing with the sound after the scene),
and reproducing, more rhythmically, the din of dinner.