In Theater, the Composer Must Play Second Fiddle : The Music Has an Important Role, but the Play’s the Thing

Although Robert MacDougal is never seen on stage in “Hard Times”--at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa through April 16--he considers himself as much of a performer as any of the five players in the cast.

And in fact, his presence is felt from beginning to end of this adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel as he helps to shape the entire framework with an invisible hand.

“I think you adopt a role as a theater composer, just as an actor does,” said MacDougal, whose score for the 3 1/2-hour performance on the Second Stage not only announces characters and themes, but accelerates the psychological overtones and highlights the dramatic meaning of Stephen Jeffreys’ script.

“You have to think of yourself as an actor,” MacDougal maintained in a recent telephone interview from Malibu. “You decide what gestures and what style are appropriate and you use your technique accordingly.”

In the case of “Hard Times,” the composer evokes a 19th-Century ambiance with 1 1/2 hours of underscoring recorded by a string ensemble. At times it suggests everything from Gilbert and Sullivan to Gustav Mahler. Yet it never sounds derivative or even like “period music,” testifying both to MacDougal’s eclecticism and his musical sophistication.

“I think we all stem from a continuum,” he said. “To deny that is what has gotten us into a pretty deep stylistic morass these days. You can listen to Beethoven and hear moments of Mozart. You can listen to Brahms and hear moments of Beethoven. I don’t deny influences at all. I welcome them.”

MacDougal justifies his composing choices in theatrical as well as in purely musical terms. For one thing, Dickens requires “a context that communicates on an immediate level,” he said. That ruled out being musically abstruse or, as he put it, “unregeneratively modern.” For another, references to previous musical idioms have their own reward as entry points for the audience.

Indeed, whether the sonic texture of a play consists of musical interludes, incidental underscoring, sound collages, basic aural cues natural to particular settings (such as birds chirping in the trees) or any combination of these, ambitious theater composers tend to be vitally allusive.

Before creating the incidental music for the SCR production of George Bernard Shaw’s “You Never Can Tell”--on the Mainstage through April 9--Joel Kabakov went so far as to read the latest biography of the playwright in tandem with the play. What he discovered had a significant influence on his score, he says, right down to the choice of instrumentation.

“Shaw had fun satirizing the control built into Victorian society,” Kabakov noted in a telephone interview from Fullerton. “Everyone wants to act very properly even when characters and circumstances are out of control.

“But while this comedy borders on outright farce, it can also be appreciated as a message play dealing with problems that Shaw actually faced in his own life, such as the search for his real father. There is a serious intent to the satire.

“Therefore, I wanted to create a surface of convention in the score, such as what English music might have been like in 1895, yet something that is capable of humor. So I made a string quartet the core timbre of the score to let the seriousness of the chamber music come through rather than orchestrating fluff with flutes and harps and guitars.”

His score, which comes to a total of about 20 minutes, is divided among a prologue and its variations (“I thought a little bit of Gustav Holst’s ‘Saint Paul’s Suite,’ which deals with traditional English country tunes”), a waltz and an habanera that echoes the Hispanic references in the play. (Mrs. Clandon and her children have arrived at the seaside from Madeira.)

The habanera also serves as a satirical commentary on turn-of-the-century English taste and style because it “possesses a particular awkwardness that would be equivalent to the stilted way the English would understand Latin rhythm,” Kabakov explained. “The built-in squareness of the habanera borders on a cakewalk. Even the melody is square enough to smack of early cakewalk melodies.”

The allusiveness of a play’s so-called “sound design” can have all sorts of ramifications. Like Kabakov, Michael Roth delved into the playwright’s life when he created a pre-show voice collage for the SCR Mainstage revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” earlier this season. But Roth went beyond that to excerpt actual documents from political and cultural history.

“I wanted to activate the space with a sense of weird things happening,” he said in an interview from Ithaca, N.Y., noting that the play revolves around alleged witches who are brought to trial in Salem, Mass., during the 17th Century.

Thus, for 30 minutes before the drama commenced, playgoers drifting to their seats heard voices on a dozen sound tracks quietly insinuating their way through the house as though a radio was playing on the speaker system and someone was shifting the dial every 30 seconds.

Close listeners would have detected an account of a real witchcraft trial in Northern California, a gentle lullaby, Sen. Joseph McCarthy ranting about the Red Menace during the 1950s (the contemporaneous subtext of Miller’s play), Frank Sinatra singing “Witchcraft” and a passage from the playwright’s autobiography, “Timebends,” about the first time he met Marilyn Monroe.

Why the Monroe connection?

“Miller uses adultery in almost all his early plays,” said Roth. “When he writes about Marilyn (whom he married in 1956), it’s clear he felt he had betrayed his first wife. In ‘The Crucible’ he used an invented adultery to hinge the plot. It didn’t really happen at the Salem witch trials. I found that autobiographical passage revealing.”

Roth’s collage certainly found favor with the critics. He was nominated for a 1988 “sound design” award by the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle (winners to be announced April 9). He also received an “original music” nomination for his incidental scoring of the play, which consisted primarily of a four-part violin fugue (based on a 1690 New England hymn) and drum variations.

The fugue turns out to be one of Roth’s favorite scoring devices. When he collaborated on Lee Blessing’s much-praised “A Walk in the Woods”--first at Yale Repertory, then at the La Jolla Playhouse and finally on Broadway--”every piece of music was a fugue,” he said.

Once again, the choice was rooted in more than mere taste. “It was a reflection of the two characters,” Roth said. “They are both arms negotiators saying the same thing at different times or different things at the same time. So the structure of the play seemed to me fugue-like.”

For all the creativity that animates their efforts, theater composers recognize that their work will never become the star of the show because scoring for a non-musical production must always play a subordinate role to the dramaturgy.

Yet each of these three artists is a highly trained composer in his own right, having written for the concert hall or the opera house, where “pure music” reigns.

MacDougal, 47, is a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and has received the Naumberg Award for Composition for his chamber piece “Anacolophon.” Currently, he is composing an opera based on Shakespeare’s “MacBeth.”

Kabakov, 45, has a doctorate in music composition from Harvard University and, apart from scoring five other SCR productions and a children’s musical, has written for the Boston Symphony Orchestra as well as various dance companies.

Roth, 34, trained at the University of Michigan and has written chamber works, modern-dance scores and an opera, “Hopi Prophecies,” in addition to being resident composer at the La Jolla Playhouse.

“One difference between writing abstractly and writing within the theater medium has to do with the development of musical ideas,” said Roth, who has just begun scoring Beth Henley’s “Abundance” for SCR’s California Play Festival. “In the concert hall you can develop them fully. In the theater musical ideas must make their point quickly and move on. The play itself is the development.”

Kabakov concurred: “Theater music must be interpolative. It must not be obtrusive.” But, he argued, “there are two opposed schools of thought about how to approach it. One sees it as sound design, which I believe tends toward the decorative. The other sees it as musical composition, which I believe can be more profound and more original.”

Serious music can be composed for the theater, he said, citing such examples as Shostakovich’s score for the Russian “Hamlet,” the scores by Theodorakis for film versions of the Greek classics, particularly “Elektra,’ and the incidental music to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by Felix Mendelssohn.

Still, a talented theater composer such as Chuck Estes can be frustrated by the limitations of the craft. Despite his exceptional scoring for Allan Havis’ “Morocco” and his vivid sound design for Lanford Wilson’s “Talley’s Folly”--both on the SCR Second Stage earlier this season--Estes said his theater work sometimes involves a creative dilemma.

“More often than not you are asked to produce tiny pieces of music,” he lamented in a recent telephone interview from Fullerton. “You sit down for the 90th hour and say to yourself, ‘God, I wish I could go past the eighth measure. I keep myself interested by trying to develop a musical idea over the course of a show. But it is inevitably fragmented, and the thrust of the idea is probably not noticed by anyone but me.”

Estes, 42, acknowledged that he did “a ton of composing” for “As You Like It” on the SCR Mainstage three seasons ago “because there were four or five song texts” in that Shakespeare comedy. But it is all the more reason that he feels he “hadn’t done anything” on “Talley’s Folly,” good notices notwithstanding. The creation of rural night sounds simply did not call for any musical composition.

“There’s a difference between composing music and collecting sounds,” said Estes, who is also the resident composer for the Grove Theatre Company in Garden Grove. “I’ve only recently become tolerant at all of the term ‘sound design.’ I have always felt like one of my holy wars on this planet was to do away with that term.”

Richard Jennings, whose rollicking score enhanced last season’s hit production of Richard Sheridan’s “The School for Scandal” on the SCR Mainstage, takes a similar view of his role.

“I’ll design when necessary, but it’s not as interesting to me as composing because I’m in love with notes,” Jennings, 38, said from his studio in Hollywood. “Taking sound effects from records is just not nearly as much fun.”

Nevertheless, he accepts the less-exalting aspects of theater composing--perhaps because he has scored music for films and television with some frequency.

“The role of music in the theater basically is to cover the noise of scene changes,” said Jennings, who has worked at such places as the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and the San Diego Repertory. “That’s a practical way of putting it. Of course, it sets the mood and fills out the ambiance. But directors want opening music, closing music and noise cover.”

Just the same, his satisfaction working in the theater remains. He said the live elements of a show afford pleasure, from the collaborative process of the rehearsals to the response of the audience after the opening.

“I’ve listened to my music on TV, and I know millions are watching,” Jennings said. “But I can’t get any feedback. That’s why I love the theater more than any other medium. It has a pulse.”

“You Never Can Tell” by George Bernard Shaw continues through April 7 (curtain times today: 3 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $19 to $26) and “Hard Times” by Charles Dickens continues through April 16 (curtain times today: 2 and 7 p.m. Tickets: $20 to $25) at the South Coast Repertory Theatre, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Information: (714) 957-4033.