My process for Wolf Play was to write three pieces of instrumental music that I felt embraced the themes and characters of the work and then extract motif and moment from them. None of these played in their entirety, but snippets of them -- and their variations -- were sprinkled through the entire work.
Director Kathleen Burns asked me to write something that was 'the start of the universe, creation beginning' In performance this played in layers which evolved throughout the show's opening monologue.
This was the first piece I wrote after reading the piece a couple of times. I wanted to get the sense of 'wolf' and also of the agony of the play. But also it had to slap.
This was the second full piece which I wrote almost in response to the first, looking for an optimistic version of part one, that drew on the same palettes and motifs but in a way that left some hope for the future. The music box melody from this became 'Jeenu's theme'.
