The Music of T.S. Eliot's Poetry: Integrating Text, Live Performance, Sound Design and Video in a Multimedia Theatre Production of 'the Waste Land'

The article examines the interactions between the various modalities - poetic text, live stage performance, sound design and video projection - in a 2013 theatrical production of T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922). It particularly focuses on the creation of the sound design for the performance and how this relates to the themes and sensibilities of the poem, its inherent sonorities, and what Eliot called "The Music of Poetry" (1942). It explores the range of musical and compositional strategies employed for the project, from textual analysis to associative methods, and particularly emphasizes the complex interweaving of and interactions between synthetic and concrete sound samples which complement and, it is argued, enhance the "musical', imagistic and psychological elements within the poetic text. The performance built on Eliot's 434-line poem, and is a collaboration between Steve Dixon, who produced, performed and created the video projections, and Joyce Beetuan Koh, who composed the music and soundscape. It has been performed in Singapore, Brazil and the United States between 2013-17.
Citation:
Dixon, Steve and Joyce Beetuan Koh. "The Music of T.S. Eliot's Poetry: Integrating Text, Live Performance, Sound Design and Video in a Multimedia Theatre Production of 'the Waste Land'." eContact! Online Journal for Electroacoustic Practices, vol. 16, no. 2 - Special Edition: Sound Art and Interactivity in Singapore, 2014.