S5: E4: Dominique Le Gendre on Composing Music for Shakespeare Plays

Dominique Le Gendre discusses composing music for Shakespeare plays, including Richard II at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare audio recordings.

For a complete episode transcript, click http://www.womenandshakespeare.com

Dominique Le Gendre's Website: https://www.dominiquelegendre.com/

Interviewer: Varsha Panjwani
Guest: Dominique Le Gendre
Researcher: Grayson Yuzon
Producers: Alyssa Goodwin
Transcript: Benjamin Poore
Artwork: Wenqi Wan

Suggested Citation:  Le Gendre, Dominique in conversation with Panjwani, Varsha (2025). Dominique  Le Gendre on Composing Music for Shakespeare Plays [Podcast], Series 5, Ep.4. http://womenandshakespeare.com/

Twitter: @earlymoderndoc
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Email: earlymoderndoc@gmail.com

Transcript

Varsha: [00:00:00] Glass Shatter 

Hello, dear listeners, welcome to Women and Shakespeare. I'm your host, Dr. Varsha Panjwani, and we are on the airwaves again to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday. For those of you who don't know already, I am a British Asian, and in India, where I was born, everything is celebrated with music. So obviously to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday, I wanted to invite someone who has given the gift of lots and lots of music to Shakespeare.

My guest, Dominique Le Gendre, is a composer combining the musical cultures of Trinidad and Tobago where she spent her childhood with her training in Paris and London. She has written music across a wide range of media: radio drama, art installations, theatre, opera, chamber music, dance, film, television, and much more.[00:01:00] 

Her phenomenal musical languages can be heard in the music that she composed for all of Shakespeare's plays as part of the Complete Arkangel Shakespeare collection. I talked to her about this undertaking as well as about composing music for a landmark production of Richard II at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which boasted an all women of colour cast and creative team, and it included a chant that I found myself humming for days after. 

Dominique, it's such a delight to have you on Women and Shakespeare podcast because growing up, I enjoyed Bollywood versions of Shakespeare plays, so I know what the combination of Shakespeare and music can do. But I know very little about the subject, so I am very much looking forward to learning from you.

Dominique: Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. 

Varsha: So, in [00:02:00] keeping with the Women and Shakespeare podcast tradition, our first question is going to be, what was your first encounter with Shakespeare and what was the nature of that encounter? 

Dominique: So I first met Shakespeare at school. We studied Shakespeare in Trinidad. And I think if I remember, we did, uh, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. And of course, we just studied the text as text. You know, we didn't look at staging them as plays or anything, so it was really just treated like literature.

Varsha: And was that interesting to you? 

Dominique: I found it fascinating because we had fantastic teachers. We had a really great literature teacher who taught us to understand Shakespeare. 

She made us translate basically the lines, so we would have to speak the lines as if it were ordinary speech. And of course the first time you start doing that, it just seems like an impossible task. And [00:03:00] then as you get into the hang of it, um, I think we all just really enjoyed that transformation from the ‘thees’ and the ‘thous’ into feeling as if the language suddenly became ours.

Dominique: Yeah, so. Even though we were in Trinidad, it just felt like, yeah, we can do this. This is part of our language and we understood the stories. 

Varsha: I totally get you. I think ownership of the text is so, so important when we translate and suddenly it feels like Shakespeare is our own. And I'm so looking forward to asking you about the various Shakespeare productions that you have composed music for.

Uh, but before I do, I did want to ask you, what is music to you? Do you think it is a way of communicating a feeling, an intense connection? Or do you think it's a way of navigating through a narrative? 

Dominique: That's, um, that [00:04:00] is a tricky question because it's like when I was younger, music was a form of expression to do exactly those things, communicate a feeling or sort of heighten something in a text. It was very much specific to the context in which it was working, but because music has become so much more of my life, it has sort of walked with me for so long, now I realize that actually music is really a translation of the world around me. And what it does is that it says everything that words and physical expression don't say. So it's the language of the unsaid. And there's almost a sense that you're, especially when you're a composer, that you're constantly sort of grasping to find the exact meaning or the exact way of expressing that [00:05:00] sentiment that can never be described by words or even by a facial expression. There's always something else that only music can do, and somehow we all recognize it when you hear a piece of music that everybody responds, so. 

Varsha: So in Shakespeare's plays, one of the things I'm fascinated by is silences. And I always want to think about what is filling those silences, right? What is not being said? So I love that maybe music can be a way of tapping into some of those things. 

Dominique: Yeah. That, that's very true. And I often also have had battles with, with directors who want the music to sit in the place where silence should be.

’Cause I tend to think sometimes that we put too much music. I treat silence like music. And silence is very important to have [00:06:00] so that we hear the difference, you know, the complete absence of sound. But yeah, for me, it's always about finding out who's living in that space. Is it music? Is it silence? Is it the words? Is it, you know, what is it? 

Varsha: Mm. So, it's not just a way of filling up the gaps. 

Dominique: No, no. Because I think that Shakespeare writes, there's a reason why there are pauses there. It's like you just need a space sometimes, to just sit and feel and be a part of it.

Varsha: So, you were born in Trinidad and Tobago. And you were talking about your first encounter with Shakespeare there. And these places have. Such rich musical histories, don't they? I mean, whenever, uh, they are mentioned, my mind is immediately going to drums and steel bands and calypso. Um, so could you please tell me how [00:07:00] this cultural background has influenced the music that you compose? 

Dominique: It has, um, how I say it, it has made my language very, very dense and dense in such a way that it encompasses all of Trinidad's history, which of itself encompasses the cultures of the world. You know, the Americas, Europe, Africa, and India and the Middle East, or as it was called the Middle East in those days. Because of Trinidad's very mixed population, its history of slavery, but also, our population is 45% from the Indian subcontinent, which means that we have a heavy predominance of Indian Hindu and Muslim festivals, religious festivals.

So all of that music, [00:08:00] the music of those rituals is very, very present, has always been present in the sort of sound world of Trinidad, along with the drums and their association with Orisha traditions as well as folk traditions. The steel pan of course, which always comes alive months and months before carnival. So the whole place is just filled with sounds of steel pan. 

And then also we have a lot of traditions that come from Venezuela. So we have a lot of traditional Venezuelan music sung in Spanish in Trinidad, in lots of the villages around the North Coast.

And on top of that, there's a dimension of sound that is very, very rich and very dense because it's a tropical climate. And so you are more open to the outside world. Even now with [00:09:00] all the air conditioning that we have, you know, at the time when I was growing up, we didn't have air conditioning.

So, doors and windows were open and you heard loads of sounds. You heard the sounds of not just your neighbors, but you heard birds all the time. There was this constant presence of bells of all sorts of bells: church bells, bells of vendors riding their bicycles, selling ice cream, popsicles, oysters, all kinds of food that they were selling on bicycles.

Traffic of course, and choirs. You hear a lot of choirs constantly present. So that's a rich, rich, rich, dense mixture of sounds. Plus of course, all the music that's on the radio, on records and all of that. So going back to your question is how that has influenced my music is that every single bit of that is there in the music. And not separately, but all [00:10:00] together. So it's, yeah, it's a big palette of colours that makes up the vocabulary, I suppose. 

Varsha: That's great. So layers upon, layers upon layers of soundscapes. 

Dominique: Yes. And it seems very kind of natural, in my writing to have in a piece of music, something that is polyrhythmic, but that also has suggestions of Venezuelan traditions, Joropo music, and they live very comfortably together. Plus, it affects the way that I orchestrate, I would say. 

Varsha: Yes. Talking about layerings upon layerings, living comfortably together, you trained in Paris, and now you live in London. So how have these two places then shaped your musical journey?

Dominique: They've had very different influences, because, well, obviously they're very different places, but [00:11:00] in Paris I became aware of how much I had to learn, or how much more I really needed to learn to become a composer and a competent musician. Paris is very conservative in the way that it teaches its music, and at the time that I was there, which was late seventies, early eighties, the only choice that you had if you were training as a classical musician was to go through this competitive entry exam for the Paris Conservatoire. And later on, another big national conservatory opened up in Lyon. But essentially you had to focus yourself on being a virtuosic classical musician or a composer in a certain style. And there was very little, in fact, there were practically no avenues for anybody to learn anything else. So yeah, you sort of had to teach yourself or go private. Um, but the training was very [00:12:00] rigorous and I think that's what I've kept. That's certainly what I got from my training in Paris because a lot of my training actually happened outside, in municipal conservatories with separate teachers, individual teachers or whatever.

That way I acquired all the skills and tools to be able to write music properly, and also just to be able to translate the sounds that I was hearing, so express myself properly. At the same time, Paris was also a place that was buzzing with the best music from all around the world, especially all around Europe, all around Africa, and Vietnam, Cambodia. It was a time when world music was really opening up. It was like the big boom of world music. And so I was hearing all the like, greatest musicians around. And so all of that kind of fed into my vocabulary as well. 

And then [00:13:00] London offered huge freedom, huge creative freedom, and many more opportunities than Paris did at that time. And because of the freedom and the more open attitude towards creative teams working in theatre, it meant that I was able to acquire or to get experience as a composer writing For a huge raft of formats, like for theatre, for radio drama, for TV, for art house films, documentaries. And then I moved on to dance, did art installations, and then especially after I finished the gig with Arkangel Shakespeare, I decided to move into music just for the sake of music.

And it's been like in the last 20 years, I've really just been writing music for chamber ensembles, for opera, for soloists, choirs and so on. So [00:14:00] I've had the opportunity to literally to write music right across the board for everything in a way that I don't think I would've had in Paris for sure.

Varsha: That's so exciting. I am, absolutely dying to ask you about this piece of theater music that you composed for Shakespeare's history play, Richard II, for an extraordinary production, because this was a production where the actors and creatives were all women of colour.

And Adjoa Andoh, who was also a guest on the podcast, she played the lead role, Richard II. So this production was performed in the indoor theater of Shakespeare's Globe, which is the Sam Wanamaker, and it is a very intimate space and it is lit only with candles. So what were some of the challenges or maybe the joys of creating a soundscape for that space?

Dominique: I mean, first of all, it was really a joy [00:15:00] just to be in that space. You know, suddenly it's like to walk on the ground where Shakespeare had his theater is, is kinda special. And then, it was really nice just to be in a space that was so intimate and containable, and also built on materials where you get a really good acoustic.

So it was great for hearing with actors' voices and also for hearing the music. The challenges, the difficulties arose within the location of the musician's gallery because the gallery is above the performance space, so it makes it really difficult for musicians to communicate with the performers if you're doing live music.

But anyway, we got around it and everybody learns their cues and we find ways of sort of signaling so they know how, how to find the start point and the end [00:16:00] point or whatever, when it's needed. But the other thing with the lighting was only the musicians were allowed to have little clip-on lights so that they could read the music, but otherwise they were in total darkness. I think we had to insist on the clip-on lights 'cause it was, there was a hope that it would be possible to do it by candlelight, but that doesn't work really. 

Varsha: So it actually makes me think whether they did have a different system as well of communicating with their actors in Shakespeare's day because they must have needed that, surely? 

Dominique: I wonder if they had written music, or maybe they just rehearsed it because the musicians were also the actors, so they knew the play. Yeah, 'cause in our days, like the musicians come on separately, so they don't know the play. 

And it's different when you have, you know, it's like when you have the play in your body and you can [00:17:00] respond to it musically. Whereas most times the musicians are separate to the acting company, and so they get booked to come in for their gigs. So they do separate rehearsals. And even the few rehearsals they have with the actors don't necessarily allow them time to know the play. So it's, it's not quite as integrated as one might like it to be. But still it works, you know?  

Varsha: Yes. And you are right because they worked with the same company. So it must have created a rapport there. But you all managed that beautifully. I saw that production. It was amazing. And would you tell us what kind of music you were creating, or what kind of world were you creating with music for that production of Richard II? 

Dominique: That was tricky, because I was trying to create music to [00:18:00] make this court credible. So the music had to express the court and all of its rituals. It also had to express the inner life of the characters. And it also had to do things like take us from one place to another to suggest time moving on, or distance. And I had to do that with three kind of unrelated instruments, bassoon, percussion and voice and Shruti.

So. Bassoon isn't really an obvious instrument to have to include in it, but it worked because it gave us sort of a deep throated hum to the whole thing, I think. And sort of like of almost like a human voice commenting on everything that was going on. 

Varsha: Yeah. And that was some court, right. So were you [00:19:00] thinking about the court of Richard II or were you thinking about the court that was created for this production with all of the women of colour from different parts of the world coming together? 

Dominique: Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah, very much so, the world of this production had to be credible and it had to feel like it was, I suppose, a world of powerful courts from across the, you know, so that whatever the music was saying, when it was expressing the rituals of the courts, it had to feel not necessarily like an English court, but it still had to sound majestic. An expression of power. 

Varsha: It very much was. And I am obsessed with the opening music of this production. Might you take us through what was being played? 

Dominique: So I suppose that you mean the opening sequence, [00:20:00] from the puppet show up on the balcony, and Richard is doing a series of vocalizing, and underneath it there is the sound of the bassoon as a drone. I think there's a Shruti drone also. Hand percussion, really light hand cymbals that just beat lightly to suggest an atmosphere of lightness before we go into the chorus call that all of the courtiers then announce when they come in.

And they sing a chant, with made up words, that I just came up with, because the combination of the consonants and the vowels propel that court into this space and give a sense of power. So the chant is. ‘Badayede’. And they all come in singing [00:21:00], ‘Badayedeyedeyede, Badayedeyedeyede …’

And it's John of Gaunt who's, hitting his, uh, her staff on the ground and then the djembe drum takes over and there's this sort of cross rhythm, that lifts the whole thing. And they repeat that chant over and over, until Richard is down with them in the middle of their circle. And then Richard brings the whole chant to our court.

Varsha: Yes, a chant that's repeated through the play as well. So when you are composing music for a Shakespeare play, what is your process? Do you analyse the text for clues about music? Do you let the genre decide what music it's going to be? 

Dominique: So there are lots of things that inform the music that I eventually write. One is of course the director's decision, what [00:22:00] choices the director has made to do with instrumentation. Sometimes we agree on a musical style together, and then, there are various questions that I have to answer, such as, what role the music is playing, whose voice is the music embodying? How many voices in music is embodying? And when I say voices, I mean, is the music just internal or is it representing a character? Is it representing a theme?

Then for me, there are other considerations, such as, of course, the text, what the text is saying, the rhythm of the text, and especially if I'm working with audio and actually even with live actors, I spend a lot of time in rehearsals just to listen to the actor's voices and to hear the texture of the actor's voices. To decide where I'm going to [00:23:00] place the music, which instrument is going to play it. Because it has to come in the right place and it has to be saying something that is not there in the words. So all of those things, yeah, all of things matter, really, and they're all going on at the same time.

Varsha: So of course you have composed music for each play in the complete Arkangel Shakespeare recordings, and for the benefit of our listeners who don't know about these yet, these are fully dramatised audio recordings of all of Shakespeare's plays that I'm very much recommending for anyone who enjoys listening to Shakespeare's plays. 

So when you were composing music for these recordings, were you at all interested in historical research on music in Shakespeare's times? So, what instruments were being played? Who the musicians were? 

Dominique: It very much [00:24:00] was when I had started off, when the plan was first mooted. And then the director, Clive Brill, said very openly to me that he wanted the music of each play to be very different. And he deliberately did not want the music to be period. 

Varsha: Right. 

Dominique: So just to give you an example, so we would take a decision just before we'd start production on a specific play.

In Coriolanus, he said he wanted the music to sound like a New Orleans marching band perhaps. So I wrote for an ensemble of brass and some woodwind, but mostly brass instruments, like a New Orleans marching band. And it gives a very specific colour. 

For King John, he wanted the sounds to be industrial. And so I worked with a percussion ensemble called Ensemble Bash. We recorded in an empty warehouse using the [00:25:00] metal curtain chains that were hanging in the warehouse, an electric saw and lots of drumsticks and drums and sheet metal. Um, so it, everything was very, very different.

So that's a million miles away from your question about what music was like in Shakespeare's day and who the players were. 

Varsha: Yes. Especially electric saws. 

So which Shakespeare play did you really love composing music for? Was it one of the musical ones, like The Tempest or Twelfth Night?

Dominique: I loved doing The Tempest. I had great fun doing that. And which are the ones I really enjoyed writing for? Pericles, because I got to use some very different, a really nice group of instruments. For Cymbeline also, I worked with an ensemble. I don't think they exist anymore as an ensemble. They were called the Dufay Ensemble and they play period [00:26:00] instruments, so we used lots of shawms and rubabs and uh, medieval type, or Renaissance type drums and Turkish drums. And I think there was also a harp, I'm not sure, a medieval harp, or Welsh harp, I think. It is really difficult to choose but The Tempest really stands out.

Varsha: What did you enjoy about The Tempest? 

Dominique: Gosh, I think it was just everything. It was the play, the actors who were in it. The actor who played Ariel, Adrian Lester, has a fantastic voice. He sang the role of Ariel. There are songs that he has and he sang it in a fantastic falsetto voice. So it was fun working with him on that.

And just the music, the musicians that I got together for that production were a really good bunch of musicians. It was almost like a [00:27:00] combination of folk with a bit of cello and bit of orchestra in it. Yeah, it was really nice to have an opportunity to write in that style.

Varsha: Um, I'm very interested in the connection between women and music that Shakespeare portrays. So Ophelia sings to communicate when she allegedly goes mad. Desdemona sings when she's waiting for Othello towards the end of the play and is very sad. The statue of Hermione comes to life when music is played in The Winter's Tale. And then Titania’s fairies sing her to sleep in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, just to take a few examples. How did you compose music for Shakespeare's heroines?

Do you think that there is a special connection between music and women in Shakespeare's plays? 

Dominique: You know, I was thinking about those scenes, writing music for those scenes. What [00:28:00] those specific scenes highlight is the fragility of these women that is expressed in words and music, but that also underlines the madness of the world around them that drives them to this fragility.

Because, as we know, there's a point where Othello's jealousy is so immense and so total that he no longer sees Desdemona. And it doesn't matter what she does, she no longer exists, or the only thing that exists is his jealousy to devastating consequences.

Ophelia's the same thing. There's a madness that is going on all around her, and yet she's a person who is identified as mad.  

 What I find interesting about what Shakespeare does is that into the mouths of the women, he puts this other sort of expression that [00:29:00] somehow draws the focus of the men and takes them away from their relentless, relentless beating and ranting and into a very tiny little world that allows them to see, oh, there's something else going on here. But yet, never once do they ask themselves, Am I wrong? Might I be going wrong? Why is she doing this? 

Varsha: So in a way, these songs, even if they are emphasising the fragility, are actually enhancing a woman's presence in the play. Making us focus on them.

Dominique: Focus on them, and actually shining a huge, huge spotlight on the world around them. That fragility exposes the brutality of the world around them, and somehow it takes that woman's presence to [00:30:00] expose that brutality.

Varsha: I like that as you said, music is a way of expression for these kinds of, you know, because they can't partake in these big, loud narratives. This is their expression. 

The final thing that I wanted to ask you was, are there any women composers who have inspired you because do you think we are now in a world where people are finally engaging after a really long time in the west especially, are they finally engaging and rediscovering more women composers?

Dominique: Yeah, I mean the opening, the opening up of the world to women composers. But I would say, you know, in the classical world, that's where the opening has happened. Thank God. It’s about time, you know, that we are getting an opportunity to hear and discover the work of all these women who have been working [00:31:00] for centuries and writing music and producing music in extraordinary circumstances. But in popular music and traditional music, women have always been present because if I just think when I was growing up, I didn't know of any women composers. I think it was only in my teens and I became aware of Ethel Smyth as a composer. 'Cause her picture was on the cover of Time magazine one year. 

But I was very aware and very much into Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Joan Armatrading, of course, all the folk singers, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, all those women performers who were like hugely present. Ella Fitzgerald.

I mean, it was like endless, endless, endless women all around, you know, fantastic performers and singer songwriters. And that tradition has continued. So there's still loads and loads of [00:32:00] great women composers in genres that sort of cross everything. Their language, I find their language very, very, um, open and wide and not restrictive. Yeah. 

Varsha: Do you think. The future is looking great for women composers. You are saying that they're going strong. 

Dominique: It, yeah. Yes. I mean, right. The present looks good. Um, how long it will last.

Varsha: Yeah. Well, here's hoping. 

Dominique: We can try. 

Varsha: Yes. And on that note, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to learn from you. 

Dominique: Thank you.

Varsha: That was Dominique Le Gendre talking about composing music for Shakespeare's plays, including Richard II at the Sam Wannamaker [00:33:00] Playhouse and the complete Arkangel Shakespeare audio drama, and she was telling us how all her different homes have fed into her music and how music has become an expression of all her worlds.

With that, I bid you adieu, adieu, adieu. But remember to tune in to Women and Shakespeare streaming at Apple Podcasts and Spotify and wherever else you get your podcasts. If you want to listen to the podcast with a full transcript, head over to the website, www.womenandshakespeare.com. Until then, keep smashing the patriarchy.

Glass Shatter