Creating the sound of The Peony Lantern

This month, Yokohama Theatre Group’s production of The Peony Lantern (牡丹燈籠/Botan Doro) will be available to stream as part of the Montréal horror theatre Festival De La Bête Noire. This is the second YTG production for which I worked on sound and music – and the current situation, with audiences impossible and live-streaming becoming the norm, made it all the more exciting and satisfying a project to work on. https://ytg.jp/peony-lantern/  

From the show description:

The Peony Lantern | 牡丹燈籠 is a retelling of the story that spawned rakugo, bunraku, and kabuki plays and was popularized in the west in Lafcadio Hearn‘s 1899 book, In Ghostly Japan. Our version is set in the Taisho period, in Yokohama, in the three days leading up to the o-bon festival of the dead. A traveler arrives at the port of Yokohama in 1912, alone and unprepared: unprepared both for life in a very different culture and for falling in love with a very singular woman. But something strange is going on, a secret hangs in the air like a lantern, and the boundaries between life and death are thin. Can the traveler discover what’s happening before it’s too late?

I’ve created a special short track with some of the most pivotal music moments of the play for supporters over on Patreon. You can listen and read a full version of the below post by signing up at www.patreon.com/annamurraymusic.

About the sound of The Peony Lantern

The story of the Peony Lantern was chosen for this project for a number of reasons. A significant part of my Noh study here in Japan has been in considering the connections between Japanese and Irish literature, in the stories we tell and the techniques we use to tell them. Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek/Irish writer seemed a natural point of focus for both my work and that of Yokohama Theatre Group; through his collecting and retelling Japanese stories in English, he introduced a view of Japan (albeit a very particular, and probably not realistic one) to Europe. It was through embracing his status as an ‘outsider’ that he could provide this lens

The Peony Lantern, though is a story much older than Hearn’s retelling of it, and despite it being the basis for rakugo, bunraku, kabuki and other adaptations, has never been associated with Noh. Our reworking of the story though, drew on some Noh-inspired ideas. Firstly, narrative techniques were borrowed from Noh, mostly significantly the telling of a story within a story. In mugen Noh, part of the ‘present day’ action involves the shite (main character) telling the waki (secondary character) the story of their past; in The Peony Lantern, a street musician tells our main character, Islay, an older version of the story, through an abstracted shadow puppet play.

More fundamentally, our telling of the story revolves around the thin veil between the ‘real’ world and the illusory, the world of ghosts and spirits; even more than this, as in Mugen Noh, in our recreation world of Taisho-era Yokohama, these ‘worlds’ don’t just interact with each other, but exist simultaneously. Similarly, the past and the present too collide and combine, both literally and figuratively – ghosts and the living exist together, while the modern industrialised world and old Japan are meeting, older and younger generations interact, and there are even moments where time slips or freezes completely.

“The shite [main character], therefore, exists in both worlds, present and past, at the same time…Or, better said, Noh makes no clear distinction between the past and the present; characters come and go between the two worlds.”

Mitsuya Mori, 'The Structure of Theatre: A Japanese View of Theatricality'

When it came to creating the music for The Peony Lantern, this collision of real and unreal also created an additional opportunity. Creating theatre under the current circumstances compounds challenge upon challenge. While creating music for the specific needs of theatre is new to me, creating music for live performance is not. However, Covid-19 has simply removed one of the basic and first assumptions of performance: the audience. The show was still ‘live’, performed straight from beginning to end and unedited, but our audience were watching it in their homes, often listening to dialogue and music through earphones. There was opportunity for detail, intimacy, and to use sound to further blur the distinctions between reality and unreality.

Rather than starting with music for different scenes, work on this play began with the creation of sound motifs that would underpin these moments where time skips, or of connection between the real and unreal. While most instances of sound and music seem to exist within the sonic space of the action, these are located as to seem more ‘present’ to the listener.

Thanks to director Andrew Woolner for inviting me to take part in this project, and to the amazing cast and crew. Make sure you watch the work!