In the Mahwah High School Production of The Crucible (Fall, 2016), we added a prologue where Reverend Parris discovers the white dress in front of the curtain. I recorded this percussion combination to act as part of the recurring witchcraft theme throughout the show.

Act I of The Crucible calls for a hymn that does not actually exist; the text reference is a creation of Arthur Miller's imagination. I spent a lot of time researching period hymns to find something appropriately dark and menacing for the show. The lyrics are adapted from Psalms of David by Isaac Watts, with an original melody/arrangement in the style of a Sacred Harp. I recorded Reverend Parris on the intro, then the full ensemble to fill in the congregation. I then looped their voices and began playing with reverb, echo, speed, and synthesizer to score the scene where Abigail Williams tries to convince John Proctor to leave his wife and return to her.

One of the creative decisions the director and I made for the Mahwah HS production of The Crucible was twofold: any scene requiring music would allude to witchcraft and accusations, and any scene including an accusation of witchcraft would include music. This is the first instance of the latter. When Tituba is brought back in and questioned by Reverend Hale, I mixed together the initial percussion from the opening of the show with elements of the recorded hymn, church bells, wind, synthesizer, and an acoustic guitar played with a cello bow. This technique became the basis of all fights over witchcraft in the production.

My goal was to create a sense of chaos whenever Abigail Williams was onstage putting on one of her productions for approval. Here, when she confesses to participating in Tituba's rituals, I returned to the simple church bells from the start of Act I and transformed them with pitch modulation and layering into something far less serene.

Act II of The Crucible opens with Elizabeth Proctor singing a lullaby offstage to her children. I had the actor playing Elizabeth record this for use in the show. The lullaby is an adaptation of "Over the Hills and Far Away," with alterations to the text to make things a bit more menacing. In the original, children are enchanted by Tom's music figuratively; in my adaptation, there's a good chance that the children are literally enchanted by Tom's music.

Mary Warren and Abigail Williams are both prone to their exaggerated performance of victim-hood in the text of The Crucible. I wanted music for both of their approaches to accusing others of witchcraft. Mary's is more apprehensive and somber. The modulating woodblocks, rising synth, and bowed guitar easily slid in and out of the action of the play while defining Mary's contribution to the hysteria of the witch hunts.

Near the end of Act II, when the poppet is discovered in the house, we needed some scoring to amp up the tension. I combined the Tituba accusation music of Act I with a significantly slowed down and processed version of Mary Warren's theme from earlier in the act. This was the music that played through the end of Act II, leading to our intermission, and we wanted the audience put on edge.

I really wanted to play around with audience expectations for Act III. They knew to expect rearranged/deconstructed vocals, but they did not know that anytime Abigail Williams accused someone of witchcraft that I would reuse Elizabeth's Lullaby as the basis of the spell. Add in synth and cymbal rolls digitally reversed and you have a disturbing spin on Abigail's attempted destruction.

The Crucible shifts when Mary Warren decides to accuse John Proctor of witchcraft to save herself. I arranged the Act II Mary Warren theme with additional elements from other compositions throughout the show to create the scoring for the moment where John Proctor's life changes forever.

Once Elizabeth Proctor tells the court John Proctor never cheated on her, Abigail Williams is free to go for the throat of anyone who stands in her way. Once again, I incorporate Elizabeth's lullaby for the infamous Yellow Bird sequence, only flipping the vocal to be totally inhuman. I recorded a few runs on alto flute to process and incorporate for a twist on the expected musical bird affect.

The director and I decided a major tonal shift was needed for Act IV. The scene opens with Tituba and Sarah Good waking up in the jail cell. I wanted the echo of witchcraft to sound with the wind and percussion, but silence to really be the driving force. No music plays again until the death march for John Proctor at the end of the production.

Geek! HS Edition by Crystal Skillman is like The Odyssey reset as an anime convention. Each scene is punctuated with stock character types for an action/adventure story and cartoonish sound effects. My task as composer was to create an original score for an anime series that doesn't exist. The Battledome sequence in the second scene was written with a metronome, the bass end of a piano, and a xylophone.

One of the strangest composition tasks in all of Geek! HS Edition was creating an original rap track for the male lead using lyrics provided by Skillman. There is no music licensed with the show even though the script requires quite a bit and no indication of the rhythm or emphasis in the rap track. The director and I decided on an early-90's hypeman style of Hip-Hop for the U-Leeo theme, composed on a drum machine and performed live every night with assistance from my HS projection operators in the house.

Dante, the main character of the anime within the play, is supposed to have an original theme that appears in different variations throughout the play. This is the original version from which all other versions sprang, an original synthesized composition inspired by the romantic anime dramas of the early 00's. Here, it plays under the convention's museum dedicated to the creator of the Dante's Inferno anime, Johto Samagashi.

The Elevator scene at the start of Act II, as written, is the most technically demanding scene in the show. Dante and U-Leeo have to use the power of their imagination to travel from a broken elevator at a convention hall to a town in Japan, a HS football stadium, an outer space battlefield, and an Endor-like forest of furry sidekicks. Aside from the lighting design, I used elements of Dante's theme and reset them to anime-styled versions of these locations. The town theme is in the the style of modern slice of life series; the battlefield is magical girl action fantasy; the forest of Gurgies is an exotic percussion beat; and the football field is actual audio recording of the pep rally that year at Mahwah High School.

American showman Harry Van attempts to uncover the real identity of Russian beauty Irene by playing various Russian folk songs on the hotel's piano in Idiot's Delight. I arranged these folk songs for solo piano and taught the actor how to play them for this production.

American showman Harry Van attempts to uncover the real identity of Russian beauty Irene by playing various Russian folk songs on the hotel's piano in Idiot's Delight. I arranged these folk songs for solo piano and taught the actor how to play them for this production.