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

This 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, is a collaboration between Steve Dixon, who produced, performed and created the video projections, and Joyce Beetuan Koh, who composed the music and soundscape. The performance was directed for stage by Tony Knight and was first presented in June 2013, firstly as a keynote performance at the International Association of Philosophy and Literature Conference, National University of Singapore, and then at the University of São Paulo, Brazil during the Experimental Settings: Numerical Audio Visual Culture Conference.