Steve Przybylski, Composer
Seamus: Hiya, Steve! Thanks for sitting down. How’s everything going in the studio?
Steve: Reasonably well – a little bit crunched, but that’s where we need to be in process at the moment. It’s a big, big show, and a lot of moving pieces to fit together.
Seamus: You’re billed as Music Director/Composer on The Pirate Laureate and the King of the Sea. For the uninitiated, can you break down what both of those roles entail on this show?
Steve: That’s actually an interesting question on this project. Since this is a sequel, and there is preexisting musical material from the previous show and from the development process before I came aboard that is very much a part of these characters, my job as a composer is to put a new spin on the existing material, fill in places where additional music is needed, and make it all feel like it belongs in the same world. (And remove the kitten from the keyboard…this is one of the challenges of working in a home studio!)
Seamus: Kittens always want in on the creative process.
Steve: As MD, my gig is to teach and shape the music that’s being performed live – often on the fly as music needs to conform to changes in staging/choreography/text. It’s very much an on-your-feet sort of show to work on.
Seamus: It’s interesting that you mention the music belonging to a cohesive world, because world-building is such a big part of both Pirate shows. Can you talk a little bit about the musical influences that inform the show’s soundtrack, and how you make them all cohere?
Steve: Oh gosh, there are so many! For my part, there are two things that scream “pirate” – the big, orchestral film score-y sound, and the “I have an accordion and am questionably Irish sounding” sort of sound; so I aimed for a place somewhere between John Powell and the rhyming pirates in Curse of Monkey Island. The Decemberists were a big influence for Jason; Carlos wanted to get a little bit of Vincente Fernandez happening; and what’s wonderful about this world is that it’s a place where all of those can fit next to each other somehow without feeling like they’re breaking through from outside of the play.This play is more – I think the world Jason has been using is “cinematic” than its predecessor, so I’ve tried to play with scale a bit; using some big, layered orchestral bombast right alongside very intimate, a cappella live vocal work.
Seamus: Zach wrote some new song lyrics for this one; how do you work with him to bring a given song to life for the production?
Steve: In each case, Zach’s lyrics have pretty much said exactly how they’ve wanted to be set. A lot of them already had existing melodies – or fragments of melodies – from the development process, so it was pretty much taking those and regularizing them, putting them to the chord progression they seemed to want to be set to, playing them in rehearsal and having Zach and Jason say “Yup, that’s what that’s supposed to sound like!” All I had to do was treat the songs like they asked to be treated, get them in the cast’s hands and stay out of the way.
Seamus: Are there any new musical moments you’ve brought to the show that you’re especially proud of?
Steve: The first time I heard the cast sing the finale in context, I started to tear up in the rehearsal room. And there is one spot very early on – Jason was looking for a place to bring in one of the songs from the previous show, maybe just a snippet – and I built this massive John Williams-ish cue around it which fits wonderfully and really changed the way I view the show musically. But those are still collaborative moments – the text on the finale is Zach’s, the melody is Doug’s, the chords and arrangement are mine. And I think the fact that all of the “oooh” moments have multiple people’s hands in them says a lot about Jason’s aesthetic. It really is everyone’s show.
