Confederates
Oregon Shakespeare Festival (2022)
Repertory Theatre of St. Louis (2023)

Promotional trailer

I wrote the score and created the sound design for the west coast premiere of Dominique Morriseau’s Confederates. Morriseau is a leading U.S. American playwright who has received, amongst other honors, a MacArthur Fellowship, Obie Award, and nomination for a Tony Award. See production websites here and here for additional details.

The play deals with the intersectional experiences of Black women across time — one an enslaved woman serving as a spy during the Civil War and the other a professor in a present day university. Their stories are compared and contrasted across the piece, ultimately arriving at a space of the “changing same”: structures remain although the outer contours and range of autonomy for Black women might have shifted over time.

To support the dual temporal framework, my score blends traditional African American and Afro-Caribbean elements (Gullah-Geechee ring shout, body percussion, Afro-Caribbean drumming, old time fiddle) with contemporary hip hop and electronic components. A recurring gesture is the voicing of a groove through either the roots or contemporary palette, which is then taken over by sounds from the other. In addition to the main cues in the link above, I created musical underscoring (based on similar components) as well as a sound design consisting of ambient and other effects.

Click here to listen to music from Confederates

For the recordings, I sang, played percussion and various synthesizers. I also remote engineered sessions with three additional musicians (Rafael Maya, Safiya Fredericks, B.E. Farrow) and mixed/produced the recording.

Cues of note:

  • “Thank you for giving me the floor” — A cinematic cue that accompanies the first transition from present to past. It introduces the main theme, voiced by solo vocalist and fiddle. An electronic drum beat enters partway through, beginning the sonic weaving together of musical eras that grows increasingly complex over the course of the piece.

  • “Now you’re a real man” — Hand clap patterns from the ring shout and old time fiddle chops morph into synthesized beats and organ as the play transitions from past to present.

  • “Goodnight, Sara” — A berimbau-like synth pattern leads into a hip hop context featuring a digitally processed fiddle solo.

  • “I’ll kill you in your sleep" — Built on a hip hop beat realized on the barril (Afro-Puerto Rican hand drum), the cue features drum improvisation from the Afro-Cuban rumba tradition and accompanies the main enslaved character making a dramatic bid toward freedom.

  • “You betta damn sho not cross us” — This cue features the traditional ring shout stick and tambourine patterns realized on virtual instruments, developing into an intense contemporary beat as the action of the play reaches a fever pitch.

Reviews:

“There’s also compelling use of sound and music from composer/designer T. Carlis Roberts. All of [the] technical elements work well to represent the two eras and locations as well as providing a thematic connection between the stories.” - Snoop’s Theatre Thoughts