#3784: With Jocelyn Pook

English composer/violist/arranger/producer Jocelyn Pook joins John Schaefer to talk about her music for the play, King Charles III, which is now in previews on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre and opens on Nov. 1.  Jocelyn Pook has worked in a variety of media--theater, dance, television and film, including a celebrated score for Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999.) In Mike Bartlett’s  King Charles III,  where the queen is dead and after a lifetime of waiting, the prince ascends the throne, Pook’s score is not incidental music. Rather, these contemporary sounds and Latin text are whole musical sections and allowed to have a voice. Also, the dialogue is entirely in iambic pentameter.

King Charles III is now in previews; Opening night is November 1st.

Then, listen to portions of Jocelyn Pook’s recent song cycle, “Hearing Voices,” which has also been staged as a multimedia chamber opera.  The work was inspired by Pook’s great aunt Phyllis Williams, whose diaries chart her incarceration and her struggle to live with the voices she heard. In past works, Pook has crafted “found sound” – including London soccer chants, messages from her phone answering machine, and interviews with neighbors being evicted to make way for a new highway – with live voices. Again, she does so in “Hearing Voices,” where she features the recorded voices of Bobby Baker, Mary Pook and Julie McNamara, and their experiences with mental health. On one of these songs, “So Funny,” she edits together laughter and augments it with melodies that follow the contour of the laugh.  Hear all that, and more. 

PROGRAM #3784 with Jocelyn Pook  (First Aired 10-09-2015)