International Journal of English Literature and Culture
 

International Journal of English Literature and Culture Vol. 2(6), pp. 104-110, June, 2014

 ISSN: 2360-7831 ©2014 Academic Research Journals

Review

Shakespeare and All Our Yesterdays

¹Sidney Homan and ²David Homan

¹Department of English, 4008 Turlington Hall, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611, USA.Corresponding author’s email: shakes@ufl.edu;  352-378-9166.

²America Israel Cultural Foundation, 1140 Broadway, Suite 304, New York, New York 10001, USA. E-mail: david@homanmusic.com;  212-557-1600.

Accepted 24 June 2014

In the fourth of the five movements of the suite All Our Yesterdays, a piece for orchestra portraying the various dimensions of Alzheimer’s, an actor comes onstage, an old man, suffering from the disease, who can recall his life only through quoting lines from Shakespeare. All Our Yesterdays is examined from five perspectives: two real life events that were the genesis of the piece; the use of Shakespeare’s text in movement 4; a note on scoring the piece from the composer; the rehearsal process, the performance itself, and the larger issue of an actor’s working with musicians; and some more general thoughts on the combination of words and music, or the collaboration between actor and musicians.
This essay charts the evolution of the collaboration among composer, musicians, and actor, and, along with an analysis of the performance itself, explores the interface between music and theatre. In this instance the composer (David Homan) and the actor (Sidney Homan, a Shakespearean scholar) are father and son.

Keywords: Shakespeare, performance, Macbeth, music




 

FULL TEXT PDF