AT THE END of the first act of Anton Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard," the great Russian playwright's script indicates that a shepherd plays a reed pipe.
"That's wonderfully ambiguous," Todd Barton says. "Which I love."
It leaves Barton, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's resident composer, lots of room to do his thing. Which is to add the dimension of music to stage plays.
Since OSF founder Angus Bowmer hired him in 1969, Barton has written the music for more than 100 plays, including the entire Shakespeare cannon twice over.
These days, with music as integral a part of a play's design as set, costume and lights, composers such as Barton meet with directors months before rehearsals begin to start mapping out the music.
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Milwaukee, Wisc., composer John Tanner wrote the music for Shakespeare's "As You Like It." Barton did "The Cherry Orchard." Tom Stoppard's farce "On the Razzle" will have music by award-winning Los Angeles composer Larry Delinger. Theater professor Irwin Appel, who is also an actor, director and composer, wrote the music for "Rabbit Hole," a newer play by David Lindsay-Abaire.
TODD BARTON'S trip to the most famous orchard in all theater started in November when OSF Artistic Director Libby Appel asked him for musical ideas. He wrote a theme based on his impression of the play, and Appel liked it at once.
"It's nice when that happens," Barton says.
The theme will take the audience out of the one act and into the next. It will crop up here and there with reed pipe, strings and flute, a haunting melody with the minor harmonics that spell Russian soul.
There is an early guitar song with vocals. Act three is wall-to-wall waltzes, as the play's "famous Jewish orchestra" performs off-stage, and characters at a mock ball dance.
Barton recruited musicians to play flute, violin, viola and cello rather than four violins as Chekhov specified, then recorded, mixed and edited the results.
He won't get into the old debate about whether "The Cherry Orchard" is comic or tragic. The argument began in 1904 between Chekhov, who said it was comic, "almost farcical," and Konstantin Stanislavski, who directed its premiere at the Moscow Art Theatre, who insisted it was tragic.
"What I've learned from Chekhov this time is that ambiguity is the heart of art and transformation," Barton says. "There's an ambiguity to it, a melancholy, a playfulness, a force of nature. To worry about comic or tragic is not part of the right universe. It's not a discussion I find fruitful."
Later, he describes the music as haunting.
He's not saying how he created his version of one of the most famous sound effects in drama — a strange off-stage noise that comes twice and is described by Chekhov as sounding like a string breaking. Characters on-stage describe it as sounding like a heron, a cable, an owl, and sad.
Barton spent weeks trying different things. He finally mixed five or six elements into a sound that lives for four or five seconds.
COMPOSER JOHN TANNER and the rest of the design team working with director J.R. Sullivan on "As You Like It" decided the production, which will have a 1930s look, was about identity and change.
"It's America finding itself," Tanner says. "You'll bring your connotations. Hard work, honesty, prevailing, Woody Guthrie, a tough but simpler time."
In his day job, Tanner is a partner in an agency that makes music for TV commercials, documentaries and other media. Recent OSF productions include "The Merry Wives of Windsor" and "Love's Labor's Lost."
He listened to lots of Woody Guthrie for "As You Like It." He found the music surprisingly complex.
"His guitar style came from The Carter Family," he says of the first-family of country music.
One of the play's themes is a contrast between life at a great duke's court and the pastoral life of forest and countryside.
"The court is more the city sounds, with no rustic instruments, no fiddle or banjo," Tanner says.
There are actual songs in Shakespeare's script, but Tanner and Sullivan didn't use them.
"They were the pop songs of the day," Tanner says. "We thought the original lyrics would actually remove us from the play."
Instead, they asked the purpose of each song. For example, when the good Duke's men sing in camp, it's about living in nature and their attitude to it:
We ain't got no roof above except the big blue sky,/And when it starts a rainin', we're everything but dry ...
Tanner says he wanted to avoid changing Shakespeare's intent.
Most of the play's songs will be performed live. There is also incidental music, which is recorded. Sullivan wanted music for every scene shift to sum up what just happened and propel things into the next.
Tanner says, in writing for plays, a composer must remember he's there to serve the script. Flexibility is a key.
"Todd (Barton) says a composer is like vodka," he says. "Whatever you put it with it, it takes on the flavor."
LARRY DELINGER, who composed the music for Tom Stoppard's "On the Razzle," is a freelance composer who has written music for theaters throughout the United States and Europe, and for radio and television. He has received eleven Los Angeles DramaLogue Critics' Awards for excellence.
He says writing for farce requires the composer to become an "aural actor."
"You do what they do," he says of farces and their characters. "Double takes, wrong turns, feelings of (he laughs) impending doom. That's the tack I've taken, make the instruments run into each other."
He used piano, violin, clarinet, alto sax, trumpet, French horn, trombone, tuba, percussion and xylophone.
"There's something about a xylophone that's funny," he says.
He has worked with Laird Williamson, who directs, for 35 years.
"We hardly have to talk," he says.
Williamson is not a musician, but he has what Delinger calls a good musical background.
"He'll give me a composer or something" as a key to the production's spine, he says.
What was that for "On the Razzle"?
"'The Simpsons,"' he says. "I saw what he meant. It feels out of control."
He says that in farce, a composer does not need to underscore scenes.
"Or, I never have. The language itself propels the play. You get out of the way."
The play moves to Vienna, then the outside of a shop, then the shop interior, then to a restaurant, to an apartment, a garden, back to the store, and so on.
"Stoppard didn't write how you get from one to the next," Delinger says. "You can't just say we're going to stop the play. My challenge was to write the music from one location to the next. So it has a wacky movement."
Delinger says the hardest assignment he ever had was when he was a young composer and was asked to write music for a 35-piece orchestra for "Peer Gynt." The play's original music was written by the composer Grieg, no less.
"I'd get up every morning and write as fast as I could," he says. "It was frightening, but I learned good things. You have to write something, just anything.
"Interestingly, I'd write down the most elementary idea and feel like a fool, but it gets me going. 'Oh, I see, that could do this' ... I still laugh about it."
IRWIN APPEL says he approaches every project as a blank space, no matter if it's a classic or a new play like "Rabbit Hole."
"In design conferences, by that point we have exorcized past concepts," he says. "So classic or new, it's no different.
"What does make a new play different is that sense that you are breaking new ground, and not necessarily knowing where it's heading."
Appel teaches theater at the University of California at Santa Barbara and is an actor and director as well as a composer. He has performed Off-Broadway and regionally with the New York, Oregon, Utah and Colorado Shakespeare festivals. He composed for last season's "Up" and "Bus Stop" at OSF.
As OSF Artistic Director Libby Appel's son, he is in the unusual position of being able to talk shop at family gatherings.
"Rabbit Hole" has the reputation of being a major tear-jerker, but he didn't write a bunch of dirges for it.
"It's sad, yes," he says. "And yet what is important is to not layer on top of that sadness. Almost approach it from a lighter point of view, more wistful, lonely, rather than trying to tell the story through the music, which might otherwise become maudlin. It's a delicate balance.
He expects the music to continue to develop right up to the play's opening on Sunday, Feb. 25.
One question faced by directors and design teams is whether a play's music reflects its outside world or the inner life of characters.
"To me it reflects Becca's inner life," says Appel, speaking of one of the play's lead characters. "She's very elusive. I'd love for the music to have that."
Appel says writing for plays is a knack. He's known great musicians and gifted composers who can't do it — "and they're more skilled composers than I am."
He thinks acting, directing and composing are different sides of the same expression.
"An actor tries to inhabit a role, the composer tries to inhabit a world."
The only thing he'd shy away from would be a project involving a full orchestral treatment like a John Williams film score.
What he'd really like is to write rock music and lyrics for Bertolt Brecht's "The Good Person of Szechuan."
"I'm a rock guitarist at heart," he says. "That's who I am, since age 15."
Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or bvarble@mailtribune.com.
