2012

Footfalls (after Beckett)

for flute, oboe, two guitars, tingsha, violin, & violoncello

Recording

Cygnus Ensemble

Video

Premieres

Kathleen Chalfant & Holly Twyford, Actors
Joy Zinoman, Founding Artistic Director,
The Studio Theatre in Washington, DC
Cygnus Ensemble,
William Anderson, Music Director

Off-Broadway Production of Sounding Beckett
September 14, 2012 (preview)
September 15, 2012 (opening night)
September 23, 2012 (matinee)
Classic Stage Company
New York City

Work Details

Duration:

ca. 8 minutes

Commission:

Commissioned by the Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music for Sounding Beckett, a collaborative project between The Studio Theatre in Washington, DC, Joy Zinoman, Founding Artistic Director, and Cygnus Ensemble, William Anderson, Music Director

Publisher:

Biscardi Music Press
No. B48-12-1

Distributor:

Theodore Front Musical Literature, Inc.

Other Version:

With Piano
(replaces guitars and tingsha)

Sample Pages

Selected Press

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“There’s a haunting, ethereal sound to the music.”

Theatermania

Dan Bacalzo, "Sounding Beckett," 2012 Sept. 17
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“Chester Biscardi’s airy, atmospheric musical response to ‘Footfalls’ [is] elegantly composed.

Backstage

Mitch Montgomery, "Sounding Becket," 2012 Sept. 16
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“…a production that is both respectful of the playwright’s work and imaginative in its incorporation of music.”

Sequenza 21

Christian Carey, "Sounding Beckett Sounds Right," 2012 Sept. 19

Click to View All Press Quotes

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“There’s an inherent musicality to the language of Samuel Beckett, which makes the idea of pairing three of his short works with original music compositions an intriguing one. In Sounding Beckett, now at Classic Stage Company, the Cygnus Ensemble beautifully performs these musical works.


The most successful pairing comes first. Actress Holly Twyford performs ‘Footfalls,’ but rather than picking up her feet and walking, she shuffles along in a rhythmic pattern that creates a visible mark on the bare black stage. Her character is someone who has been taking care of her ailing mother (voiced by a pre-recorded Kathleen Chalfant), and has never really gotten to live her own life. She paces incessantly, and there’s a frustration and sadness to both her movements and her prolonged moments of stillness.


Composer Chester Biscardi echoes these qualities in the brief instrumental piece that follows. There’s a haunting, ethereal sound to the music.”

— Dan Bacalzo, “Sounding Beckett”, Theatermania (September 17, 2012)

“Director Joy Zinoman accomplishes a surprising feat with “Sounding Beckett,” a nearly flawless and enlightening show that pairs three short plays by Samuel Beckett with a vivid selection of newly composed instrumental music. Zinoman, of the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., and musical director William Anderson fully accentuate the stark, misanthropic melodies in Beckett’s deliberate dialogue-or lack thereof. The three plays selected draw strength from sound-be it shuffling, silence, or audible shivering-and tersely defy any sort of traditional plot.


‘Footfalls,’ in which Holly Twyford plays the haggard and trapped May, who paces within a single beam of light on the stage floor. Kathleen Chalfant provides the purring disembodied voice of May’s mother, who is either dying or has already died. Nonetheless, May continues to converse with her, methodically shuffling back and forth along the lighted path. It’s a marvelous visual conceit, matched by her mother’s disembodied words: “Will you never have done revolving it all? In your poor mind?” Beckett calls for Chalfant to repeat “it all” a few times in voiceover, both robbing the words of any meaning and somehow extending them to encompass all meanings. Chester Biscardi’s airy, atmospheric musical response to ‘Footfalls’ [is] elegantly composed.”

— Mitch Montgomery, “Sounding Beckett”, Backstage (September 16, 2012)

“Three of Samuel Beckett’s late one-act plays (from his “ghost period”) are the source material for Sounding Beckett, an interdisciplinary collaboration that is entering its second (and final) weekend of New York performances at Classic Stage Company on September 21-23.Theatre director Joy Zinoman has enlisted a fine cast of actors and resourceful design team, Cygnus Ensemble directed by guitarist William Anderson, and composers Laura Kaminsky, John Halle, Laura Schwendinger, Scott Johnson, David Glaser, and Chester Biscardi to create a production that is both respectful of the playwright’s work and imaginative in its incorporation of music.”

— Christian Carey, “Sounding Beckett Sounds Right”, Sequenza 21 (September 19, 2012)

“‘Sounding Beckett’ is directed by Joy Zinoman, the founding artistic director of the Studio Theater in Washington (she stepped down in 2010), who chose the plays and has staged them with a glamorous starkness and a clear respect for the works’ purity. They alternate with original musical compositions that they inspired, performed live and with a haunting intensity by the Cygnus Ensemble.”

— Anita Gates, “Stark, Minimalist and Beckett All Over”, New York Times (September 19, 2012)