The lights go down, and everyone is silent. The whole crowd is holding a collective breath as voices from every direction all ask the same question, building until they stop, and a man is there, prostrate on the floor, crawling up a set of stairs toward a chest full of riches. He is sweaty, disheveled and heavily bearded. He answers the voices, the chest slams and the lights shut off. The first scene of the Count of Monte Cristo has ended, and you can already feel the tension in the air.
As you are imagining that scene, whether or not you saw Union’s production of the Count of Monte Cristo, you probably had some sort of backtrack playing in your head. The mood just would not be right without it. Music is the thing that serves to heighten tension, drag out tears, induce fear, make you fall in love and more. There is a reason that films have soundtracks.
The opening scene of the Count of Monte Cristo is no different. As the voices demand answers, and Edmond crawls toward his found treasure, an ominous ensemble of strings plays in the background signaling to the audience that this is not a scene to be settled about. This is the beginning of something unfinished—something big for Edmond Dantés.
But behind every good score is the composer who wrote it, and the Count of Monte Cristo happened to be scored by none other than senior computer science major Ben Trainor who took it entirely upon himself to write the music.
Trainor’s career in composition was kickstarted in college after he wrote the score for a short horror film his friends from high school made, but Trainor knew, even before the short film, that he had the desire to write music in a theatre capacity. The tendency toward strings and the acoustic style put theatre squarely in his comfort zone, so when the Count of Monte Cristo rolled around, Trainor saw it as a golden opportunity.
As soon as he got the script, he read through it, made notes and started hearing the imaginary score in his head.
“That is one of the exciting things about the process of writing it is I was just, like, while reading through the script, imagining music to go with it and then actually trying to harness whatever the heck is going on in my head,” Trainor said.
He started with one motif for Edmond and then he wrote a whole theme. After that, came another theme and thus the beloved score was born. He began all of his writing in January before the semester and rehearsals began, but the timeline for recording, mixing and editing was only about two weeks. He diligently worked for several hours each night leading up to the first tech week mixing, mastering and fine-tuning his work.
“On our first Zoom rehearsal in January, I played the two pieces he had sent to me for the whole cast, without telling them who wrote them. When I told them it was Ben, everyone was stunned,” Kristin Klonowski, adjunct professor of theatre and director of the play, said. “You could see on their faces that they realized they were participating in something special, and they needed to get their “A” games on!”
After all of the grunt work was finished, then came the application.
“After that first night of rehearsing that it worked really well and I just had to adjust a couple of minor things, I walked away like a giddy 12-year-old,” Trainor said, on the edge of his seat. “It was like, like Christmas or something. This works. I had spent so much time imagining the fight scene and then seeing the story I was telling through the music line up with the story that’s being told through the fight scene, all the swords clashing at the particular times and a character getting stabbed, seeing it line up, seeing it realized was so gratifying. I don’t know that I’ve been excited in that way about anything, either in a long time or at all. It was incredible.”
Trainor was telling me this with a light in his eyes and an ear-to-ear grin on his face. His music even impacted the actors’ performances on stage.
“Even the way I spoke and moved changed once we implemented the music scene-by-scene,”Caleb Adkins, senior computer science major and lead actor in the play, said. “There was a lot that it conveyed about the undertone of the different scenes–be it tragic or scary or whatever else–that added new life into everyone’s performance.”
At the end of it all, the lights go down. Not a soul is left in the theatre except one composer after the closing night of the biggest project he has worked on. He no longer has to mix or edit any scores. He no longer has to give five hours of his night, five nights a week to this show. He no longer has to sit in a chair that he slides progressively forward in every night, praying that the gunshot sound actually works this time. He is finished. The dust has settled, and he can finally breathe.
He walks through the theatre to the exit on the other side, but before he leaves, he takes one last look at the place where he has spent most of his time for the past several weeks. A deep sigh escapes his lips, and Ben Trainor leaves the theatre.
“It’s like this, this little crate, this box, of time that’s just, it’s not sealed shut. I can still go back and open it and relive some of the memories, but it’s just like this chunk of life and I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just this thing, this part of my human experience, that is central to my memory. Like in ‘Inside Out’, she has these core memories and fears, and it’s like one of those,” Trainor said.
Trainor hopes to compose one day at the level of Michael Giacchino or Hans Zimmer, but first, he has to graduate. For now, he can say that he scored the soundtrack that set the mood for Edmond Dantés’ revenge plot as the Count of Monte Cristo.
“I’d have a smile on my face every night at the same parts of the play and then after it was all done, it was kind of like I didn’t really know what to do with myself,” Trainor said. “But I also have all of these other projects I have to work on now. It was really gratifying, really fun, really exhausting, but it was all worth it.”
