Meet Rody Ortega: Sound Designer and Composer!

This week, we asked our incredibly talented Music Composer and Sound Designer, Rody Ortega to talk about his background and tell us his thoughts about working on “Chitra: The Girl Prince”. Here’s what he had to say:

My name is Rodolfo Ortega, and I am one the composers for Chitra.

I was born in Havana Cuba, an island filled with rich musical traditions. Many Cubans are gifted in the art of music. I am not sure why that is, maybe it’s something in the water, but for such a small island it sure does have a plethora of talented musicians. Or maybe it’s just that in Cuba you are just so dirt poor that without Netflix you naturally

find something else to do…and playing the neighborhood piano or whacking away at a guitar is a cheap way to spend your days. Perhaps poverty is a great incubator of art.

I am not that talented but let’s say I inherited maybe just a little bit from those Cuban waters.

I consider myself a pianist who happens to compose music for live theater, and work as an airline pilot on the side. Playing the piano is what I think I do best. Unfortunately I do not get a chance to play all that often. It is a fact of where I now live, and have for most of my life in the U.S; A country which perhaps might be the greatest in history at making artists but the worst at making audiences. At least audiences for what I studied, and what I have spent most of my life practicing which is playing the piano.

So how does a pianist, born in Cuba, end up writing Indian music? I asked myself that question a number of times. I mean surely there are people more steeped in Indian form than I…Right? Perhaps, but somehow Anita and Sarah Jane saw something in me that gave them confidence in my abilities to come up with something that would pass as somewhat authentic. But what is authentic? I mean I am not Polish but I think I can interpret Chopin’s G Minor Ballad pretty well. Do I have to be born in Salzburg to fully understand Mozart’s K 331? Of course not! That’s ridiculous! Still, you wonder, if there was someone else that might have been able to do a better job than me? Someone who comes to the table with the prerequisite knowledge already baked in. It’s a risk they took, and I hope, I did not disappoint. They hired me and we were off.

For me it was learning about the style and listening a lot. Learning scales other than what I was used to writing in. I mean I knew about the Bhairavi scale and the Kafi, and the Purvi, but I had never written in any of those forms. It was liberating to explore other tonalities other than the western conventions. But it also created some problems. I recognized that early on. Especially when blending Western elements and East.

The problems are that when marrying the two, sometimes I would find some collisions that didn’t work. Collisions can be great, after all conflict is what theater is all about. Imagine King Lear where all the sister’s get along. Not much left of the play is there. So wanted collision “Yes” and unwanted Crashes “No”. Finding a way to bend the two can become problematic; But that’s a challenge and not a limitation.

When listening to a lot of contemporary Indian music you find that there is a lot of western elements that are merged between the two and I wanted to adopt that in some of the music that I wrote. Chitra asks for that. There are purely Indian traditional elements, purely western, and then a “mixed salad” of the two. People like to use the phrase “Melting Pot” when talking about points such as these but I don’t like that because I think when you melt something more often you get something that does not resemble its original form. I wanted things to live together and harmonize and compliment one another and still retain their musical identity…you know a mixed salad.

One of the real challenges in Chitra was that I was handed some tracks from other composers that were to be used in the show. The problem is that they sounded different, because they are of different mixes. What I did to unify them is to remaster them and also to layer in some drums from my collections that kinda of brought all of those different takes together.

So Chitra has a wide range of styles from traditional, to Bollywood, to huge epic cinematic drums, and everything else in between. When I watched a lot of Indian movies in preparation for Chitra I noticed that many switched easily from one form to another without any explanation…They just switch forms because it felt right, which kinda of lines up with children’s theater believe it or not.

There is a license granted in children’s theater in which children don’t necessarily know what the rules are. I find this a plus rather than a minus. So you can switch styles and forms and that is completely okay in a way that say, a conventional opera cannot; Or wouldn’t be accepted. And kids go along with it because they don’t have a biased expectation of what should come next. You tread along hoping you get it right and the kids will be the first to tell you when you get it wrong.

If there is one thing I wish we I could do differently in Chitra, and in most of the theaters I work for, is that I wish we could go back and hire real musicians to perform the music live nightly.

Computers have allowed theaters to create huge epic scores on a budget. And what computers are capable of doing is truly amazing. I defy anyone to tell me which drums in Chitra are real and which are not. I bet most will get it wrong.

The advancements in computer generated instruments have paralleled the advancement in CGI in the visual world. The capabilities of generating authentic instruments on the cheap is something that appeals to theater companies. I get it musicians are expensive. But imagine a time in the not so distant future when actors are replaced by holographic rendering. Would we want to see that? Probably not? Why? Because there is nothing like a real actor telling a story live. That scenario is not the future for musicians in most theaters...it is the now, and I don’t like it. Some say that theater is not really a musicians field? I disagree. Music when done well is nothing more than telling a story which after all is what theater is all about and we should embrace it.

There used to be two compelling reasons to have live musicians one because they sounded better and two because the public demanded it. The first argument is fast losing ground to technology and the second goes to my point about audiences. It doesn’t seem like most audiences care or can discern the difference. We have become in the U.S. primarily consumers of music and not producers of it. We have lost the value in the joy of creating music for yourself at whatever level you are at; Getting around the piano on a Sunday afternoon and everybody singing for the joy of making music. The further we are from that connection the less value we have in the importance of the act of creating music.

While the tide points to my two reasons above proving those statements right, I disagree with both. There is nothing that will replace the experience of having live players.

If I had all the power in the world I would love to do Chitra again but with live musicians.

I hope I get that chance someday.

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Thank you to Rody for those incredibly insightful words! Be sure to hear his incredible music in Chitra, now playing through March 3rd.