Noise Ensemble: a New Musical Phenomenon
Takes the Stage

It is modelled on the next great, popcorn-crunching Hollywood blockbuster – but the starring roles are played by percussion instruments. 

Noise Ensemble is a new and unique type of musical theatre, clashing together virtuoso drumming, energetic dance, stunning lighting effects and an intriguing video backstory. All these elements are bound together by a contemporary classical concert score that takes percussion music into a new orbit.

Noise Ensemble’s creator, young British composer Ethan Lewis Maltby – who already has a number of film soundtracks under his belt – has constructed a two-hour spectacular that he believes will chime with a cinema-loving audience. This show has the musical richness of a film score, but with the beats brought to life on stage.

Musicians such as Evelyn Glennie, the Scottish percussionist, have introduced a classical repertoire to millions. The phenomenon of Stomp, which creates rhythms with objects from dustbins to cigarette lighters, put urban drummers centre stage in London’s West End and around the globe. But Maltby has created a marriage of the two, combining the energy of live performance of a range of musical styles with real instruments from marimbas and vibraphone to every size of drum.

Twenty-nine year-old Maltby was the first percussionist to win a national music award while still a student and he played with orchestras in his home county of Northamptonshire from an early age. After studying at Canterbury Christ Church University, he took a job there as a lecturer in film music, and started a percussion group while developing his own composing – but one of his aims was always to get percussionists out of the corner and into centre stage.

“I grew up playing in orchestras, after developing an interest in hitting things when my parents bought me a drum and cymbal set at the age of two!” he says. “But in an orchestra, the drummers and percussionists are hidden at the back. When I went to university, I got into film, and then theatre. Noise Ensemble was a way of combining these, bringing drama to music, and giving percussion a chance to take the spotlight.” 

“What I wanted to do with Noise Ensemble was take percussion instruments from the back of the orchestra and put them right at the front: there are some amazing players, and they deserve a chance to shine.

”Drums are at the heart of Noise Ensemble and elements of the show have notes of eastern mysticism. But Maltby says that he has tried to steer clear of imitating other world traditions of drumming. “I have been careful not to write pastiches of drums around the world,” explains the composer. “I am lucky to have a clear voice as a writer, and the actuality of writing a jazz, latin, then African number just doesn’t work for me. I wrote the music as though scoring a film, rather than imitating an act such as Tao, which is based on the drumming culture of Japan. Noise Ensemble brings together my training and musical influences over the years, mostly with film music and film composing.

”Maltby cites his influences as spanning from Thomas Newman, composer of the score to The Shawshank Redemption and American Beauty, and Mark Isham (October Sky and Crash) to the ‘Hollywood bombastic’ James Horner, who wrote the music for Titanic. “People sometimes turn their noses up at film music, certainly in the academic world, as they don’t consider it ‘real’ music,” he complains. “That is a bit blinkered. Some of the finest contemporary composers write for film.

”Back to Noise Ensemble, and at a popular taster show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year, the show had excited reviews. A writer for the Scottish Herald believed that this show would “do for drumming what Riverdance has done for Irish dance.” At any rate, a promotional DVD that producers Louder Than Words made of the show has persuaded some 30 theatres around the UK to sign up to the first full-length tour of Noise Ensemble.

Performed by 10 skilled and charismatic musicians, the new show is almost two hours long and its score includes tuned instruments such as marimbas (wooden bars struck with a mallet), vibraphones and glockenspiels as well as numerous types of drum – around 50 instruments in total.

Noise Ensemble is not just about the music however. Some numbers feature comic elements: a drumming “match” play-off, or tambourines thrown across a circle of players to create the beats. The movement is all choreographed and other numbers include dancelike sequences, as the players move in unison and strike each other's drumsticks in between beats. The choreography, although to some extent envisioned by Maltby in his directing of the show, has been masterminded by Chris Baldock, who worked on the West End crowd-pleaser, Bounce. A complex and striking lighting design by Ben M Rogers highlights the movement and drama on stage while a video background flicks across ‘channels’ of percussion playing, with short sequences to introduce the players to the audience. 

Noise Ensemble was originated for the 2001 Canterbury Festival. Maltby then went on to work on another project, creating the musical Courtenay about the last great battle on English soil with the television and film producer Christopher Neame. Designer Ben M Rogers was also part of this team, but it was Noise Ensemble that excited him most. He thought they could develop this show into something unique.

In 2004 producers Louder Than Words took Maltby, Rogers and Noise Ensemble to one of the major venues at the Edinburgh Festival, the Gilded Balloon. Audiences and critics were tantalised and the idea of a full-length version bloomed.

After national auditions of around 300 virtuoso percussionists in 2005, the producers picked a team including one member of the original Canterbury cast. Maltby, who had performed in the original show, stood back to concentrate on writing and directing. Meanwhile, the cast of four men and six women, all in their 20s and 30s, have spent the Christmas period in furious, calorie-burning rehearsal for the upcoming tour.

The result will bring to life a film score on stage. It is something energetic and rhythmic yet musically compelling. “I guess its closest match is Stomp, but with real instruments” says Maltby. “I think it is more like a classical concert, but with elements of rock and roll including impressive lighting design, costume and video – a true percussion spectacular.”

“If Noise Ensemble was a film, it would be a big Hollywood blockbuster with popcorn and all the trimmings. I have written it for an audience, not for critics or academics. I hope people will find it a fully rounded entertainment.”

“This is why I have included the humorous elements,” says Maltby. There is a Laurel and Hardy element of physical humour which runs throughout the show which, he says, is a counterbalance for some of the perceived stuffiness of the classical music scene. “Classical musicians can sometimes be seen as pretentious,” admits Maltby. “To me the comedy was vital to counterbalance that, and if anyone thought the performers were full of themselves, in Noise Ensemble they can also see the humour.

”Although there is a strict score behind the entire show, to a casual member of the audience, it seems free-flowing and spontaneous. The presentation – with urban costumes, dance routines, and the odd tribal yell – presents the contemporary classical score in a fresh way, and one that Maltby believes is more interesting than the current fad for classical-pop music hybrids.

“There is a lot of material written for classical percussion,” he says, agreeing that performers like Evelyn Glennie have brought it more to the popular consciousness. “But we are not just doing what they do in the chart world, with a hybrid of classical singers and contemporary production. This is no Whitney Houston sung in Italian to make it sound more classy. Noise Ensemble crosses the boundaries, and is a theatrical show for the family.

”Maltby is getting this show on the road before heading back to his music theatre writing – the next project is already planned with his wife, lyricist Renee Martineau, as a sci-fi special that he describes as “Mars Attack meets Noises Off”, with a half-time twist.

Meanwhile, the drummers are getting in shape for a loud and energetic six months of bringing Noise Ensemble, their Hollywood-style blockbuster, to town. Starting at the Wyvern Theatre in Swindon on January 25, Noise Ensemble will be travelling for six months across the UK, taking in venues in Scotland, Wales and London before embarking on a European tour in autumn 2006.

Senay Boztas