The Children’s Hour

Lillian Hellman, 1934
Dir. Steve Thompson (Sherlock, Vienna Blood), Nov. 2025.

To create this score I grounded myself in the play’s setting of 1930’s New England. Composers of the time like Aaron Copland and Charles Ives combined a modernist approach with American folk music, and the result was a peculiar character, with lively Appalachian fiddle muddled into a more complex world of dissonance.

The music had to cover a broad emotional range, moving between playful naïveté, cruelty, deep companionship and utter devastation; and throughout, a profound sense of unease.