Plymouth Chorale (Manchester by the Sea) 2016 – Lesley Barber

For inspiration for the a cappella pieces and the harmonies, says Barber, she reached into the past. “I looked at the earliest melodies that came over from Plymouth. I thought of that trauma of starting over — how do you start over? I wanted to tap into what was really old and timeless in what they are exploring [which is] a classic starting over in a tough state.

Plymouth Chorale was written and performed by Lesley Barber for Kenneth Lonergan’s Oscar winning film Manchester by the Sea which featured here at ‘Friday’s Finest‘ on Sept 1, 2023. Its sister piece Manchester by the Sea Chorale appeared here shortly after.

Early in the scoring process, Barber took inspiration from New England church music from the 1700s, including Calvinist hymns and other music of the Pilgrims and Colonial era, with its emphasis on a cappella vocals. Barber developed the music to complement her understanding of the essence of the film’s scenes based conversations with director Kenneth Lonergan. Barber says she and Lonergan share a theater background which has given their collaboration “a lovely shorthand.”

To score scenes that reflect Lee’s “interior landscape”, she (Lesley Barber) sent the music to her daughter Jacoba Barber-Rozema, an opera major, then recorded her singing in her dorm room via Skype. Barber said the confined space made for a “perfect sound“…. Caitlin Warren of Spindle Magazine said the score adds perfectly “to the raw emotion of the film without ever overwhelming it to the point of feeling contrived or cheesy.”

“I think all the music I composed and that we chose to put in the film has a sense of inevitability. It never quite lands as repose; it never quite settles and never quite lands,” she says. “There’s the sense with the vocal and the instrumental pieces that I composed that these could actually keep going and it would not bother you, somehow, the repetition. It’s like time and fate.”

Lesley Barber, who lives in Toronto, has earned international acclaim over the past two decades for her film scores, starting with her composition for Patricia Rozema’s When Night Is Falling in 1995.

Reference:
1. Manchester by the Sea‘s Composer on Scoring Kenneth Lonergan’s Masterpiece – Lesley Barber – The Credits

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