I certainly did my best to bring the story [Anthem] to life in another medium.

I collaborated with a brilliant young sound designer named Anthony Mattana, who enriched the sound of the total production with vocal effects, percussive and other sounds. He also mixed the sound effects and the music, using the theater's first rate sound system to complement the theater's acoustics. This completed my score.

If Anthem finds an audience in New York City, my hope would be to see the play transferred to a commercial theatre for an open-ended run.

After I write a sequence, I just open the script and then sit at the piano keyboard and "play" the script. (And because I also draw and paint, sometimes I sketch out the action as well.)

In the original novel [ Anthem], the story unfolds in the mind of a single character. Maybe that's why Ayn Rand called the work a poem.

Jumping twenty or so years later, Ann Ciccolella, artistic director of Austin Shakespeare, approached me with the idea of staging Anthem. She had heard my film score to Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life. And she said, I want to do Anthem as an oratorio. Well, I figured what she meant was a straight play with music.

Basically, I composed the musical structure in one pass. The rest was editing and small adjustments. And when the play was read by actors with the music, the sequence timed-out perfectly.