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.

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.

I always thought the story [Anthem] would work in three dimensions - and studying that cut material was very useful.

Sometimes, I stood at the front of the E train, watching the tunnel ahead, imagining what Anthem would look like on stage.

Typically, among the audience members joining the actors, the director, Ann Ciccolella and myself, about half of these theater goers have read the novel [Anthem], and half have not read it. That is interesting.

I love film scores and opera, and I wanted to work in those forms. But theater was more accessible. And no one was doing this in the late 1970s, when I began working in the theater. So, I have written scores for thirteen plays, which are not musicals, but straight plays.

Music and text have several commonalities, and one is meter and rhythm. Both spoken word and music have certain regularities, and they can be sub-divided rhythmically.