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.

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.

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.

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.

Ayn Rand called her novella Anthem a "hymn to man's ego." My approach to Anthem the play was to provide the story a further dimension through music and sound. The work is now larger than a hymn. It's really "spoken opera."

I really enjoy fusing text and music.

Actually, one Anthem cue is a good example of the process. There is a four-minute sequence of music in Anthem, which underscores a prison sequence, and it lines up with five different, smaller scenes within one large scene.