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

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.

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.

Most of Ayn Rand's major characters are already formed at the start of the stories.

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.

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.

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.