Phillip Owen
I grew up the son of two school teachers in a variety of small towns across North & Central Texas. Born in Hico, raised in Stephenville, Corsicana, Rockdale, Georgetown and ultimately Austin. Because the family had summers off together, we would usually travel on road trips. We went to all 50 states in the US.
As a young boy I often followed my Dad around with his work as a public school band director and musician. I learned piano early on, then later the trombone and the guitar. I usually found the inside of a band hall to feel like home and sheet music to laying around all the time.
I played guitar in garage bands in high school, college, and my younger adult years. I started acting in college and later trained in Suzuki/Viewpoints from the SITI Company and in Coporeal Mime with Blue Raincoat in Ireland. I have a BA in English from Texas Tech University, M.Phil. in Theatre Studies from Trinity College, Dublin, and an MFA in Sound Design from Yale School of Drama.
I had a few mentors who have inspired me. My Dad showed me how to be a manly musician and musicianly man. Mom taught me to love. Dr. George Sorensen at Texas Tech taught me to make choices and commit. David Budries at Yale School of Drama showed me the creative tools of a sound designer and gave me confidence in a new career. Pierre Dupree at the Alley Theatre became a sound design brother to me. Michael Bodeen showed me how to pay attention to details as a professional.
Traveling from, but spending most of my life around, Austin, Texas has created a desire to find the musicality in ordinary things and everyday life. A place like Austin inspires people to “be themselves” in very creative and sometimes odd ways. It builds an expansive sensibility toward art and meaning, the kind one finds in the landscape of Texas Hill Country or out on an open prairie. I curate disparate voices from different places to tell a unique story.
As Lecturer in Sound Design at Texas State University, I teach and mentor undergraduate students in the classroom and in production as sound designers and mix engineers. I freelance as a theatrical sound designer and often bring along my students to assist me and gain real-world skills. They are the future.
Audio Tracks
- 01 Dancing at Lughnasa (Sound Design & Composition)-1801
- Katy Cunningham playing the Irish bohdran, multiple tracks
- This was a very early idea that I recorded earlier during a rehearsal of a production of Cymbeline at Stonington Opera House in Stonington, Maine. I multi-tracked Katy playing and liked the imperfections that came from it. I used this as a piece of vocabulary to kick start the concept of my sound design—something rough, wild, and dance-able.
- 02 Dancing at Lughnasa (Sound
Design & Composition)-1803
- Phillip Owen playing the guitar, with recorded rain sound effect from San Marcos, TX
- Another early idea before design meetings began. I wanted to explore a single instrument playing in nature to study the sound of a lonely place of mystery. This was never used in the final design but offered a starting place for the sonic world of the play.
- 03 Dancing at Lughnasa (Sound
Design & Composition)-1806
- Elliot Dean (14 years old of Austin, TX) playing the fiddle on a freestyle melody
- I recorded Elliot when preparing for a different play, Outside Mullingar (another Irish play also produced at Everyman a few years earlier). He had won many bluegrass competitions and came highly recommended. The fiddle was a voice that the director, Amber Page McGuinness and I found to fit the world of Dancing at Lughnasa—solitary, human voice-like, simple, rugged. This recording gave us a good idea of where we wanted to take that voice.
- 05 PK MA (8-30-18) reference track
- The Pigeon Kings are a Baltimore-based band featuring the following musicians:
- Victor Gangon (fiddle)Ciaran Quinn (guitar, bodhran, bouzouki, tin whistle)Josef Crosby (fiddle, engineer)
- The Pigeon Kings playing the Irish traditional standard “The Mason’s Apron”
- The director, Amber, introduced me to the band, the Pigeon Kings, and I found collaborating with them to be one of the highlights of the design process. Ciaran, their guitar player, is from Belfast, and I found in talking with him early on that there was a very unique entry point for their music into this play. It was as if the band resembled the infusion of an Irish story into an American sensibility through an American audience. This production became a far-away story that resonated with a local mind and became something new in its collaboration: the band, the play, the dance.
- The Pigeon Kings are a Baltimore-based band featuring the following musicians:
- 07 PK Theme 2 2
- The Pigeon Kings playing their interpretation of a melody I wrote for the play. This was used after Act I and illustrates our collaboration very well.
- 09 If Ever You Were Mine (w reverb)
- Josef Crosby playing the fiddle on a traditional Irish melody, with reverb added for effect
- This melody was used as a finale to underscore the final monologue just as the lights go down.
- 10 Theme 1 merge
- This theme was one I wrote as a general idea for the world of the play and had the Pigeon Kings record. The first section is me on the guitar with MIDI sampled instruments recorded in my office as a scratch recording to get the idea going. The second section is what the Pigeon Kings did with it in making it their own. This kind of collaboration was at the heart of making this production an honest part of coming into the Baltimore community from Austin and making an Irish play resonate with us and the audience.
