The general sound design concept for this show was one of the main reasons I wanted to do this play, as I had long wanted to incorporate the sounds of Korean traditional music (gugak) into Lear. I had originally been interested in using really traditional gugak but found while doing preliminary sound tests in the theatre during The Merchant of Venice that the recordings I was thinking of weren't crisp enough in the theatre, and as I found during the sound design process, many gugak recordings were difficult to extract brief snippets from, as the layering of instruments created few clean breaks between musical phrases. Instead I shifted toward recordings of modern gugak compositions and solo instruments, particularly those featuring the geomungo, and the gayageum for Cordelia. 

I composed the Fool's songs. Some of them were inspired by schmaltzy Korean trot songs, as I had originally thought of making him a pumba-style clown. At the same time, I did not want the show to stop every time the Fool sings, so many of the other songs are written like quick schoolyard taunts.

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In Shakespeare's time, at the end of the play the dead characters usually would have had to stand up in view of the audience and a jig would most likely have ended the play. I have often felt that the ending of Lear feels incomplete without something like this, so I incorporated an ending song into the curtain call. The complete ending sequence is below (with my voice recorded as a practice track for the cast). It begins after Edgar's final line, with the stage strewn with bodies, as one of the nurses from the show's opening slowly enters with the hospital bed. Albany, Kent, and Edgar lift Lear into the bed, while the three daughters slowly stand up and exit. Finally, Edgar (who also doubled as a nurse in the opening of the play) gently raises the head of the hospital bed and exits. The man awakens and the lighting snaps back to the hospital lighting as his daughter (the same actress who played Cordelia, now in modern clothes) rushes in with a suitcase. As she approaches the hospital bed and takes his hand, the lights turn to pink-purple and they have a moment together before he passes and the lights go out. Then the colored lights of Lear's world slowly come up as the cast enters in groups, singing. I used three different pieces of music for this sequence (credited below). Miraculously, both the traditional version of "He that has an a little tiny wit" and the modified version that I composed for our Fool matched well with Geomungo Factory's piece "Fly to the Sky," which became the backing track for the song. It was difficult for the cast to hear the music from the stage, so I added some additional percussion to the recording and conducted from the back of the audience.

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