By Allison Leyton-Brown
Allison Leyton-Brown is an award-winning composer, pianist, and musical director who has collaborated with the IJB on two podcast projects, Arachnid: Uncovering the Web’s Darkest Secrets and The Ultimate Choice. Both series are hosted by the IJB’s Rob Cribb and produced by Susanne Reber of Piz Gloria Productions in partnership with TVO.
Before I even knew what the subject matter of the show would be, I was already on board; the shows I’ve worked on with Susanne and her team have been among the most creatively satisfying projects of my career.
Upon learning about the subject I was both horrified and intrigued — I knew this was an incredibly powerful and important subject that needed to be exposed. The stories of these survivors as well as those fighting for change needed to be told.
When I begin my creative process, I build out the musical world I will be composing within; the sonic and instrumental palette. Building the palette for any of my scores is a process of me distilling the essential ingredients of the show into musical sounds and ideas. These essential ingredients can be emotional, environmental, and conceptual. For ARACHNID, the image of the spider itself – literally crawling the web, multiplying and subdividing, consuming images and information – was my immediate inspiration.
I knew I wanted to create an insidious, moving musical motif to anchor the theme and that it wanted to live in a bass frequency. I also knew the overall landscape wanted to be a digital one, with more and more sonic layers revealing themselves the deeper we went. When I zeroed in on the concept of the live double bass playing amidst sonic plucks, I knew I had hit on the heart of the score. I later added live piano as well as acoustic string plucks and even an overblown flute at the very end of the Main Theme to juxtapose against the electronic layers.
It is the juxtaposition between acoustic and electronic layers that creates the vital tension behind my score for ARACHNID, a tension that is fundamentally connected to the story we are telling. The live instruments become the voices of the people in our story – the human beings amidst the inhumane acts, acoustic entities lost in a digital landscape.
- INSIGHTS: I was nearly beaten to death with a rolling pin. Then the criminal justice system failed me - 27 February 2026
- INSIGHTS: If we are serious about ending male violence against women, we must abandon the term “Intimate Partner Violence” - 13 February 2026
- INSIGHTS: Gaps in federal oversight leave First Nations patients behind - 9 January 2026