Composer Peter Salem is no stranger to ballet stages – or to Scottish audiences. 

Salem’s first full length ballet score was for his frequent  collaborator Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s A Streetcar Named Desire created  for Scottish Ballet. Streetcar’s jazz-soaked score moves seamlessly from  nostalgic waltzes and swing to bluesy, haunted loneliness. By the end of  the ballet, as Blanche is lost in her fantasies, the music has also drawn us into her fracturing psyche.

Since Streetcar, Salem has scored ballets for Camino Real, Emma  Bovary, The Little Prince, Lady Macbeth, and works on Coco Chanel, Frida Kahlo, and Eva Perón. Showcasing his compositional versatility, Salem’s music conjures rich worlds for each – Latin American flair for  Frida and Perón, Parisian glamour for Coco, and a dreamy, doomed  romance for Emma Bovary.

In The Crucible, choreographer Helen Pickett and her collaborator James Bonas transport us to 17th-century Massachusetts, a place of stark  contrasts: public and private, sacred and profane. On stage, Pickett’s vivid choreography unfolds in a shadowed space against a monumental wall – a spare, stylised evocation of colonial New England. Salem, too, evokes this atmosphere with a monochromatic palette dominated by strings, often double-stopped (where two or more notes are sounded simultaneously) in the style of folk fiddling, made deliberately harsh. The strings and occasionally female voices quote old hymns with ancient-sounding harmonies, while minimalistic loops and slashes of wind, percussion, and low brass ramp up the tension.

Electronics also play an important role: Salem samples rustling animals and birds in the deep forests—the very sounds of the unknown that spark the town’s fatal paranoia. When the girls dance with feral abandon in the forest, their rave pulses to a drum-and-bass-inspired groove. But it is in creating empathy with his characters that Salem excels – tender and urgent for John and Elizabeth’s pas de deux, increasingly desperate as Elizabeth protests her innocence before the court. Salem has given voice to the inner lives of these complicated people.

Robert Murray is Scottish Ballet’s Director of Brand, Audience and Digital.