ABSTRACT
The previous chapter concludes with a discussion of the last of Aaron Copland’s three musically derived perceptual planes—the “sheerly musical” or, as we apply it to electronic media, the “productional/technical” plane. In this chapter and the one to follow we examine productional/technical elements in more detail by dividing them into three categories: (1) musical ingredients; (2) on-stage talent ingredients; and (3) stage-molding ingredients. The first two are the subject we cover in this section, and the third comprises Chapter 6. Together, musical, talent, and stage-molding elements are the raw material out of which electronic media content is constructed. Consequently, it is helpful to examine them individually before moving on in subsequent chapters to analyze their cumulative results. We begin by looking at music, which, for the electronic media industry, is a programmatic building block rather than an artistic end goal.
