ABSTRACT
Introduction: An Ear-Opening Experience
I tell the story of how I personally came to understand the extraordinary power that music has to incite emotions and to affect mood. I follow this story with another experience in which I learned in a most unusual way about the power of music to manipulate both actors and audience in a play, how music fundamentally empowers theatre.
Old School Aesthetics
I lay out the most important agreement the reader and I must make before investigating the aesthetics of music in theatre: an understanding that our concept of aesthetics is unique to each artist. We define the term aesthetics in its original Greek sense, that is, how humans perceive the world through their senses. I make the first of many arguments throughout the book about how important it is for the reader to develop their own aesthetic.
When Sound Gets Divorced from Music
I discuss my particular process in creating sound scores for theatre, some of the advantages and some of the challenges. One of the major challenges I discuss is a somewhat typical process in American theatre, where the composer and sound designer are brought into the development of the show after the directors and actors have established the music (prosody) of the language, and are asked to create a score that empowers that music. I make the argument that all too often the lack of available time to accomplish this results in disjointed, fragmented and trivialized sound scores and undermines the power that an organic score contributes to the audience experience. We discuss some of the common approaches to creating sound scores for theatre, and the advantages and disadvantages of each.
Who Should Read This Book
Regardless of the process involved, every artist relies to a certain extent on intuition. For some it is all they need. For the rest of us, we need to develop craft and technique that helps us through the valleys in between the peaks of brilliant intuition. This book takes composers and sound designers on a journey to discover the most fundamental nature of our art so that we may better and more consistently create. We hope to appeal to sound designers and composers looking for clues into the fundamental nature of what we do that can be practically applied to their work. It informs regardless of formal music training, and in doing so helps allied artists including directors, designers, actors and even theatre audiences understand the diverse roles that music plays in theatre.
Overview of the Book
I lay out the structure of the book, beginning with the development of a simple formula that not only serves as the general heading of three of the four major sections of the book, but provides the simplest of descriptions of the essential musical nature of theatre itself. I conclude by providing a brief introduction to the subject matter of each chapter.
