Narratives
Theatre of the Ear: how music and sound design carried radio drama before television
Before screens filled living rooms, orchestras, thunder sheets and carefully timed silence told whole stories through the radio speaker.
Narratives
Long-form analysis of how a score is built across a whole work: theme development, recurring cues, and the shape an audience registers unconsciously.
Narratives
Stories Told on Pointe: how ballet scores carry plot without a single word
From Swan Lake to Romeo and Juliet, ballet music faces the strangest brief in composition: tell the whole story with no dialogue at all.
Narratives
Two Acts From Five Hundred Pages: how musicals adapt source stories
When a novel or a life becomes a musical, the story is rebuilt around songs, a book, and a clock that runs about two and a half hours.
Narratives
Twenty-Four Songs of Winter: How the Song Cycle Tells One Long Story
From Beethoven's 1816 pioneer to Schubert's Winterreise and beyond, the song cycle is the form that lets short songs add up to a single narrative.
Narratives
One Record, One Story: how the concept album became a narrative form
From Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads to The Wall, the concept album turned a stack of songs into a single told story.