The Musical Theatre Composer as Dramatist: A Handbook for Collaboration PDF
Preview The Musical Theatre Composer as Dramatist: A Handbook for Collaboration
The Musical Theatre Composer as Dramatist ii The Musical Theatre Composer as Dramatist A Handbook for Collaboration Rebecca Applin Warner METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Rebecca Applin Warner, 2023 Rebecca Applin Warner has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. Cover design and illustration by Rebecca Heselton Stave © Tartos / Shutterstock. Musical notes © tuulijumala / Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-2941-9 PB: 978-1-3502-2940-2 ePDF: 978-1-3502-2942-6 eBook: 978-1-3502-2943-3 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. Contents Introduction 1 Part One Section one The first shared language: Theme 7 1 Finding the way in 9 2 Theme, story and plot 21 3 Theme, character and musical parameters 37 4 Trunk themes and branch themes 55 Section two The second shared language: Shape 73 5 Dynamic curves 75 6 Modes of enunciation 89 7 Big shapes 103 8 Small shapes 121 9 Mapping the musical 135 Part Two Piecing it together in analysis 143 10 Analysis of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie 145 vi Contents Part Three Piecing it together in the creative process 183 11 Collaborative workbook 185 References 204 Bibliography 206 Index 211 Introduction This is a book about building blocks: musical building blocks. More specifically, musical building blocks that are wholly bound up with dramaturgical ones; building blocks that can be used to build the construction that is a score for a musical. This book is written by a theatre composer whose main passion is musical theatre and who also frequently works with actor- musicians, composes music for plays and composes for media. Whatever the project, always, my aim is that the music tells the story. And I don’t just mean the song lyrics tell the story; so often when we say a song tells the story and we analyse how the song is telling the story, we focus on the lyrics. I mean that the music itself tells the story, even if the lyrics were taken away. Music is a powerful language, but it is a non-specific one: it creates so much meaning and tells such a depth of story, evoking so much in the way of emotion, feeling, time, place and providing all the sensing ways that we know truth. But music struggles when it comes to specificity – it needs its verbal storytelling partner in order to communicate exactly what is happening in detail. Sometimes those details don’t need to be known and each individual listener can create their own version of the music’s inherent story. But sometimes it is important that those details do need to be known and such is often the way in musical theatre. Music and text are cohabiting storytelling partners in musicals, and while the two are often inextricably linked, this book will focus on the storyteller that is the music. When music is so infused with drama, as it is in a musical, then there is a symbiosis between the music and the drama. Perhaps this is always so: perhaps 2 The Musical Theatre Composer as Dramatist music is always spun with so many infused meanings and interpretations, but certainly it is the case in musical theatre. Why not then extend this symbiosis to the language that we use to discuss such music? Musicological tools are incredibly important for the composer of any genre of music, and also for the analyst of music. However, context is everything and there is a very practical situation for the composer of musicals, that it is unlikely that they are discussing the score of a musical in musicological terms with their collaborators. Collaboration is vital to musical theatre. Even when an individual person writes both words and music, there will be someone they are collaborating with: a commissioning producer, a director, a dramaturg for example. Also, there are many composers of musicals who have not come from a classical musicological background – not all musical scores are created through notated music on staves. Ubiquitous sequencing software has also widely transformed a visual concept of music from the stave to lozenges on a timeline. Everyone involved in a musical needs to be able to talk about the music of the show in dramaturgical terms, whether they identify themselves as a ‘musician’ or not; a language that enables this to happen feels long overdue. This book is intended for anybody with a dramaturgical interest in the music of musical theatre – for composers and those creating music directly yes, but also for those devising musical theatre and needing a way into the music; for those trying to find ways of marrying together character and music either as a creator, performer or director; and for those attempting to analyse musical scores from a dramaturgical perspective. In this book I hope to offer a language and some tools which can be accessed by all, whether you have a background in musicology or not. Musical theatre is an inherently collaborative art form, and it is important that we are all able to discuss the music in the drama and that these conversations are not just reserved for those who can read notation, or who are otherwise musically ‘in the know’. There is no claim being made that this book gives the method on composing for musical theatre, or that this is the definitive way to approach a musical score. Instead, I offer some tools and ways of looking at musical theatre scores with the hope that you may find some of them useful and in the hope that it might strengthen collaboration in its many guises. I hope to offer opportunity for depth of compositional exploration for composers, and to offer ‘ways in’ and Introduction 3 possible paths to discussing, analysing and interpreting music for those who do not consider themselves ‘musicians’. I hope to offer building blocks for either creating musical theatre, or for analysing it. By talking about musical ‘building blocks’, I mean that this book will help explore the various parameters with which we write music. We will be looking at structure – both on a large overarching scale and also on a micro level – melodic writing, harmony, rhythm and texture. As musical theatre creators, we make many choices all the time about our characters’ expression of themselves and it is crucial that the decisions we make are in fact conscious choices which are dramaturgically informed. Each of these musical parameters (melody, harmony, rhythm, tonality, etc.) need to be decided upon from the motivation of dramaturgy, continually asking oneself the question what does the particular [rhythm] of this moment say about where this character/plot/storytelling is at right now? That is not to say that all of the parameters will be telling exactly the same story – in fact that is probably not what you want at all. They can be seen as multiple sides of the one personality, or multiple angles of the one dramatic problem being solved. Just as the music might be telling a slightly different story from the lyric, and thereby the combination of them reveals subtext, this can all happen between musical parameters – the expansiveness of the harmony or voicing might be telling you one part of a jigsaw puzzle while the insistent rhythm is revealing another subcurrent going on. We will be looking at all of these parameters under two much broader umbrellas: theme and shape. These are my two mantras as a composer, working thematically to knit together threads of musical material over the course of a whole score, and using concepts of shape to help create contours of meaning within a show, within a song or within a moment. Think of it as working like a musical sculptor if you will – the themes are your clay or your marble which you are then moulding or chipping away at in order to create the dramaturgical meaning, messages and shapes that you hope to convey to an audience. Theme and shape are two shared languages; they are of concern to the entire creative team on a musical in a variety of ways and therefore we are going to explore them as the shared languages that they are. We will often be making reference to dramaturgical and narratological considerations, and Part Three will also encourage visual ways in as inspiration for the composer.
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