Chapter 1

Why This Book?

Introduction: An Ear-Opening Experience

I was a junior in high school in 1969, a nerd at a time when nerds could not have been less fashionable. Every day brought another embarrassment and humiliation. But I had found music early in my life, and music, it would turn out, would be my salvation.

One day, after a particularly traumatic experience—which, curiously I can’t even recall now—I came home, and went up to my bedroom to sulk. I can’t ever remember being so despondent and overwhelmed. I pulled out a new record that I had just bought a couple of days ago. It was a new band I had recently encountered, Pink Floyd. I put on side three of Ummagumma, an experimental departure from their earlier albums.

I lay down on my bed as the grand and pompous first movement of Sysyphus started. Somehow it was exactly what I was feeling: angry, oppressed, overwhelmed. The second movement, a piano solo, calmed me down quite a bit, and was much more reflective, although quite melancholy, which was now how I was feeling. The third movement led me into a world that was funky but unpredictable, a bit scary and chaotic, again very much like my life. It built to a huge climax, and then released into this quiet, reflective but deeply unsettling world. By this point I was only semi-conscious, but somehow deeply connected to the music, my moods changing with the album tracks.

A crashing, raging sound momentarily shook me from my reverie followed by an eerie dissonant and slowly building section before the monolithic oppressive chords made their final climactic re-entrance. It left me in a very calm place, immersed in a world of birds singing and insects buzzing around, and eventually a very simple, peaceful acoustic guitar seemed to take away all my pain. This gave way to the final movement on that spinning bit of vinyl, Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict. The piece is among the most whimsical in popular music. It left me … happy.

As I awoke from this experience, I was astounded. How was it that less than a half an hour ago I had lay down on my bed overwhelmed by despair and hopelessness? And now I was … happy!? Nothing in my world had changed, except that I had listened to music. How was it possible that music could possibly have that kind of influence on me?

A little over three years later, I was going into my junior year at Michigan State University, when I landed a job as an assistant director with one of our faculty members, Peter Landry, at the Calumet Summer Theatre, in one of the most northern points in Michigan. We were mounting a production of Emlyn Williams’s classic psychological thriller, Night Must Fall.

The rehearsal process was uneventful until about two weeks before we opened. Peter received news that his father had passed away. He told me that he would need to leave for about a week for the funeral, and I would have to take over directing the play. Picture this: I’m barely a junior, and all the people in the company are either grads or the senior star actors at Michigan State. And I’m going to “direct” them! Now, I’m an opportunist as much as anybody else, so I was like “yeah, sure I’ll do that, no problem.”

Then Peter said, “Oh, and while I’m gone could you find some sound effects? Door creaks and thunders, things like that.” This is a murder mystery, right? It’s about a gardener who comes to visit this really, really old lady in a wheelchair, and it’s one of those creepy, spooky, great summer stock entertainment kind of shows. So, he left, and I started to put together some sound effects from these Electro Voice sound effects records they had—thunders, door creaks, all the sounds I thought the show might need—and commenced to directing the production. And I directed, and I directed, and I directed, and every day the show just got progressively … worse. It never got better. Every direction I gave made the show worse. It kept going down and down and down and down and down …

So now I’m really embarrassed, and Peter comes back from his father’s funeral about a week later, and the show is as deadly boring as you can possibly imagine. Not at all scary, my creepy sound effects are not doing anything. We all gathered, and Peter pulled out this reel-to-reel tape recorder—in those days it was a Wollensak. He sat down, and said, “well I’ll tell you what, let’s just run through and see what we’ve got.” We started running through the show, and while Peter was gone, he had put together a soundtrack of film composers such as Bernard Herrmann, classic music from fifties suspense thrillers. And the show went from “I can’t bear to watch this” to frightening, chilling and riveting. The tempo and rhythms of the actors magically fell into place; the music commanded and transformed the acting. I experienced the show like it was my very first time and it totally blew me away.

Suddenly I realized how music could fundamentally transform theatre.

Old School Aesthetics

So began a journey that has lasted my entire life, a combination of discovering how sound and music work in the sound scores I composed, and of sharing those discoveries with students in sound design classes over 40 years.

These are the discoveries I hope to share with you in this book, but before I do, it’s important that we understand something about art and artists. We are all unique and different. That is as it should be. Who would want to live in a world in which all of the art followed the same set of rules, in which all of the art somehow turns out the same, because we all follow the same rules? Every maker of art and every person who experiences art has a separate and unique aesthetic.

Aesthetic. That word can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. It has changed quite a bit from its original use. The origin of the term aesthetic comes from the Greek term aisthetikos, which means “perceptible things,” or from aisthesthai, meaning to “perceive by the senses.” However, it was resurrected and appropriated in the mid-eighteenth century to mean what it generally means now, our general sense of beauty and art (Oxforddictionaries.com 2016). But this earlier definition precisely fits our needs in this book. So, we will use the term exclusively in this book in the Greek sense. When we use the term aesthetic in this book we will mean how we perceive the world through our senses, especially our senses of hearing and sight. Using the term in this way allows us to immediately bypass value judgments in perceiving art. Quite the contrary, it validates every individual’s own valuation of art. If it moved you, then it’s a valuable piece of art.

Oh, and by the way, in 2003, Stylus editor Ed Howard reported that the general consensus about the Ummagumma tracks I had been listening to was that they were “something lower than shit” (Howard 2003). Other people’s aesthetic. Go figure.

At the same time, we are very concerned in this book with how we connect with each other using music, especially when we use it in the more highly specialized discipline of creating sound scores for theatre. How our audience perceives music is critically important in understanding how we connect with one another, even more so when we attach ideas to music like we routinely do in theatre. We will find that using the term “aesthetic” in the Greek sense will be much more helpful in improving our ability to create and understand music composition and sound design for the theatre.

In using the term “aesthetic” in this manner, we go much further than avoiding often less than useful valuations of artworks that undermine and inhibit creativity. If you create music in your art work, this book makes no attempt to evaluate the quality of your art. Instead, this book will hopefully give you a fundamental understanding of the interconnection between composer, performer and audience. To do that, it helps to understand how human beings perceive the world through their senses. But do not confuse that with me trying to convince you to like music that I like, or theatre that I like, or that I think you should compose or design in a certain way. I will show you some fundamental tools we use along the way, and help you understand how we use them and why they work. What you do with them is gloriously your own business. In that sense, my hope is that my aesthetic will inform your aesthetic, not that I will convince you that I have attained some ultimate truth that you must blindly adopt as if it were a religion.

When Sound Gets Divorced from Music

As an example, let’s consider how I have typically composed sound scores for theatre over the last 40 years. I like to work more like the composer of a musical would work: we compose pretty much the entire score, and the director then stages the entire production allowing the preexisting music which dictates tempo, dynamics, vocal colors and so forth. I’ve been fortunate to work with an extraordinary director, Joel Fink, together in this manner for many, many productions both in Chicago and at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and we’ve developed an amazingly intuitive relationship where we instinctively know how each other “perceives the outside world through their senses,” each other’s aesthetic. On any number of productions, Joel has walked in to the first cast read-through with my complete soundtrack, to which he will stage the production. Yes, there are many changes and adaptations we will make along the way to address mistakes I made in the composition, nuances that the actors bring to the performance, and the tremendous conception that Joel develops in the realization of each production. Working in this manner puts a tremendous responsibility on my shoulders to come to a complete and full understanding of exactly how music works in the production. There have been instances where Joel has listened to my initial compositions and said “lovely piece, Rick, but this music is for a different show.” But for the most part, the score is largely composed in advance of the rehearsal process.

Composing the score in advance of rehearsals, like a musical, has become a large part of my theatre aesthetic.

But it isn’t the only viable aesthetic out there. Most directors will argue for a different aesthetic, and with very valid arguments. While working in this manner has its advantages, as evidenced in the dominance of preexisting scores in musical theatre and opera, working in this manner also has its decided disadvantages. In particular, an existing score tends to undermine the journey of discovery undertaken by the actors. Including music very early in a production tends to dictate the actors’ pacing and rhythms—it’s very hard to fight against it. Many directors are very leery about introducing sound too early in the rehearsal process, and some prefer not to introduce it until the actors’ pacing and rhythms have been clearly set. Scenic artists typically develop the space in which the events of the play unfold. Once this space has been created, directors then learn how to reveal actions that take place in time. Since sound is primarily a time art, it makes sense to orchestrate those actions after the actors’ action has been staged. Doing this helps to accommodate the rhythms imposed on the actors’ performance imposed by the scenery. This is another very common way of working, especially in smaller theatres with limited budgets. Most films are also created in this manner. The composer receives a relatively complete edit of the movie and then composes the score to support the rhythms and pacing of the actors and the film editor.

Working in this manner places its own challenges on composers and sound designers: their process can’t really start until the other processes are complete. In film, this often means very compressed time schedules squeezed between the “rough cut” and the release of the film. In theatre, this often means that the composer/sound designer can’t really begin to work on a show until the technical rehearsals—a time-honored tradition made all the more pragmatic by salaries that compel sound artists to restrict their effort to very short time periods. Still, this approach can work amazingly well provided that the amount of orchestrating required is doable, and, conversely, that the sound team has developed the extraordinary ability to create workable sound quickly and efficiently, often while waiting for lighting designers to perfect their own contributions.

If composing the sound score before the show goes into rehearsal is one approach, and composing the sound score during the technical rehearsals is another, there remains but one more aesthetic in the creation of sound scores: composing the sound score during the rehearsal process. It seems that this is, for practical reasons the most common approach, but perhaps the one that is the most fraught with potential problems when the sound score is composed simultaneously, but separately from the rehearsal process. The problems with this approach will require a bit of explanation, but is so important that it serves as one of the underlying themes of this book, so bear with me.

Joe Stockdale is considered by many to be the “father” of Purdue Theatre. He came to Purdue in 1951 and directed productions there until spring of 1976, three months before my tenure at Purdue began. He led the LORT Purdue Professional Theatre and directed 140 shows that included such notable artists as William Saroyan, Academy Award winner Anne Revere and James Earl Jones. His students included such legendary figures of the American stage as Peter Schneider and Tom Moore (Williams 2007). Later in life I had the privilege of discussing some of my then emerging ideas about the function of music in theatre, and Joe graciously offered these thoughts in an email to me:

Joe’s disdain for the modern Broadway musical aside, there is a very real problem with Joe’s snapshot history for me: it only considers instrumental and sung music. It doesn’t include music’s profound influence in theatre that is neither instrumental nor sung music.

For example, it doesn’t include the prosody of the actors’ dialogue. Prosody is the part of speech that doesn’t use signs or symbols like language does; it involves the rhythms with which the actors speak, the stresses and dynamics, the speech melody. It’s how we tell a question from an exclamation from a command, even when the words spoken are all exactly the same. Consider the many ways of saying the simple statement “I’m going to the store.” It could be filled with the excitement and anticipation of having just won the lottery. It could be filled with frustration and anger, like how I would say it after I discovered for the third time that I was missing a part to repair my leaky faucet. It could simply be filled with indifference because I’m bored and need something to do. Or it could be bursting with the excitement and anticipation of going shopping for that new flat-screen television. It’s a form of music that we as orchestrators cannot ignore.

Beyond the music inherent in the actors’ speech, there are also inherent rhythms and dynamics of the actors’ physical performance. In another art form, we would consider these to be a form of dance. But can we ignore these when we create sound scores for the stage?

The plot of the play also has its own musical structures. Traditionally this structure follows the form inciting event, rising action, climax and resolution. But modern theatre provides us with many alternative forms. In order to draw us into the world of the play we implement very specific rhythms, tempos and dynamics. These musical elements bring together the prosody of the actors’ voices, and their physicalizations into a larger musical structure that also includes scene changes, blocking, projections, lighting and more. One of the most common problems I encounter in younger student composers and designers is their inability to conceive how the individual elements of the production combine to form a larger whole, in the same manner that a composer develops a theme in a sonata into an exposition, a development and a recapitulation. These are critically important musical structures.

You may argue that I am defining music unnecessarily too wide. But I will argue in the course of this book that this wide definition of music is justified anthropologically, neurologically, evolutionarily and historically, and one way or another is essential to creating the dramatic experience of the audience. Hopefully by the time you finish reading this book you too will never think of music so narrowly again, that is, solely confined to instrumental and sung sounds that we hear.

Let’s briefly discuss how the problem of sound scores becoming disconnected from the music of the actors and the play came to manifest itself in theatre. Electronic theatre sound design as we now know it came to the theatre table pretty late. Electronic pioneers started experimenting with sound in the theatre in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the earlier means of cueing recorded sound into a performance relied on a sound operator dropping the needle onto a spinning disc rotating at 78 revolutions per minute. A valuable operator was one who could produce the desired sound in a relatively precise way—“If the dog could bark somewhere around here, that would be great!”¹ As you can imagine, this precluded the ability to perform in a musical manner that had the same precision as, for example, a pianist who could play ahead of the beat, on the beat or off the beat—millisecond differences that have great musical meaning in performance.

However, the musicality of a lot of these sound “effects,” as they were probably rightly called, was not so important. Sound was being used iconically; that is, the sound performed was being used as an icon for the real thing to let the audience know some specific fact about the story (e.g., that a dog had barked). As long as the audience understood that the sound they heard was supposed to represent a dog, all was well. And, of course, it was easier to play a recording of a dog than to have a real dog located offstage and convince it to bark on cue. Never mind that the dog barked in the acoustic environment of the backstage area, not the actual acoustic environment of the scene. Ditto for a train. The prominence of dramatic realism in the twentieth century paradoxically empowered this iconic approach to sound over musicality.

By the time I started “designing” sound in the early 1970s, and for quite some time after, everyone referred to sound as “the newest design element,” if they were willing to consider it as a design element at all. Because sound was so often considered in its iconic function rather than its musical, a whole process developed for incorporating sound into a production that was modelled after lighting: stage managers calling cues, sound operators located in glass booths, and loudspeakers located where the lights were, creating sounds that emanated outside of the dramatic space. Sound often became a Band-Aid to address other problems: scene and costume changes that went on way too long, instilling mood where none had surfaced in the rehearsals. As I once overheard an artistic director say to a struggling director: “Put some music under it. It will mean something.” Of course, as my sound design friend Joe Pino put it, “that’s the problem. It always means something. There’s no way that you can prevent that” (Pino 2017).

And, most significantly, there was little to no perceived need to bring in the sound team early in the process to create the music with the team. Back in the day, some directors’ idea of sound design was that they would provide a list of sound effects, and the sound technician would go to their sound effects library and find several versions of the required sound. The director would then pick out the best one. This was sound design? No wonder people were saying “sound design? There’s no such thing as sound design, it will never be an art form.” So we played the sound effects back at something resembling the right moment, mostly because the audience needed to know something, for example, that a dog barked—backstage.

By the time theatrical style changed to demanding a more musical theatre, the processes were so firmly in place to prevent the musical integration of sound into a production that change would often be an uphill battle. Today the sound team often goes away on its own and develops the sound score that seems appropriate for the script and the director’s interpretation. But this approach that divorces the composer and designer from the other “musics” of the production often leads to fragmented, trivial, oversimplistic sound scores that more often distract listeners rather than pull them deeper into the performance. This process often results in the creation of two musics, the music that drives the performance itself, and the audible music and sound that attempts to somehow match, dictate, correlate or illustrate that internal music.

Such a process of composing the sound score simultaneously, but separately from the composition of the music of the actors, seems to be rather hit or miss. Ideally, we would compose the sound score simultaneously within the rehearsal process. But as I said before, that is pragmatically difficult for a variety of reasons. To overcome what is pragmatically working against us, we need a fundamental understanding of how sound and music work in theatre that could then empower us to utilize their full power to engage and transport audiences into our dramatic worlds. What we need in production is an aesthetic informed by the experience of music in theatre, that transports the audience into the world of the play. It is my hope to build the foundation for such an understanding in this book.

Who Should Read This Book

Even in the preceding examples, many production teams have achieved extraordinary results using any of the three processes described without the benefit of this book! This is no accident. Music is primal; it’s a biological component of human physiology and psychology. Music is so fundamental to our being that we take it for granted that we understand it. Everybody can listen to music and be moved by it. You don’t have to have any training whatsoever. That is quite different from language. An intuitive approach also applies to making music. Many of the world’s most beloved musicians have no formal training whatsoever. They can’t read a note of music; they have no formal training on their instrument. They play from the heart, from deeply ingrained intuition, allowing their emotions to flow through their instrument. Ask them how or why they play notes in a certain way, and they will be at a loss to explain. It just happens.

A similar situation exists with directors and actors and other artists expressing themselves through music. For example, a director may say to an actor, “If you put a beat right there in that line, you’ll get the laugh you’re looking for,” and sure enough, the actor puts the beat there—just a little pause, just a little cadence, a musical thing right there, and there’s a laugh. The actor turns to the director, and says “how did you know that?” The director responds, “I don’t know,” or “I’ve been doing this for 40 years.” But ask the director why, why musically is that right? They can’t tell you. It’s intuitive. Music is very intuitive. It’s one of the arguments about music being biologically and evolutionarily driven. It’s really intuitive. All cultures have it. All time periods have it.

For many, this intuition is enough. For the rest of us, there will come a time when we need to effectively communicate, and we will want to have a command over our tools in order to connect with our audience effectively. Nearly everyone can communicate to a certain degree using their native language. However, the best communicators are those that also study their language, who understand and learn the nuance of meaning, syntax, phrasing, efficiency and precision. It is similar with music. In every artist’s life, there are hills and valleys; hills of magnificent inspiration that come from who knows where, and valleys where we seemingly don’t have a creative idea to offer. We don’t need to understand how music works in theatre to get us through the hills, we need to understand how music works to provide a craft that leads us to success in the valleys. In this book, I will argue that the art we need to understand, that will lead us to better craft, lies in understanding music holistically. The more we understand how music works, the more we will understand how theatre works, because theatre is a type of music.

You’ll notice that I keep using the term “connection” in describing our work as composers and sound designers for the stage. This implies a distinct bias that I have as a playmaker, that also applies to my target audience: that music is fundamentally not the same as communication, in which information is transferred from one entity to another. We’ll see that music doesn’t usually work that way. Instead we use music to manipulate the audience’s perception of time, and in the process, stimulate emotions in them. It’s a careful distinction, one that will hopefully become much more necessary as we move forward in this book.

But this process of connecting with an audience still involves transmission, mediating and reception. My objective is to transport the audience to a balanced blend between a world we as a production team choose, and a world the audience creates in their imaginations. Because of this, I tend to carefully balance how much I leave to chance. There are many fine artists out there who are perfectly content to simply express themselves as artists and let the audience make of it what they will. Pure composers often encounter this problem when they first attempt to write for the stage—it’s not enough to be able to express oneself in a moving manner. Expression in theatre is tied to a larger conception, and must support that larger conception in what is experienced by the audience. So, while we will discuss the careful balance we must achieve between what we give the audience as playmakers and what we require the audience to supply themselves, this book is intended for those who want to improve their ability to connect with an audience, their ability to consciously manipulate design elements to affect an audience in a very specific and predetermined way.

Given these caveats, I hope that this book will prove an invaluable source of inspiration for composers and sound designers alike, regardless of whether you have formal training in music. For years, I called my course “Composition for Non-composers,” but, in practice, I have found that formally trained composers have found great benefit in it also. Forty years’ experience teaching this subject in classes does provide some hope that this material will help you become a better composer and designer. But I’ve discovered something else along the way: there is tremendous interest in this subject beyond composers and sound designers for theatre and film. Musicians, directors, playwrights and actors have found their way into my class and enriched the dialogue tremendously. Visual artists interested in exploring the element of time in their works have also participated and found value in these discussions. Even those with just an avocational interest in how they are being manipulated when they go to the theatre have found the discussions contained herein intriguing. There’s something to be said for the idea that one gains even more enjoyment from experiencing a work of art when one is able to simultaneously analyze the experience one is having. It is the intention of this book to provide some tools to do just that too.

Overview of the Book

In this book, then, we’ll attempt to identify the core principles of music that apply not just to instrumental and sung music, but to art in general, and more specifically to theatre, including playwriting, directing, acting, visual design, and, of course, sound design and music composition.

We’ll make the argument that theatre is specifically a development of music, a specialized form of music. Our thesis is very simple:

• Music = Time Manipulated
• Song = Music + Idea
• Theatre = Song + Mimesis

We start with time and define that. What is music, then? Music is just time manipulated. We will define music in a very broad way to include the prosodics of speech and visual music such as dance. What is song? Song is simply when you add the communication of ideas to the fundamental connection provided by the music. And then finally, what is theatre? It’s when you take a song, and you add imitation to it (or more specifically, mimesis, which we’ll explore quite a bit in later chapters). Instead of singing about something, we become that something. It’s that simple, and we shall see that this is exactly how theatre developed.

The most important principle for which we will be building a case is that theatre is a very specific type of music. You can have music without theatre; you cannot have theatre without music, especially as we define music in its broad sense. Once we understand how music works in its broad sense, how music works in its more traditionally understood aural form will hopefully become much clearer.

To get to the most basic principles we use in creating sound scores for theatre, we’ll need to narrow our subject down quite a bit. We will do this by separating culturally acquired characteristics of music and theatre that change significantly from one time period to another and from one culture to another. Such an investigation would be overwhelming, and it would not get us where we want to go. There have been thousands and thousands of volumes written on the historical and cultural forms theatre has taken. We are not interested in supplanting those; we are simply interested in exploring the foundation upon which those forms are built. We want to identify core principles, and to do that we need to identify elements and principles of music and theatre that have not changed for tens of thousands of years. They worked the same way for the Greeks as for cave dwellers. They work the same way for us. Timeless principles are a great place to start when building an aesthetic of music and sound in theatre. If you are going to build a foundation for learning how to use music to connect with an audience in theatre, what better place to start than things you know to be true for everybody? So we will study music as an evolutionary adaptation. Why evolution? Evolutionary changes take place over thousands and millions of years. If a trait applies to our ancestors and also applies to us, we’re pretty certain that we’ve identified a fairly fundamental principle of the human condition that we can learn to manipulate. By identifying those principles, we can assure ourselves that the principles that we discover will apply to all periods of sound and music, and to all cultures, not just white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males in the United States.

As we shall see, music is simply a word we use to describe how we consciously manipulate our perception of time. In order to understand music, then, we will need to understand how time works. We’ll start there, at the beginning of time and the universe, looking for clues in the fields of physics and astrophysics. We’ll specifically look at the physical differences between sound and light and their relationship to matter. Then we’ll trace how we came to be able to perceive time and space, and the specialized evolution of our ears and eyes to do both. We’ll investigate how evolution led to important pretheatre activities such as ritual and dreaming and connect those to our understanding of how time and space work. We’ll see how rhythm evolved around the same time that primitive man began to walk on two legs and look at the relationship between rhythm and bipedal locomotion.

We’ll consider the complementary evolution of music and language, especially in the evolution of the human brain, and in particular, the relationship of music to language in song. This will lead us into discussions about the neurological evidence showing fundamental brain functions that haven’t changed in thousands of years. Michael Thaut wrote one of the outstanding books on this subject, Rhythm, Music and the Brain, and explains the reason this inquiry is so helpful in this way:

We’ll look into the relationship between this neurological evidence and the evolution of art as a human endeavor. We’ll connect psychological theories to this evolution, specifically related to the evolution of music, how and why music incites interest in its audience, and the role that memory, a close ally of music, plays in art.

We’ll see how music and song contributed to the first great civilizations and how, when combined with mimesis, they begat the art form we now know as theatre. In conclusion, we’ll consider the development of one specific strain, the first truly autonomous theatre of ancient Greece, as a case study. We’ll investigate how Greek theatre developed out of music, and explore their uncanny understanding of how humans perceived both. Aristotle said that tragedy developed from the dithyramb and comedy from the phallic song. What’s the importance of this statement? The importance of this statement is that Aristotle specifically suggests that theatre developed out of a musical form. It’s not a minor detail. It’s a major consideration that supports the major underlying theme of this book—especially when one considers the role that Greek theatre played in the subsequent development of Western civilization.

Ten Questions

1. Define the term “aesthetic” as we will use it in this book.
2. What is the purpose of this book, and what does that have to do with our definition of aesthetic?
3. Describe three ways in which sound designers create sound scores for theatre.
4. What is prosody?
5. Name three forms of music besides instrumental and sung music in plays.
6. What does it mean when we use sound “iconically”?
7. What is the great danger of creating the sound score during but independent of the rehearsal process?
8. State the thesis of the book in its most simple way.
9. What is the most important fundamental principle underlying this book?
10. What types of principles will this book hope to explore, and which types will it hope to avoid?

Things to Share

1. Tell us a story about the first time that music profoundly moved you, that moment when it changed your life. Play us an excerpt of the music, so we can more fundamentally appreciate that moment. When you tell your story, consider when and how you will introduce the music. How will you set up the story in such a way that when you play the music, and we hear the music, we will have something like the same experience you had when you first encountered the music?
2. Tell us about your music aesthetic. How do you perceive music through your senses? Tell us about what kinds of music you like, and see if you can look deep into your life to help us understand why you are attracted to this music. Find a way to help us connect to this music in the same way you do. Then play an amazing example of this music for us to experience.

Note

1See David Collison’s outstanding book for a detailed and delightful history of sound in the theatre: Collison, David. The Sound of Theatre. 2008. Eastbourne, UK: Professional Light and Sound Association.

Bibliography

Howard, Ed. 2003. “Pink Floyd-Ummagumma.” September 1. Accessed January 15, 2016. www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/on_second_thought/pink-floyd-ummagumma.htm.

Oxforddictionaries.com. 2016. “Aesthetic.” Oxford University Press. Accessed January 15, 2016. www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/learner/aesthetic.

Pino, Joe, interview by Rick Thomas. 2017. Personal Interview, March 9.

Plato. 2009. “Phaedrus, by Plato.” The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed December 31, 2016. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html.

Stockdale, Joe. 2009. A Couple of Thoughts from Joe, August 17.

Thaut, Michael H. 2005. Rhythm, Music, and the Brain. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Whitney, W.D. 1890. “Translation of the Katha-Upanishad.” Transactions of the American Philogical Association 21: 88–112.

Williams, David M. 2007. “Centennial Curtain Call: Celebrating 100 Years of Purdue Theatre.” Liberal Arts Magazine Fall: 12–16.