Dramatic Writing

Apr 30 2008

Posted in Composition
Post tagged drama, dramatic writing, music bed, underscore

Hi everyone,

I was wondering what ideas you might have regarding dramatic writing? In other words if a client said to you, “I need a melody that says “adventure,” perhaps as underscore to a scene in a movie or music bed, what would you do? Would you simply run to your instrument and start pounding out ideas until something came out that you liked? Or, is there another way to approach this? What are qualities of a motif that says, “adventure.”

Let me know our thoughts,

All the best ~ Jerry

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Joshua Pearl

May 2, 2008 at 12:42 pm

Jerry,

What an wonderful invitation for a conversation!

Having worked extensively as a performing and composing musician in the worlds of musical and non-musical theater, I have given a lot of thought to the topic of drama and music- how they function under the same principles and how they are distinct.

In my experience, there are countless ways to marry dramatic expression and musical expression. Here are a few of the many approaches I have discovered:

1) Think in dramatic terms. Think about conflict and resolution rather than tension and release. Think about composing for characters and actions rather than for moods and emotions.

2) Collaborate directly with actors, directors, and writers. Improvise together. Record and listen to what you come up with. Let the differences in your crafts inspire new modes of expression.

3) Experiment with opposites. When you have an impulse to express strength, go for gentleness. When you want to be serious, try to lighten up. This practice can facilitate more spontaneous (and therefore dramatic) decisions.

4) Study different theories of dramatic structure and schools of theater. Writers, directors, and philosophers like David Mamet (True and False), Aristotle (On Poetics), Peter Brooke (The Empty Space), and Jeffrey Hatcher (The Art and Craft Of Playwriting) may not address musical composition directly, but their insights into the composition of a story, a scene, or a character are filled with implications that can be adapted and applied to the craft of musical composition and performance.

I hope you get many responses to this question because I think that musical and dramatic structure and expression have a lot in common and we can learn a lot by bridging the gap between what is considered musical and what is considered dramatic.

Thank you for bringing it up,
Joshua Pearl
Director, The Whole Musician Workshop
Woodstock, NY

jgates

May 2, 2008 at 3:36 pm

Hi Joshua, thank you for posting and welcome aboard! I came across another book that I have found really useful. Maybe you’re familiar with it. It’s called “The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters” by Christopher Vogler (Paperback).

In college I had an elective to kill and decided to use it on took a course devoted to screenwriting. I took the course because as someone that wanted to compose music for dramatic purposes, I felt that if I knew the writer/director’s language/point of view/vocabulary I would have a good chance of being able to communicate more effectively with them. With the exception of John Carpenter, there aren’t too many director’s that can speak a musician’s language. It really helped a great deal. It taught me all of the elements that go into a good story. Ad if yu watch classic movies or read well-written books, you do find the elements discussed.

Lets see if we get some more posts as I want this to eventually go into some “conceptual” thoughts about the actual composition aspect.

All the best,

Jerry

jgates

May 2, 2008 at 3:39 pm

P.S.

Joshua, does the Whole Musician Workshop have a website? What does your organization do?

yannick deborne

May 6, 2008 at 2:53 am

Hi Jerry.
Thanks for all this information. I’m interested in the conceptual aspects of composition (and therefore arranging and orchestration).
Please, give us your vision !
I hope you’re still doing well. I don’t have any plan to come and visit you in the next few months, but I hope we’ll have another opportunity to meet and chat a bit.
Au revoir.
Yannick

Joshua Pearl

May 6, 2008 at 11:25 am

Hi Jerry.

Thanks for the response and book recommendation. And thanks for asking about my organization.

The Whole Musician Workshop is an an umbrella organization based around my work as a holistic music teacher and independent producer. The website is www.wholemusicianworkshop.com.

Located in Woodstock, NY, WMW offers individualized artist development programs, courses, and phone and live workshops for composers, songwriters, musicians, and recording artists, all based around the principles of holistic, integrated learning, deepening of one’s musicianship, and exploring greater freedom of expression. We address the interrelationship between a musician’s craft, their personal values and style, and their career path. Coincidentally, Berklee’s own director of career development, Peter Spellman, has been instrumental in helping me develop the Workshop over the years and continues to be a source of inspiration and support.

Back to the topic at hand, you hit the nail on the head by addressing the writer/director’s language, point-of-view, and vocabulary as the foundation of communicating with them. I think that music-as-a-dramatic-art-form is best realized in collaborations and that the best collaborations are based on effective communication between collaborators.

Many fruitful relationships between film writer/directors and composers come to mind: Fellini and Nino Rota, David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, The Coen Brothers and Carter Burwell, Speilberg and John Williams, to name just a few. Directors often report how music is essential in the development of their ideas.

As for the actual composition aspect, there seem to be many approaches: from the operatic concept of attaching specific motifs to characters, places, and actions…to the Hollywood convention of using underscoring as a means to provide an audience with unambiguous emotional information which take the story beyond what a character might be actually doing or saying…to the more contemporary uses of sound-design, pads and/or pop-songs to evoke a mood or inject a vibe into a scene.

My experience has been mostly in collaboration with live theater and dance. I would love to hear from some seasoned film or TV composers.

How about you, Jerry? In what ways do you translate your craft as a composer and orchestrator to the art of dramatic storytelling? Do you play with tempo, dynamics or voicing on pre-existing, “emotionally neutral” melodic and harmonic material or do you create motifs and progressions that have some kind of “inherent drama” within them?

Here’s a musical koan: What comes first, the sound or the feeling?

Looking forward to more posts,

Joshua Pearl

Phil DiTullio

Oct 13, 2008 at 11:50 am

What a great discussion.
I will come at this from a purely scientific angle.
The Schillinger theory would tell you not to put pen to paper unless you know the outcome.

Schillinger approach to melody and the semantics of melody have definite procedures.
Melodic rhythms, for example:

Positive-is long duration followed by a short duration. This gives a positive emotion.

Negative-is short duration followed by a long duration. This gives a negative emotion.

Regarding melodic shapes around a pitch axis (pitch time maximum) this is called the Psychological dial. I believe Michael Rendish taught this using a line.
the dial coincided with certain emotional states. My teacher would give me a tune to analyze melodically and have me write a story tracing its semantics.

Phil

Jerry Gates

Oct 14, 2008 at 12:04 pm

Very interesting Phil!

I’ve never explored the Schillinger method, although being at Berklee I’m always aware that it exists. A quick check of the current composition/harmony classes tells me that is no specific coursework here that deals with it. I would bet that there are teachers, especially composition or music history teachers that mention it though.

Through your explanation I can visualize the effects that the positive/negative/Psychological Dial concepts would present, and they make sense. I was studying/working/living in Los Angeles from 1985-1993 and at the time there were a number of different angles that people were presenting (mostly older people than I am now!). I guess in the end we use the concepts that help you get to the desired end result the most efficiently.

I’ve done a bit of studying of Dodecaphonic music with regard to manipulating the row(s) for a particular dramatic purposes - even to manipulate it to totally diatonic uses (Jack Smalley/George Tremblay). Once I new that I could always count on a particular source to give me a particular impact, I felt a lot more comfortable with my writing. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the writing is great, that just means I have found a way for me to trust the information (notes) and proceed from there.

THanks for responding!

Jerry

Phil DiTullio

Oct 14, 2008 at 1:10 pm

Jerry,

Thanks for your response. I in no way think that there is only one to do things. It is surely what method speaks to the person individually.
For me being a clinical chemist and going to Berklee later in life I wasn’t able to understand music until I started to learn Schillinger.

In California many of the old time film scorers Lieth Stevens, Nathan Van Cleave, Vic Mizzy came from the Schillinger school. At the same time of the Schillinger House, there was a school California ,Westlake that was teaching Schillinger.

Phil

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