Give the Audience Member a Story to Tell
If you haven’t yet read the introduction or Part 1 of this series, please go back and read before moving on to the rest of the article.
In the introduction to this two-part series on designing memorable experiences with music, I argued that the key to making powerful arts experiences is wrapped up in two basic tasks:
To sear a visceral memory into the audience member’s mind.
To give the audience member a story to tell.
Each of these tasks is hard work. And even if you do everything right, there’s no guarantee that the art will stick in the minds of the audience. The purpose of this essay is to lay out a theoretical framework for the second act, “to give the audience member a story to tell”. It will discuss some principals and tools by which you, a designer of musical experiences, will increase your odds of achieving this with more people, more of the time.
Give the Audience Member a Story to Tell
Introduction: A Dinner Party
Given enough time at a dinner party, someone will ask:
“So, are you watching anything good on Netflix?”
“I’ve been watching ______.”
“Oh? What is ______ about?”
In that exchange is a pearl of wisdom.
Now imagine you’ve just been to the symphony. The program opened with a short piece by a living composer which was followed up by a concerto played by someone who seems to be famous even though you’ve never really heard of them, there was an intermission, then a big famous piece that you’ve heard before and happens to be the same title as listed on your ticket. The next day you’re at that same dinner party. You mention you went last night to the symphony:
“Oh? What was the concert about?”
This, of course, would never happen. Concerts aren’t about anything; instead they’re… well… this is where things get vague. This is an enormous problem in our industry.
Let’s play our post-concert dinner party conversation one more time. You mention you went last night to the symphony:
“Oh? How was the concert?”
“I liked/didn’t like the first piece of the concert, the famous soloist was engaging/boring, and the famous piece was played well/badly.”
How can we understand the story you just told? Try this: classical concerts are usually about Really Good Music™ played by Really Good Musicians™ who are sometimes Really Famous Musicians™. The measure of a concert is not the story it tells, but how Really Good™ it was.
Oof. It hurts to read that precisely because it resonates with the truth. But we can set our sights on a higher goal, one that breathes deeper meaning into the concert experience and can unlock a world of memorable performances.
Music as Storytelling
Before we delve into the practical, let’s explore why it matters that we execute the second task on our list, “to give the audience a story to tell.”
If we want a concert experience to be truly memorable, it is necessary to consider that human beings remember through the act of storytelling. By giving audiences the means to tell a story to others, we give them the ability to remember what they experienced. And in the very act of telling another human being, they recall the memory of their experience thus making it more permanent.
Storytelling is at the very core of music’s roots. Some cultural theorists believe that one of music’s primary functions in early humanity was to make stories memorable and permanent in cultures that didn’t read or write — keep in mind that the global literacy rate was only 12% in 1820, 46% in 1960, and reached 86% in 2020. Without literacy, it was still important to pass along stories. Historians now believe that Greek epics, like many poetic oral histories around the world, were not spoken but sung. One may consider music to be a technology that aids the act of storytelling by providing emotional and temporal structure to the listener’s memory.
In my bones, I believe that all music tells a story. I write this while already anticipating pushback from those who mistakenly would consider my belief in the inherent storytelling power of music at odds with the phenomenon of absolute music (pure instrumental music, not intended to represent or illustrate something else). There is, though, no conflict. Music is experienced by a listener as a succession of tones or sounds over time. In some music, this succession of sounds carries an explicit story with real-world or imagined narrative correlates; in others the story is purely aesthetic. In any case, there is always some pattern (or a deliberate lack of pattern) of sonic energy that bears resonance to something about what it is like to experience the world as a human being. When John Cage asks us to sit in silence for four minutes and thirty three seconds, that is still a story.
Let me offer a concrete example of music that displays no obvious story on its surface, yet still contains one. Perhaps the Very Most Famous™ piece of classical music is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. If you’ve ever encountered Beethoven’s Fifth on a marketing brochure, you have likely read a description about how this is indeed the Very Most Famous Piece™, that it is Really Good Music™, and that you’ve probably heard it before. That’s one story about Beethoven’s Fifth.
To me, Beethoven’s Fifth is about an individual’s struggle to break free of the pressures of society. The famous first movement, with its unrelenting barrage of downward minor thirds, mirrors the anxiety and anger one feels as the world puts you in your place. The second movement wanders from moment to moment in search of acceptance; in relief from this yearning, there are moments of loneliness, intimacy, and solitude. The third movement begins to emerge into the world tentatively, only to sink back into the shadows. Then, in the last movement, the protagonist (is it Beethoven?) fully arrives, declaring a true identity to the world in a blazing C Major full of upward momentum. Overall, it is a story about pushing up through the downward forces of society into self-actualization, emerging from Darkness to Light. Can I prove that this is factually true? Of course not! But I dare you to come to a performance of mine and tell me that it doesn’t feel true. To me, Beethoven’s Fifth isn’t about being the Very Most Famous Piece™, it’s about alienation, about the struggle to find one’s place in the world, some good-ol’-fashioned Don’t Let the Man Keep You Down™.
Telling Stories from the Stage
Storytelling in music is expressed in its greatest power when it is employed through the full gamut of experiential element. It can be multi-sensory, encompassing music, lighting, video, visual art, dance, text embedded in the music, words spoken directly to the audience, smells, food, audience interactivity, and more.
The most memorable stories are singular in their narrative thrust. Even when there many characters, subplots, and tangents, the best stories have some through-line to tie together the big picture into a singular unit. Musical programming, when handled with care, can be just like great storytelling. In great programming, each musical work is chatty with the next; the audience’s experience of each new work is shaped by and retroactively shapes what came before it. With deeply intentional craft, one can design a concert program in which every piece plays an integral role in overall story. As a curator, I try to make programs that are like a game of Jenga: remove one piece from the program and the tower crumbles. A concert with singular narrative thrust tough to unearth. But, as compared to the standard fare at the symphony or chamber music hall, it packs some serious artistic power.
What rarely helps is program notes. They say things like “concerto”, “Mozart was 22 years old”, “after a rollicking episode in the strings”, “closes the symphony in A Major”… none of which actually help the audience member understand the emotional core of the music. Imagine being handed a brochure when you walk into a movie theater or a Rolling Stones concert. Absurd! If our audience will absorb anything that they can later put into words, they will absorb it from their entire sensory experience. I don’t mean to say program notes aren’t useful or valuable; just don’t confuse their purpose for storytelling. The story must come from the stage.*
*or rather, from whatever space you inhabit.
Consider the following concert design for a program that, in its essence, centers on Beethoven’s Fifth.* If Beethoven’s Fifth is fundamentally a journey from Darkness to Light, that must be reflected in the musical programming of the evening. The first work on the program could be foggy, dark, and mysterious, a sound-mass piece from which no tonality can be determined. There are two more works in before the Beethoven; the musical trajectory of these two works, one after another, would gradually coalesce, build instrumentation and momentum, move towards tonality, and stay within a dark color palette. There are no major keys before the Beethoven. Each piece of of music runs directly from one into the next without pause. There is no intermission.
*It’s another question entirely if more Beethoven is the thing our communities need most, but that’s for a later discussion. Given that there will be hundreds of concerts ever year with this very symphony, it’s valuable to explore ways in which we can make it land with greater impact.
Before the show begins, the audience walks into to a half-dim concert hall filled with recorded sounds of low, ambient, foggy sounds. At the beginning of the concert, the lights fully come down. The Master of Ceremonies (be it the conductor, an actor, or anyone else), lit with a spotlight, speaks the following words into being: “Friends, we gather here today as a community to bear witness to music’s power to transform our relationship with the world, with ourselves, with others. Tonight’s journey is a reminder that we all have the power to better ourselves and our community, to live with intention in the darkest of times so that we can experience the joys of being human. From Darkness, we move Towards Light. Thank you all for joining us.” The lights cut to black. Projected above the stage is the bold heading “Part I: Darkness”. The music begins. Over the course of the first half of the concert, the lighting gradually transitions from a totally black to half-way dim.
Immediately before the Beethoven symphony, the text “Part II: Towards Light” is projected onto or above the stage, followed by “Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 5”. At the first bars of the Beethoven, the lights cut to an angry red. The last movement is the only part of the evening with a fully lit stage, highlighted with dazzling sparkles at the most joyous moments of the movement. There are dozens more of these musically-driven lighting choices throughout the symphony.
When the audience leaps into applause, the house lights come up, mostly. A live camera-man captures live footage of happy people applauding the performance which is projected to the side or above the stage to show the exuberance and joy of the community at the end of the journey. A recording of ambient sparkly sounds unnoticeably fades into the sound of thundering hands so that there is a tinkly glow left in the room after the cathartic release of the audience’s applause dies out. The audience member ceases to hear the ambient sounds only upon leaving the concert hall.
You may be convinced that this is not the story you would tell, but there can be no doubt that, in this concert, there is a story. Not just a story, but a musical story that is supported by a multi-sensory concert design that all truly embodies the musical narrative of the script (in this case, Beethoven’s Fifth).
That’s a concert I’d buy tickets to see. Wouldn’t you?
Language and Permanence: A Dinner Party Redux
The lynchpin of our whole venture into musical storytelling is language. Psychologists have found in study after study that language is directly linked with both the way we experience the world and the working memories of our experiences. In other words, the language we use when describing our past experience impacts both the character of our memories and our ability to recall them. By giving the audience language with which they can describe their experience, we shape stories they tell, thus their very memories.
And don’t forget that, in performance art, language carries its greatest power when it comes from the stage.
Part I: Darkness
Part II: Towards Light
“Friends, we gather here today as a community to bear witness to music’s power to transform our relationship with the world, with ourselves, with others. Tonight’s journey is a reminder that we all have the power to better ourselves and our community, to live with intention in the darkest of times so that we can experience the joys of being human. From Darkness, we move Towards Light.”
Imagine yourself back at the dinner party:
“Oh? How was the concert?”
“It was thought provoking, deep, and powerful. The entire evening felt like a journey from Darkness to Light.”
“Really? How?”
“Well, for starters the music, the drama, the lighting, everything about the night…”
...and on…
...and on…
...and on...
In the act of retelling the story of Darkness to Light, your very memory becomes richer, deeper, and more connected with your very being. By giving you the language to tell a story with others, the concert equipped you with the very tools you need to remember it. And, in the very act of telling the story to another human being at the dinner, you recalled your memory of the concert, therefore making it more permanent.
If we don’t give our audiences a story to tell, their experiences might as well be forgotten.
Don’t let performances be forgotten.
The future of music and art depends on it.