Consider your favorite song. What images come to mind when you think of said song? Are they positive memories? Dreams? Aspirations? Goals?
Whatever the reason, the imagery attached to the song is most likely the reason you enjoy it so much. In fact, in one of his articles on why we love music, Robert J. Zatorre, Ph.D, says that there is a “rich statistical relationship between patterns of sound [and our brain],” and when we listen to music “we not only encode sound properties and their relationships, but also make predictions about what is coming up.” This means that we are constantly thinking about the next turn in the music, just as we would in real life.
What we listen to helps us create images in our mind that normally could take a few days to come to life, or never at all. But this is only when we listen. What happens when we see something and listen to it at the same time?
Songwriting that emulates this combination can be seen in almost all pop songs ever written. In truth, the basic pop song resonates as an experience, memory, or emotion in order for the listener to experience catharsis. Pop writing relies on the fact that there isn’t anything else to watch while listening, which results in an experience that creates imagery for the listener, tapping into their own inner monologue. Who would have thought that pop songs could be so intense?
Musical Theatre? How?
How does this relate to anything with musical theatre, you ask? Well, musicals have been adopting this type of experience into their work since day one. Traditional musical theatre gets its imagery fixation when the overture plays. The audience is left to their own imagination as the multitude of songs cross over each other to create an experience that they can then interpret to predict the plot or overall circumstance.
This is why overtures are done in the dark. The music imagery flowing out of those sometimes eight minute long pieces exists to set the tone of the night. They’re used to lure audiences in, capturing us into a time and place.
Beginning a show in the dark is something that is quite old and has been slowly fading out through the years. The younger, smaller theatre companies are now starting to adopt a new way of experiencing imagery in their shows. Many are switching from the traditional black overture to something a little more realistic: showing the set.
The Fun Part?!?
Alright, this is the fun part. What happens when we take an overture and shove it into an image for the audience to interpret? A LOT more can happen. Because there is a baseline for the music, an audience can stay on track with the story and even begin to visualize where certain themes, songs and motifs happen on stage. This is the power of using images AND music to manipulate the audience's mind to take them on a journey.
PLUS, in recent years, musicals have begun to adopt the ideas of pop music into their scores leaving many songs in new musicals with realistic tones, lyrics and imagery. The music style of recent musicals within the past few years has been that of complete realism, fully becoming pop songs.
WOOHOO!
And what have we done? We have welcomed this style with open arms!
Musicals like Dear Evan Hansen, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Hamilton, Waitress, and many more have become the pinnacle of the modern musical using music imagery to capture our minds in an instance of time and experience. Using the music as less of a storytelling piece, and more of a moment in time. We see a picture on the stage and interpret the music at the same time, leaving us with picturesque memories.
Think about it. Go back through the last musical you watched. Are you able to remember exactly what was happening on stage for at least two songs from the show? If you can, that means that those particular songs, partnered with their visual elements, were so specific that it left a painting in your brain. Did it make you think of your dreams? Aspirations? Goals? Ponder this...
Does this sound like something you want to experience, if you haven’t yet? Well good news! We have just what you are looking for! 35MM: A Musical Exhibition is coming to a computer screen near you! This musical song cycle was created with the purpose to experiment with still images and music to create a full experience for the audience. Click https://art4sb.org/35mm to learn more about how YOU can witness this captivating music imagery. Will you be captivated by this experience? Only you will have to find out!
Sources:
Zatorre, R. (2018, November 1). Why Do We Love Music? Retrieved September 01,
2020, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6353111/