Full Description
Songs, pervasive sonic ephemeral acts that combine words and music, live in a contemporary world of commercialization as commodity. Flowing through our everyday lives as a given and oft-underacknowledged artifact to accompany our shopping, car trips, date nights, and gym days. Yet songs have a history as long as humanity and language. They hold a place, up until recently in our evolution, as an oral history library of the human species. Why then is there limited scholarship about how songs tell stories, and the ways in which those stories come together with sounds? And why is there a disconnect between songwriting as industrial practice and academic thought? A New Philosophy of Songwriting argues that all songwriting choices are storytelling choices and asks the question: how can we think about Song as one of the most memorable, potent, multimodal, and portable storytelling devices ever devised? In doing so, Andy Ward and Briony Luttrell make the case for rethinking the analysis of songs and practice of songwriting with an emphasis on listening. This is a book for songwriters, scholars, and song lovers alike. Ultimately, the authors challenge contemporary thinking on music and song itself and argue for a new theorisation of song as a multimodal storytelling sonic act.
Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
1. Let Us Tell You a Story
2. Songs, Stories, and How They Come Together
3. Tension and Release: Music and Stories
4. Listening as Multimodal Act: The Cake Metaphor
5. Multimodal Narrative Songwriting: A Model for Praxis (Cakes and Constellations)
6. Is That Egg on Our Faces? It's Probably from all the Cake Making.
Bibliography
About the Authors
