Limited Series

(from the abstract of my thesis)

When I compose my music, I have a story in mind. The characters may be abstract or historical, the drama real, fanciful, or between the players themselves, but on some level, the music is my storyteller. When I sat down to compose this work, I wanted something between the abstract and the concrete, so I was inspired by the story structure of television. Not the overall structure of a connected, serialized show, but of the individual episodes. The character in this tone-poem is the arc.

At the beginning, we are often dropped right into the action and quickly introduced to ideas, characters, and settings. The context is disorienting, like a track being laid down underneath a speeding train. All of this culminates to a moment where the conflict and stakes are introduced, and then we are interrupted by a grounding element…the main titles.

The characters are re-introduced, but with a much more familiar, almost addicting format. This is a world we might be returning to, at least by the third or fourth episode.

The next part of the story explores the many winding paths that could resolve the conflict; alas, these paths do not lead to the end.

These paths eventually wither away, and the true solution comes into focus. All of the previous action, tension, characters crash into one rising action that hurtles towards the climax.

After the crux of the entire narrative, the lines unify and falls away, violently.

At the very end, there is a moral of the story. A button to reset the story to some sort of status quo readying us for yet another episode and another structure.

This is a story about stories…