Music as a Story

 From studying the processes and templates used in screenwriting, I found a fascinating parallel. 

What if a piece of music were a movie story by itself?

This suggested to me perhaps musicians could play roles, as actors do. It helped me imagine a way to teach the ability to improvise, by describing what musicians actually DO when they play together.
After all, when arranging a piece of music, players agree on “rules of thumb” for ways to play out a piece of music. By making a language to describe this process, this allowed improvisation with a specified form behind it, like an outline that didn't exactly specify exact notation. 

I know that some musical terms already existed to describe some of these "stages" in music, but I wanted more. I wanted to simplify and make it so only a page of terms needed to be learned to gain the whole picture.  

If you'd like to see the result of my invention that was inspired by this parallel thinking of marrying the genre of screenwriting to musical performance, check it out! 

Read about the unique advantages of arranging music from the point of view of imagining a piece of music as if it were a story. Here's an example of one of my outline of a musical piece:

 Any invention takes a bit of investment to wrap your mind around, and this one is no different. Projects need to be "born" and brought to maturity by exploring, figuring out and shaping how they could be useful. Ideas are similar to babies: lots of trouble! 

It's unpredictable what happens when you take one genre and use it to inspire unique characteristics in another arena. Doing so often creates synergistic combinations, often useful for more functions than could be initially imagined. Using and playing with a unique combination is what makes these characteristics reveal themselves over time. What started out as a convenient way to combine the differing abilities and involvement level for a large group of performers turned out to have other uses. 

As I used this newly invented system to describe existing characteristics of musical styles that already existed, I realized it could be used as a way to invent a completely new particular musical style that could be varied - without losing its defining "flavor." 

 It's as if I had built another magic cauldron that generated jazz from the blues! 

Here are some of the many different purposes for the Arranger's Game : 

•  ...as a way for one person to compose or propose their own arrangement ideas of a particular performance piece for their other band members 
• ...as a way for a music teacher to have all of their students play together, that will teach improvisation ability
• ...as a way to include performers of different abilities who don’t have “chops.” 
• ...as a way for band or troupe members to discuss how to play a particular song together or perform with others in a musical theater situation 
• ...as a way to give form to generalized "jamming" among musicians who do not know each others songs, skill level or style of playing 
•  ... as a digital composer's game that could have part printouts - (of course, this would take some computer programming skills.) 

 I would think that the experience of making music together with other people would be it's most interesting and fun application. Of course, that takes for granted that you would have assembled a "troupe" of willing participants who played music on instruments and/or performed and were interested in playing together with each other. Musicians would need to keep their egos at bay, and agree to cooperate and not compete, because music isn’t a competitive sport! This is the perfect process for a church who wants to include everyone who wants to play. 

 That was how I put my interest and ability to observe and analyze the nature of stories into becoming a new invention that could be exploited for more of what I might think would be fulfilling and fun. 

Hope you leaned enough here to motivate you to be inspired to head over to my site, learn a page full of terms and use it on a group to see if it’s as useful as I’ve outlined here.

Please learn more on this at:www.franis.org/out4improv 

Maybe you’d like to read about how my own community was inspired by this idea? 

They used it as a template to act out a small town Solstice celebration – coming up!