Composer

Job Duties

A theatrical composer is a person who writes music for the stage. Some composers also write the accompanying lyrics to their melodies. Other composers collaborate with a lyricist or a series of lyricists over the course of their career. Composers create songs to be performed by actors over the course of a musical, opera, or play with music. They write down notes on a staff, creating a score that musicians and singers will follow later when they perform the material.

There are many aspects of music at a composer’s disposal that enable the composer to tell the story, reveal character, and create an emotional response in the audience.

Some aspects of music that a composer controls include:

Melody: The sequence of single notes that together form a cohesive hole that is agreeable to the listener.

Harmony: The relationship between multiple notes played simultaneously - melody multiplied and fractured to create texture, tension, and complication; the layering of individual notes to create cords.

Rhythm: The repeated pattern of the notes or the structure of the sound - the placement of stress that gives the composition order and drive.

Tone: The specific quality of the sound of the notes. How long do the notes last? How loud are the notes? At what pitch are the notes played?

Timbre: The tone color of a given note. What makes the human voice singing a particular note sound different then a french horn playing the same note?

Composers use the above qualities of music to give their songs spice, variety, and nuance. Writing choices, however, are rarely arbitrary. When writing for the stage, the content of the song often dictates the form of the song. Meaning: the exact melody, harmony, rhythm, tone, and timbre of a given musical selection will often reflect the subject of the song. What the song is about will dictate how the song sounds.

Composers often use musical motifs to thematically link their songs together. A motif is a short musical phrase or sequence that reappears throughout a show. Often a motif will represent a specific character, idea, or emotion. A composer might modify or transform a motif over the course of their show to illustrate the evolution of a character or the changes in the story. Sometimes multiple motifs are combined or played over one another. Motifs give a musical or opera cohesion, symmetry, and stylistic unity. Motifs also help the listener follow the story, alerting them to important events and moments.

For all of their technical wizardry, at the end of the day composers are really just storytellers. It is the composer’s obligation to use music to convey a series of incidents, changes, reversals, and revelations. Composers work with their collaborators (often a lyricist and a book writer) to construct a musical world that will engage and delight an audience. Music is a profound and deeply satisfying storytelling tool, and composers are experts at wielding their craft to elicit delight, wonder, and surprise.

Composers write for characters. A composer must determine how every character in a musical or opera expresses themself musically. Different characters sing in different ways. Does a given character sing quickly or slowly? Loudly or softly? High within a vocal range or low? How does the melody of a character’s song (or songs) reveal the given character’s true nature? Their desires? Their fears? Their emotional life? Music is an extremely expressive medium; how do the characters in the composer’s creation express themselves?

Composers also utilize different styles of music to help tell their stories. Sometimes the musical style is dictated by the time period in which the story takes place. For instance, the musical Hairspray takes place in the early 1960s and therefore the composer Marc Shaiman’s score reflects the dance music and R&B of that historic time. In other instances, the style of the music will deliberately contradict the style of a given historical era (see Hamilton).

There are many different types of songs that composers employ in their creations. Among them are ballads, patter songs, eleven o’clock numbers, anthems, group numbers, dance numbers, duets, trios, quartets, scenes set to music, and “I want” songs (search these terms as Keywords in Show Guides or Characters). Often composers will change up the rhythm, syncopation, time signatures, and/or style of their songs to give their shows variety and to avoid musical monotony. Composers also work with orchestrators and musical directors to determine the instrumentation of the orchestra. These decisions have vital dramatic effects upon the audio quality of a show.

Terminology

Melody: The sequence of single notes that together form a cohesive whole that is agreeable to the listener.