Music can tell stories in a variety of ways: operas and musicals have characters and plots, a song can tell a short story, and even music without words can take listeners on a journey. But Randall Eng is interested in using unexpected texts like photocopier manuals and legal pamphlets to produce musical compositions that tell new stories. By cutting up and rearranging these existing texts – also known as “found texts” – he wants to repurpose the original words to transform their meanings and convey new messages.
Tag: narrative
Spectacular dance sequences are one of the most recognizable elements of Indian cinema, and female dancers are the biggest stars. Although some critics view dance sequences as just interruptions that don’t push the story forward, Usha Iyer argues that distracting from the story is actually a good thing. Whereas the stories are typically marriage plots in which women give up their independence, focusing on women’s dancing allows us to recognise the power and skill not only of the characters but also of the dancer-actresses who have shaped these films behind the scenes.
After we finish reading a book, our memories of it quickly fade and can even get distorted. Andrew Elfenbein has studied how the things we read get transformed in memory. What we remember may diverge from what’s in the book, but that doesn’t mean we’re sloppy readers – we’re actually using highly sophisticated skills without even noticing. By understanding this process we can better appreciate how books live on in our minds long after we’ve read them.