Tag: performance

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.

The idea of putting spaces between written words didn’t develop until thousands of years after writing itself was invented. Before then, even literate people could only recognize words by reading aloud. And since then, we’ve read aloud for many different reasons. Our guest Roger Chartier walks us through a few of the most interesting — from raucous Shakespearean theaters to railway passengers cozying up with strangers to listen to a novel.