The Muse & The Marketplace 2020

Try this: calculate the two-thirds mark in a piece of music and listen to see what happens at that point in time. Chances are, things become more complicated, denser. Melodies and patterns likely come to a sort of climax at right around that point in the music. Music isn't the only art form that often adheres to a structure of thirds. Some of the oldest narrative forms--fairy tales and folk tales--do too, and they've loaned their structure to many classic forms of narrative that follow.

In this session, we'll listen to short pieces by composers as wide-ranging as Wagner, Thomas Newman, Coltrane, and Beyoncé, among others, to hear how music tells its stories in three parts. You'll learn how to borrow from elements like the leitmotif, the coda, the refrain, to build stronger narrative structures for your novels, short fiction, and essays.