EPISODE 5: Listen to What's Not There

The music arranger’s power to put a listener inside a song.

Songwriters write the songs—duh—but arrangers determine how we hear them. To arrange a song is to make a series of musical decisions. What do those decisions add up to? Sometimes it’s really just a sound, and we like that sound or we don’t. But musical decisions can also determine or even change the meaning of a song. Today, we’ll discover the power of musical decisions not just to add sounds to a song, but to take sounds away, creating space for the listener to dwell within the song.

Thanks to:

RJ Bee

Osiris Media

The theme music and other scoring music for Rearranged was written and recorded by Lawrence Lanahan.