About Storybook Strings

Scores work on an audience that is not listening on purpose. Storybook Strings covers music written to carry a story, across film and television scores, game soundtracks, musical theater and the songs doing narrative work, together with the composers, orchestrators and music editors who assemble them. An audience remembers the feeling and forgets the music that produced it, which is rather the point.

Profiles are the main form, and the questions are technical: what a theme does harmonically, why a cue enters four bars before the reveal, which instrument was chosen to stand for a character, and what it cost to record live rather than sampled. Awards-season campaign lines are not reprinted. A score leaning heavily on its temp track is described that way. Session players and orchestrators are credited by name. Composers are asked what they cut, and what a schedule made impossible.

Storytelling considers how music carries narrative at all, across media. Soundtracks covers released albums, needle drops and compilations. Books reviews the writing about music and the composers' own accounts. Narratives examines structure: motifs, recurring themes, the way a cue returns changed. Scores goes into the writing itself, from orchestration and tempo maps to the recording sessions. Soundtrack News reports assignments, release dates and awards decisions, and Business News covers publishers, sync licensing, streaming income and the studios commissioning work.

Storybook Strings is edited independently and published by VUGA Media Group, part of the VUGA Enterprises Network.