I often find myself entranced in the performance when I attend the symphony. It’s always been a magical place for me. For the brief time spent in my spot in the balcony, the rest of the world disappears. I forget about the traffic on the way into town and what awaits me outside. The lights do not illuminate my way once inside, only the measures and metered lines on the paper. The conductor is merely the central string in which all of the instruments play. Alas, the pregnant pause of silence between the echo of the last note throughout the concert hall and the sudden movement of the instruments falling for the last time jolts me back to my senses – reality.
As a musician that has been classically trained since a young age, this magic of transcendence easily becomes second nature to me. Easy. But what continually challenges me as a musician and listener is the quandary of “how.” How can you, as a musician, transcend your audience into your musical world? How can you code/decode these emotional messages without distorting the composer’s work? How can you successfully perform a piece without too much stylistic grandeur, yet still evoke curiosity and intrigue? By what means does your message travel?
Perhaps music is so intrinsically individualized, at least for me. So, defining the “how” is hard. If I correlate audience appeals to music, it becomes a bit easier. Ethos, pathos, logos (E.P.L). Ethos relates to ethical or creditability. Pathos is relates to the emotional appeal to the audience’s emotion. Logos relates to reasoning. The musician creates mood via intonation, vibrato, and dynamics (pathos). She uses ethos when she stands tall, uses “proper” or classical breathing and control technique. This establishes her learnedness and credibility. Logos can be seen in her logical sense of order in the piece (phrasing with breathing) and acknowledging kiros with certain dynamics.
Movies can translate much of the same messages using E., P., and L. that appeal to the audience. As I reflect on some of my favorite movies and take a closer look at why, almost every time I find it’s because I can I.D. a strong appeal to E.P. or L. I find that those with strong appeals to one or more of these establish stronger bonds with the audience and strengthen the grounds of appeal.
News stories and documentaries fall into the black and white category for E.P. and L. I find these genres especially interesting for analysis because the authors need to condense logic, credibility and emotional appeal in a short refrain, but they have the leisure of using visual aids (unlike a musical score) to establish their strong foundation.
[The Movie]
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth debuted in 2006. Global warming is magnificent in itself, but when screening this movie for the second time, I was drawn in for other reasons. Viewing the movie with risk communication in mind, E.P. and L. appeals, stasis claims and signposts became even more evident to me. Within the first few minutes, our friend pathos takes center stage. The screen is slowly moving, Gore is softly talking about priceless nature and refers to our five senses, all while the visual is of a calm stream and trees swaying. If you are not already in love with summertime in the Appalachians, you probably are now. Gore goes into the use of visuals by talking about the first photograph of earth as seen from Apollo 8 mission. This idea that earth is finite in size establishes that it is ours to lose, which is a key point to bank on during the rest of the movie. If the earth’s climate is deteriorating – we have to do something fast (urgency). Keenly, he interjects into his intro some ethos by saying, “used to be the next President of the United States” and how he’s been giving the PowerPoint for a long time to people when he introduces himself to the audience. Logically, Gore narrates the film/documentary PowerPoint well. Simultaneously, by injecting narration into the PowerPoint, he establishes credibility and perspective on his endeavor. For instance, he breaks from the PowerPoint to talk about his son’s accident and how close he came to losing him, affected him politically and spiritually – prompting him to peruse global warming.
Gore’s use of visual aids was done very tastefully. If I didn’t know anything about how the ocean currents or the atmosphere worked before this movie, I would after seeing the movie (at least enough to get me to understand global warming). The graphs were simple and to the point, yet creative. The added elevator movement to reach the projected point on the graph really drove home the exigency of G.W. temporally and spatially. The kiddy cartoon that was used to intro G.W. served a couple purposes. It caught your attention, it was humorous, it quickly gave you a background of G.W., but most of all it summed up some misconceptions.
Gore uses many elements to establish his credibility and authority. He notes the experts that found the data and often refers to them as his close friend or close working partner. He uses his close professor in college as the catalyst to his interest and later calls on the Prof. to testify on his behalf in government. Gore often calls to attention that this PowerPoint effort has been going on for some time. In an interjected segment of his PowerPoint, he notes the 2000 Presidential Election in which he lost to Bush, Jr. Bush is depicted as negative here. The colors are all muted grey tones, the motion is slow, and the music is ominous. It is mentioned during this segment that the Bush force did not enact G.W. laws or took much initiative to stop G.W. Gore goes on to highlight graphically in his PowerPoint how the U.S. is subpar to other countries in fuel efficiency in cars. He attributes much of the poor economy to the lack of government intervention. Gore notes Katrina as a failed natural disaster effort by Bush. By framing these issues as moral and ethical problems the U.S. have not addressed with Bush as President, it adds to his ethos for being the one who acknowledges failed attempts and others efforts.
[Big picture.] The film sequentially and skillfully grabs your attention and positions you at the neutral 50 yard line. Everyone agrees that nature is beautiful and worth saving for our children. He establishes his credibility by saying he has been in the Senate, written a book, ran for President, gone overseas for treaties. Then, he gives you the science lingo and background about G.W. Next, he slowly weans you away from the 50 to controversial points, like “maybe the seasonal changes are natural and G.W. doesn’t really exist.” He pulls you more and more to his side with each credible source and graph he references. He appeals to your emotions by talking about his son and those lost to Katrina by lack of preparation and his past attempts at risk communication, “I thought they would be startled…they weren’t.” After a lot of facts and side points, he resorts to pathos, again, paraphrasing what our kids will say to us after our water levels have risen and polar bears have all drown - “What were our parent’s thinking?” In true risk communication form, he ends on a “Take action” note. In black background and white text, solutions scroll on the screen and www.climatecrisis.net appears while Melissa Etheridge sings, “I need to wake up.”
If I recall one of my music teacher’s stories correctly, some composers have actually been known to sit in the audience of their own show on opening night, just watch the audience’s faces and reaction to the show. They almost based their success of the performance and on the faces in the audience. I thought this was interesting because as I watched Al Gore’s movie awestruck, the camera panned to the audience and I was able to see their faces and interest in his PowerPoint, like a mirror to my face. If faces are any measure as to how well Gore “performed”, I’m sure my face could have read I was drawn into the movie and it was a success. At some moments, I had forgotten it was Al Gore, I had forgotten I was sitting at home on my couch and not in his round circle in lecture, I felt the rest of the audience had transcended party lines to meet in the middle for global warming.
_-Keep the music playing-_
