First Heart, Then Structure
- Rebecca Burnham
- May 14
- 3 min read
This week, I can only do a quick check in. I've pulled over into a motel en route home from a week in Utah, where I had the privileges of working on "Anger" with music producers and audio engineers Daniel Blomberg and Dave Zimmerman, attending a 3 day festival of new theatrical works (excited to write more about this later) and taking part in a 2-day songwriting masterclass with Kurt Bestor. It's been fantastic and there's a lot I'd like to share, but I'm just going to take a few minutes to share about a contrast between 2 experiences that struck me.
I'll start with the darker experience:
One of the new works at the festival I attended was a 45-minute highlight of scenes from musical about mental illness and suicide. Those are difficult topics to broach at the best of times. In a musical, they're particularly challenging. So I was nodding along when an industry professional started giving feedback about how the musical could benefit from a clearer arc. But then he made a suggestion that floored me: maybe the decision by one of the characters to bring about their own death could be portrayed in a postive light, as a kind of release? He seemed to suggest that would make a better story, structurally.
Maybe it would... structurally. But wouldn't that defeat the purposes of the young creator who seems to be aiming to raise awareness about the need to support those who suffer silently from mental/emotional afflictions? Wouldn't it wind up encouraging suicide?
Now, the contrast: I learned something important about songwriting from Kurt Bestor, as he shared the background to his most famous song. Bestor is an accomplished musician and composer who has scored films, written for the Olympics, and popularized instrumental Christmas music. But "Prayer of the Children" is his most famous piece of music, and he didn't write it to share.
Here's how it came into being: it was 1991 and he was playing with a new piece of technology, a vocal harmonizer, when he heard a television broadcast about civil war in Serbia and Croatia. Fifteen years earlier, he'd been in that part of the world serving as a Christian missionary. He'd developed deep friendships with Serbians and Croatians. The news that his friends were now at war, their homes being bombed, and their children in danger, was devastating. He started to sing, wordlessly, about his feelings into his harmonizer. Then words started to come, and because he'd studied songwriting so extensively, it was almost second-nature for him to put them into a structure that worked.
He sang the resulting song to his family, then put it away because he saw himself as an instrumentalist, not a song writing. But three years later, he needed to add a few more minutes of material to a concert, so he decided to end with the song. It connected so strongly with the audience that it took on a life of its own. To date, it's been sung by over 500 choirs in North America, Australia, Sweden, Mexico, and Germany. It's been featured at events (like 9-11 commemorations), and featured to end concerts by other artists, including Three Dog Night. All of this because it arose as an outpouring of the heart, which he was able to structure in a way that helped it resonate with others.
The point I take away from these two stories is that structure in art is important, when you can use it to help your message resonate. That's how Bestor's message that reaches for peace has wound up touching so many. But structure for structure's sake, without consideration for the message and potential impact, can wind up doing nothing better than helping an artist effectively peddle poison. Let's not. Let's instead use structure as a tool to peddle peace.
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