Radio Documentary

Witness To An Execution

Since I am a musician, I found the use of

music in this radio documentary very

interesting. It never intrudes on the piece,

but rather adds variety to the mix and

accentuates a few specific moments,

namely the introduction, outro, and

the moment when God is involved:

the final conversation.

Let's take a look at the structure of "Witness to an Execution" before we analyze the music...

The piece opens with music playing below testimonials that generally follow

the structure "I'm ____ and I've witnessed __ executions."The warden then

talks about why they made this documentary as the music rolls on beneath

him. Then, as soon as the speakers begin to recount exactly what happens

at an execution, the music stops. The music seems to make the moment

more intimate, as if each of the speakers are talking directly to us.

The music stoppage signals a change from conversation to cold, hard facts.

The music is also present while the Reverend speaks. This is roughly half-way through the documentary, breaking up the monotony of talking without background noise in the body of the documentary. The music then skips out until the outro, when it is played for almost a minute without any overlaid speaking. This gives us a time to reflect on what the documentary has said - yet another "personal" moment where music has been inserted.

The style of music is also indicative of both the geographic location that the documentary discusses and sets an aura of personal reflection. The first thing to note about the music is that there are no words to get in the way of our thoughts and the words that are being spoken in the script. Having the sound completely instrumental helps us internalize the information we are receiving. Generally, the speakers are somewhat old and all of them are from small-town Texas. The documentarian tried to create the atmosphere of old small town Texas with a single fiddle playing over the sound of a finger-picked guitar - a sound that defines the music scene in many towns around Texas. The fiddle has a raw, over-resined quality as it intertwined double-stops with single notes. This style of music occilates between sounding full and almost completely hollow while never repeating a melodic theme, giving us our thoughts no particular direction.