“You Will Be Sound”

The Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen is often understood as a product of the social and technological conditions of the 2010s. Scholars have examined how its on-stage projected text messages, social-media-driven plot, and Generation Z characters situate the musical within the cultural moment of its premiere. Less attention has been paid to how the guitar arrangements support this aesthetic by giving the score a contemporary sound. The score and orchestrations incorporate alternate tunings, open-string voicings, digital amplifier simulations, and ambient volume swells, drawing on guitar sounds and production practices prevalent in popular music of the period.

Songs such as “Anybody Have a Map?,” “Requiem,” and “For Forever” use capos and alternate tunings that allow open strings and suspended pitches to ring as fretted chord shapes change. In “Requiem,” a root-and-tenth voicing reproduces the guitar textures common in pop arrangements. Both guitar books also prescribe settings for digital effect simulations, including in “For Forever” and “A Few Words.” By specifying reverb, delay, and pitch effects, the score treats digitally processed guitar tones as part of the written orchestration.

I use De Souza’s concepts of affordance, meaning the musical actions an instrument makes available, and idiomaticity, meaning a gesture’s compatibility with established playing methods, from his book Music at Hand to explain how these techniques alter the guitarist’s sonic possibilities. Koozin’s “Guitar Voicing in Pop-Rock Music” supports my analysis of the harmonic and timbral effects of ringing open strings. Kaminsky and Lyons’s “Chords of Inquiry” provides a model for studying how alternate tunings produce chord shapes and pitch relationships unavailable in standard tuning. Herbst’s research on guitar-profiling technology supports my examination of digitally constructed tones. while Théberge’s “The Sound of Nowhere” informs my analysis of the sonic spaces produced through reverb and ambient effects.

Through analysis of selected songs and their guitar parts, I examine how the books use affordances, idiomaticity, and digital processing to make guitar timbre a written component of composition and orchestration. Dear Evan Hansen offers a case study of how contemporary guitar performance techniques, tones, and production technologies were codified within a musical-theater score.