Five Chords Turn Personal Stories Into Musical Scores
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, pianist Harold O’Neal led a workshop arguing that music can be used as a practical language for framing experience, even by people with no formal musical training. O’Neal reduced harmony to five felt energies — rising, grounded, condensed, chaotic and floating — and asked participants to map them onto short personal stories. His broader claim was that conflict, ambiguity and interpretation are not obstacles to storytelling but part of how people give meaning to what happened.
The Aspen Institute·Jun 27, 2026·16 min read
