Cantrile is a style of musical performance in the Crown of Altair world. Its defining quality, really, is its versatility. Cantrile performances can be any scale, and artists are always trying to push them larger and smaller – there have even been artists who give one-on-one performances, just to see how small they can go, but also to see how it feels, to see what they notice about the sense of performing, and apply that to their more regular scale performances.
That meditative, really sort of meta attitude, is also part of what defines it, though, of course, there are people who get obnoxious with that, at times.
Any genre of music can be used, and artists have fun with adapting old compositions to new styles. There is a standard canon of plays, songs, etc., but rather than trying to always perform it exactly as the original artist wrote it, as far back as around 700 years ago, there have been modifications, remixes, etc., and performers, historians, dramaturgs, etc. are just as concerned with who created this arrangement, this changed ending, etc., as with the original script. Changed parts aren’t considered a form of damage or censorship. In real life, they’re seen that way because there were so many times when they were just that. But in this world, in Cantrile, modifying the script has always been a way for artists to explore the story in their own way, and they come up with a lot of interesting things.
I keep saying “artists”, because really, in Cantrile, everyone does multiple jobs. Between singing, acting, playing instruments, dancing, and whatever other sort of performing; to designing and building the physical sets and costumes; directing, writing, choreography, and composing; artists are encouraged to branch out and not just stick to one thing. There isn’t an attitude of, “well, you’re an actor, stick to acting, you could never understand writing,” – on the contrary, anyone who loves doing one particular role in Cantrile is encouraged to explore other tasks, because in seeing their favorite task from another perspective, they can appreciate it better – for example, a dancer helping out the costume designers, or the conductors, can see the production from their point of view, and have a greater understanding of where they fit in the bigger picture of the production.
Cantrile has a large influence on pop culture in that world, but it’s not always popular itself in all places. The area that Andrea comes from, for example, has a lot of pop music that references Cantrile songs, but most people don’t notice or care any more than most people in the real world notice or care when pop music references classical music.
Andrea applies for, and gets into, one of the world’s top schools for Cantrile, which is where he meets Claudio, but before that, he had an internship in an arts magazine in his home city. He applied for it because he loved how they covered Cantrile, but when he got the job and went to their offices, and told them that, they gave him weird looks and said, “Oh, you really care about that stuff?” It turns out, they just covered it out of a sense of obligation, and none of them cared about it. Their reviews were all just bullshitting. Less than a year into Andrea’s job there, they decided to stop covering it altogether, and celebrated over being “free” from such “old-fashioned, confusing,” weird stuff. Andrea was stuck there, until he unexpectedly gets accepted to the school.

Cantrile plays are often based on legends, mythology, and historical stories, but these are all up to interpretation. It was never that controversial for there to be a play analyzing a story from a different side – rather, it has been seen as a positive for a large portion of Cantrile’s history. Another trend that came up about a hundred years ago, was to expand a standard play into a series. So, if a play has about 20 songs in it in the original, the authors of the expansion will add songs in the middle, add subplots, and focus on scenes that weren’t shown in the original. Since tastes change over the centuries, there are parts of the story that weren’t seen as being worth covering back when the play was written, such as a long journey too somewhere. The play might have a scene where the characters say they’re leaving on a week’s journey, and then in the next scene, they say they’ve arrived. The expansion might have a whole play covering their journey.
In some plays, there might have been an element of a character’s behavior in the ending of a story that doesn’t make sense to many people, that scholars argue back and forth for decades, centuries, over what they did and why. An expansion might give that character a character arc that explains it. And someone who doesn’t like another author’s new explanation might even write a counter-expansion, expanding the same story in different ways.
Different authors, troupes, etc. also comment on each other, comment on trends within the field. Some composer might make waves by changing a specific word in the lyrics of one song, shedding a new light on that character or situation (minor changes with big impact are something the Cantrile world just eats up). So then, another troupe might have a character in a different play use the same word, which could serve to make a comparison between this character’s situation and that one’s.
A costume choice could serve a similar purpose.
The Cantrile world just eats up this kind of analytical directing, which is part of what makes it seem so weird to people who aren’t into it, like most of Andrea’s country.
Books about Cantrile have always been part of the sphere of it, and no less than musical performances. Both analyses, and novelizations of the stories inspired by specific plays and productions, have always been part of things. With the rise of the internet, which happened longer ago in the world of the story than IRL, there has been a big expansion in solo performers, writers, artists, getting their start online and then being able to enter the real internationally communicating world of Cantrile from there.
Is Cantrile connected to magic? Yes. Yes, in a lot of big ways, though not everyone knows it.
There are a lot of jokes, so to speak, in Cantrile plays, that only magic users will get.
More on that will come once I finish writing the story – it’ll be in the story in a big way.

I… just wanted to write at least something about it, just so I have something up. If anyone actually read thing, thanks a lot, and please let me know what you think.