Michael Phillips: In ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ composer Adam Guettel took on the challenge of putting alcoholism to music

Does addiction have a sound?

Popular culture and several of the world’s greatest jazz musicians, from Charlie Parker to Bill Evans and back, say yes. It does. Many, in fact.

Film composers have dramatized all kinds of notions, rarely great or truthful but certainly dramatic, about what a life-threatening bender might sound like for full orchestra. In Miklós Rózsa’s heavy-breathing, Oscar-nominated score for “The Lost Weekend” (1945), Ray Milland drinks his way into oblivion accompanied by strings, brass, reeds and the then-alarming novelty of the electronic and otherworldly theremin.

A decade later, “The Man with the Golden Arm” — the Hollywood take on Nelson Algren’s tale of the heroin-addicted gambler Frankie Machine, played by Frank Sinatra — turned the title character’s chemical highs and lows over to Elmer Bernstein’s blasts of what might called “danger jazz.”

Then in 1958, television’s prestigious “Playhouse 90” series introduced a different, more claustrophobic portrait