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Introduction

Through gestures, topics, symbols, themes, and cultural associations, music has the ability to tell a story.

While some argue that almost all music has narrative potential whether intended by the composer or

not, certain genres of music are written specifically to be associated with a story. In this presentation, I

will explore two such genres: program music and film music.

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Methodology

I will be performing narrative analyses on both these genres of music to explain how they have varying

degrees of narrative potential both in and out of their intended settings. My methodology is largely

informed by the work of Byron Almen and Michael Klein.

To organize my thinking on this topic, I have created the following diagram, inspired by Michael Klein’s

‘map of musical discourse’ in chapter 1 of his book Music and Narrative Since 1900.

In one corner we have program music in its intended setting of the concert hall. Here it is free to tell its

story purely through the medium of sound and has the potential to be interpreted slightly differently by

different listeners.

Below this we have film music in its intended setting, accompanying the film it was written for. Themes

in the music are clearly associated with the characters and settings appearing on the screen, and

gestures that might be ambiguous in the concert hall are given context and explicit interpretation

through the accompanying visual events in the film.

On the other side of the map we have taken these two genres out of their intended settings. In this

corner we have film music that is stripped of its film and performed or heard only in its auditory form.
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This provides listeners with the opportunity to find new meaning in the music and interpret it in a

different way than what was intended.

Finally, in this corner we have program music that has been appropriated for use in film. An example of

this would be use of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The use of pre-existing program music in a film has very interesting implications for the interpretation of

that music. In a sense it imposes a narrative on the music that may or may not have been intended by

the original composer, which limits the possibilities for interpretation and may even re-form cultural

associations with the music.

For the sake of time I won’t be able provide an example to go along with the first or second categories,

but I figure those are the easiest categories to leave out as they are the types of music we are most

familiar with the narrative possibilities for.

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As an example of the narrative potential of music from this third category of film music without its film,

I’ll play about a minute-long excerpt from a movie soundtrack and do a little bit of narrative analysis to

see what we can glean from it and if the story we come up with is close to that of the actual movie it’s

from. (Camel Race – 0:30 to 1:42)

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Some elements that we can easily discern from this excerpt are the upbeat rhythm and racing strings we

hear closer to the beginning. This indicates some sort of excitement or motion, possibly a race or a fight

or even just a busy public area such as a marketplace. We might also hear elements of Exoticism in the

instrumentation and modal melodies of this excerpt, indicating that the setting of our story is a non-

Western or non-European location.

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The latter half of the excerpt opens up into a soaring string melody, still underpinned by this racing

ostinato of sixteenths. The melodic contour of this string motive generally rises rather than falling and

only increases in height and intensity as it continues. While the melody itself utilizes expressive modal

chromaticism, the underlying harmony is triumphantly major. This portion of the music is definitely

depicting a positive emotion or event, potentially a victory or a romance.

As you can see, even a small excerpt of this film music without its film for context lends itself to a variety

of different narrative interpretations.

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So if you didn’t already know, this music is from the 1999 movie The Mummy, which is an action movie

set in early 20th century Egypt where the characters have to defeat an ancient mummy before he gains

enough power to take over the world. The narrative conclusions we drew from listening to this excerpt of

music were in a sense true to the original intention of the music, but it would be easy to dive deeper into

analysis and come up with a story that is entirely different from the movie plot. Listening to just the

soundtrack without knowing the context of the movie opens up the music for further interpretation

instead of limiting it to what appears on the screen.

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The example I want to discuss for the fourth category in my diagram, program music appropriated for

film, comes from Disney’s 1940 movie Fantasia. Fantasia is an anthology of short, silent animations that

were created to accompany prominent pieces of classical music. One of the pieces that was chosen for

this movie is The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky.

As we all know, The Rite of Spring was originally written to accompany a ballet that tells the story of an

ancient pagan ritual and the sacrifice of a young girl. What Disney does in Fantasia is take a slightly
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shortened version of the piece and play it underneath a dramatic animation depicting the life and

eventual extinction of the dinosaurs.

It’s interesting because even though the subject of the animation is very different from that of the ballet,

the animators still create a narrative of this cycle of birth or renewal, life, and death. It begins by

depicting the emergence of life on earth through microorganisms that eventually evolve into dinosaurs,

then shows the life and interactions of the dinosaurs, leading up to a terrifying battle between a

tyrannosaurus rex and a stegosaurus! Following that it shows the extinction of the dinosaurs through a

terrible drought and ends with the Earth reforming itself with dramatic earthquakes and storms, ending

in the same place we started. I’ll show you the bit where the T-rex comes out because it’s the coolest bit.

(show dino battle: 14:35-15:20)

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Conclusion

My proposed diagram, though it may look a bit confusing, is meant to outline a spectrum of narrative

and interpretive possibilities rather than forcing all music to fit into one of the four boxes. Here is an

expanded version of my diagram that I unfortunately don’t have time to explain fully but which includes

more details on the narrative potential of each category of music.

In conclusion, music has the ability to express a narrative through gestures, topics, themes, and cultural

associations. When accompanied by the visual media of film, this narrative is narrowed and shaped to fit

a singular specific story and becomes more overt. When music is performed on its own, its narrative

potential expands and listeners are more free to interpret it in multiple different ways. While film is the

predominant form of narrative that we experience today and the most straightforward way to digest a

story, music on its own still has a lot of fascinating stories to tell. Thank you.