Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Film Music excursions, part the third: Program Music, one.

The classic Disney film Fantasia opens with a bit of narration by musicologist Deems Taylor, as the members of the Philadelphia Orchestra take their place in the studio. Taylor spends a moment or two describing what is to come in the film, and this in turn involves the distinction between "absolute" music and "program" music. The distinction is simply this: program music is music that tells a definite story, while absolute music does not. Absolute music is abstract music, depicting nothing but a series of musical relationships much as the shapes and colors in an abstract painting depict nothing specific.

This seems, at first, a perfectly sensible distinction. But I had an experience in, of all places, a grade school music class that suggests otherwise.

This was that standard class we all knew and hated, when we'd all get handed a bunch of song-books, the teacher would play the piano and teach us the songs, and we'd sit there either half-heartedly singing or, more likely, just "lipping" along, hoping she wouldn't notice. (She always did, the crafty old bat….) Or sometimes she'd lecture us on some classical composer and play some music on the stereo and we'd once again sit like bumps, listening along. (I'm not sure why we ever had these classes in the first place. It always seemed to me that a better approach to music education would be to require every student to either learn an instrument for band or orchestra, or failing that, participate in the choir. But I digress.)

Anyway, one time Mrs. Herkishimer (not her real name; I don't remember it) wanted to demonstrate the evocative power of music or something like that. When we got into class and took our assigned seats, she proceeded to hand out to each student one sheet of white paper and a few crayons. Our mission, she then informed us, was to listen to the piece of music she was about to play on the stereo and draw what we imagined the music to be depicting. Soon we're all drawin' away while the air is filled with the strains of some orchestral masterpiece, and when it was done she asked us all what we drew. Since the music was pretty dramatic, some of us drew space battles; others drew forest scenes with big animals; some drew towering mountains, et cetera. No one, to my recollection, drew a ship plying the waters of a great and unknown sea, even though the piece turned out to be the first movement of Rimsky-Korsakov's program music masterpiece, Scheherazade. That movement is titled "The Sea and Sinbad's Ship".

Since that day I've doubted very much that music ever, truly, expresses any concrete image. When we encounter a piece of music that bears a descriptive title, I suspect that in every case this is because the composer had that image in mind before he or she began the composing. Thus the music does not so much depict the image as it depicts what the composer had in mind, musically, when considering that image. The two are not the same thing.

This was borne out years later when I read Leonard Bernstein's invaluable book The Joy of Music, in which there is a chapter -- in the form of a dialogue -- where Bernstein questions the very notion of "descriptive" music when a friend of his describes some hills as "pure Beethoven". The whole idea of Beethoven's music evoking physical scenery strikes Bernstein as almost alien. He later brings up an Etude by Chopin, and posits that while Chopin is saying something in this music, it must be something that Chopin had felt could only be expressed in music, or else he would have used words to say it in the first place.

So I ultimately suspect that the connection between music and imagery is much weaker than many believe. What are the implications, then, for listeners of music, and for film music in particular? Stay tuned.