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

PROGRAM MUSIC, part two.

I previously argued (a month ago, it turns out -- sorry for the delay in getting back to this) why I don't believe that music has any direct link with visual imagery, separate from "the power of suggestion" contained within a title or a work's general use. So, the attentive reader might wonder, if there is no necessary link between the visuals in a movie -- say, Star Wars: A New Hope and the score by John Williams -- then can it be that other music would have served to accompany the film's story?

Well, yes. To a point.

For reasons I described in the earlier essay on program music, I don't believe that a composer can actually evoke specific visual images through music alone. This is because the tools of music -- notes, chords, instrumental timbres, and all the rest of it -- are by their very nature abstract. The color green has a specific set of "real world" antecedents for us, owing to the fact that the vast majority of plants are green. So do blue, red, brown, and all the rest. An F-sharp, though, has no such real-world antecedent. We don't wander through the world noting specific instances of F-sharps, or F-sharp major chords. A goose flying overhead, returning to Canada from someplace south, may happen to sound an F-sharp as it "honks", but we don't associate the F-sharp with that bird. The same thing happens with an entire chord, and even entire scale systems.

Consider a simple example, the descending major scale, in just two instances: the Christmas carol "Joy To The World", and Richard Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie ("Alpine Symphony"). The carol's "character" is one of festivity and religious joy, opening as it does with a grand statement of a descending major scale. The Strauss work, on the other hand, is a "program" work that purports to depict an entire day upon an Alpine peak. There's a mysterious opening of descending minor scales, which are followed by a motif that stands for the mountain itself; then, after a long crescendo, the clouds part, so to speak, as the entire orchestra bursts forth with a huge and melodic statement founded on the same descending major scale. The image in the Strauss is not one of religious joy at the coming of the King of Kings, but suggestive of a great, towering mountain revealed in all its magnificence in the first full light of dawn. One musical device -- a descending major scale -- serves to illustrate two different emotional qualities, through differences in meter, tempo, orchestration, and all the other tools at the composer's disposal.

Thus, it seems false to suggest that a descending major scale is, by itself, illustrative of anything at all. And this extends to other common musical assumptions as well, the most common being the belief that music in the major key sounds "happy" while music in the minor key sounds "sad". This is simply not the case; there are hundreds of examples of major-key music that will make you weep. So it's not up to the notes, or even the keys in which the notes fall, to convey emotion. (This stands in pretty stark contrast to what the Ancient Greeks believed, though; they insisted that specific keys, or "modes", stood for specific character traits, and that playing the wrong "modes" could actually cause a deterioration of character – the first real example of music being said to corrupt the listeners, lest anyone think that particular charge is unique to those who attack rock-and-roll.)

Music, then, takes on its emotional characteristics -- its artistic qualities -- from the composer's application of all of the various qualities at his or her disposal, which goes far beyond mere melody. Rachmaninov's famous Variations of a Theme of Paganini, for example, shows us the possibilities in just one melody, and those possibilities are legion. We hear a march, a dance, a mysterious meditation, and -- familiar to anyone who's seen the film Somewhere In Time -- a heartbreaking romance. Thus, the composer has to create a convincing work out of a plethora of different qualities in order to win us over and engage our emotions. All of those qualities, the tools in the composer's box, are related to sound and tone, but they're not synonymous with sound and tone.

What does this have to do, then, with film music? I'm getting there. Really. Sooner or later.

(Appendix: I wonder if music might have more specific emotive qualities to exceptionally gifted musicians. I'm thinking of the ones who have perfect pitch and who are very talented and notable. I seem to recall reading that D-minor was an important key to Mozart, and in the Georg Solti Memoirs I just finished, at one point Solti specifically cites A-Major as "the most brilliant of keys". This is an area that I should probably research more, but I still suspect that what I discover wouldn't affect my main thesis that music can only suggest certain emotions or relations of feeling, as opposed to specifically illustrating a particular visual element.)