An Explanation
What Music They Make: Telling a Story Without Words or Pictures
I love music. That sounds cheesy. On any one of those lame community websites where you fill in your interests, everyone always puts "music." So let me qualify that. I love what music is capable of. Without a word and without an image, it can communicate volumes. It can make you feel like you're in the presence of a God, or under the murderous eye of an unseen criminal. It can make people dance and it can make people cry.
It's just the air vibrating.
Vibrating air shouldn't have that kind of power.
But it does.
From fifth grade to tenth grade, I played the violin in the school orchestra . In those six years, I learned two things: music is an incredibly powerful force, and playing the violin is boring. If playing the violin wasn't so boring, I may very well have chosen to pursue a career in music rather than in film.
I tell you that to tell you this:
One particular kind of music I listen to far more than most people is movie scores. Not just because they represent the overlap between those two passions of mine, music and film, but also because the very nature of a film score is that it has to tell a story. Each individual cue serves a purpose in conveying the narrative to the audience. And, in the cases in which the music works best with the story, the music and the movie become synonymous.
For example, think to yourself of The Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back (you know you know how it goes). Try NOT to picture Darth Vader marching menacingly down the halls of some space station. Or try imagining Sean Connery in a tuxedo, crossing the casino floor to the bar to order his signature martini. I defy you to say that a couple of bars of John Barry's Bond theme didn't cross your mind.
But even independently of the film it was originally composed for, a great piece of film music is incredibly communicative. Even if you didn't know who Indiana Jones was, you hear the Raiders March, and you know there's an adventure afoot. And that's because the music was originally written to help tell an adventure story.
What these and almost all other modern film scores have in common is that they developed out of a mode of a style of orchestral composition which was more or less created by Richard Wagner. Nearly every film score uses what Wagner called "Grundthema," or "basic idea." The basic idea behind the "basic idea" is that a certain recurring musical theme is associated with a certain person, place or idea over the course of a piece of music. Wagner's themes were also called "leitmotifs" (literally, "leading motifs"), and the idea of these leitmotifs is that they change ever so slightly over the course of piece as a whole -- whether it be an opera or a film score -- but provide repetition so that the listener can understand that a character or idea or place is returning to the story. They are flexible but clear musical ideas repeated and varied upon to communicate what is going on in the story.
Repeated and varied upon, not unlike the elements that make up the monster myth.
