Part II. Stories For The Eyes and Ears

Remember this, son, if you forget everything else. A poet is a musician who can’t sing. Words have to find a man’s mind before they can touch his heart, and some men’s minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens. –Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds;…to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself;… to invent tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime… —these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty “instrumental music.” –Charles Lamb, A Chapter on Ears

Is conductor Leif Segerstam an “inexplicable rambling mime,” to borrow Charles Lamb's phrase? Is this “pure music” without a plot, or can you tell exactly what story he's telling?

Here is “The Festival at Baghdad” from Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade:

Well, if mimes are silent, then he's definitely not a mime.

Music students might hear the orchestra shouting and think, “Is that allowed??”—a question that is both perfectly understandable and hilariously absurd in the context of art. Segerstam certainly makes distinctive choices in this music—he is, at least, the only conductor I've heard start a war cry in the middle of the “Festival at Baghdad.”

I don't know what kinds of festivals they had in Baghdad, but I can't listen to this and hear anything other than cavalry charging into battle. ^💬 Segerstam has chosen to anchor an abstract moment—filling an empty frame with a concrete image.

Over the next several chapters, we'll test music's relationship with storytelling—from vivid depictions in film, opera, dance, and video games—and see how we come up with pictures for ourselves. All the chapters in this section pair music with something specific for the eyes to latch on to. But this approach first raises one of music's fundamental debates: should music tell a story at all?

On one side, there are the supporters of “program music” or “programmatic music”—music that depicts specific stories (these pieces often have written programs explaining their meaning, hence the name).

On the other side, there are the advocates of “absolute music”—music that exists purely as sound, with no extra-musical meaning attached.

It doesn't help that the composers themselves were walking contradictions.

Richard Wagner declared grandly that “Where painting says 'this is the meaning,' music alone says 'this is.'” But he's best known for crafting epic dramas full of symbolism and plot, like the ~fifteen-hour Ring Cycle, which many argue inspired Lord of the Rings (Tolkien himself denied it).

Richard Strauss would get impatient when asked about his music's “meaning,” insisting it was “just music.” But then he wrote ten revolutionary “tone poems,” depicting specific stories and characters from Don Quixote to Zarathustra with remarkable narrative specificity.

Aaron Copland put it most clearly: “Is there meaning in music? Yes. Can you say in words what the meaning is? No.” (He then ranted: “Simple-minded souls will never be satisfied with the answer to the second of these questions. They always want music to have a meaning, and the more concrete it is the better they like it.”)

But Copland's legacy? Appalachian Spring, a plot-forward ballet telling the story of newlywed American pioneers.

So were the composers just hypocrites? I don't think so. Many purists resist programmatic music as somehow “less than” the absolute music that can speak directly to the heart. But I think these composers recognized great extra-musical sources of inspiration and sought for their program music to transcend them.

And in the other direction, much absolute music is really just storytelling where the imagination supplies the details.

So let's dive back into the story of Scheherazade, and see what happens when source material extends the interpretation chain: Folk Tale > Composer > Conductor > Musicians > Listener. By the time the music reaches the listener, we'll see whether it conveys its story or grows beyond it.

Scheherazade

Scheherazade comes from the collection of Middle Eastern Folktales, One Thousand and One Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights). Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov tells the story in his opening night program:

The Sultan Schakhriar, convinced that all women are false and faithless, vowed to put to death each of his wives after the first nuptial night. But the Sultana Scheherazade saved her life by entertaining her lord with fascinating tales, told seriatim, for a thousand and one nights. The Sultan, consumed with curiosity, postponed from day to day the execution of his wife, and finally repudiated his bloody vow entirely.

But from this harrowing story, Rimsky-Korsakov gives us music that often feels like being wrapped in a warm blanket on a rainy day. Listen to the oboe solo from the second movement—Scheherazade herself, perhaps?

You might feel any number of things listening to this, but first and foremost, what jumps out at me is just the beauty. In fact, the contemporary composer John Adams has trouble with this music being so beautiful, or at least the way audiences bask in its beauty. A story about a man who puts each of his wives to death? “I don't know how people can really listen to this Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov and not just really think of how hideous the story is,” he says.

Mikhail Fokin's ballet goes so far as to use Rimsky-Korsakov's music to tell the story of all the women the Sultan has murdered before. All of a sudden, music that was once comforting becomes disturbing.

Personally, in my decades of listening to this piece, I don't think I've ever even thought of the story. Is that wrong, in some way, to remove the program from the interpretation of the work? Well it turns out, Rimsky-Korsakov actually removed all the descriptive titles from the subsections of the piece in a later edition, saying in his memoirs that the only thing the listener should take from the title is the atmosphere of fairy-tale wonders of the East… yet another composer of a programmatic masterpiece that hoped the music could overcome its constraints.

Scheherazade 2.0

Ultimately, John Adams responded to Rimsky-Korsakov by writing his own Scheherazade.2—a violin concerto that features Scheherazade as a strong, empowered woman without trivializing her oppression. The solo violin, played here by Leila Josefowicz, represents Scheherazade not as a storyteller, but as a woman confronting religious authorities and making her own path to freedom.

In the second movement we hear of her true love, Adams says, forbidden by the powers that be:

This is the part of Adams' music that most resembles Rimsky-Korsakov's, but even here there's an underlying danger that quickly takes a turn for the worse that the audience knows is coming.

In the third movement, “Scheherazade and the Men with Beards,” she faces an interrogation from a religious council and is sentenced to death:

Any sense of melody is consumed by dissonance—no song remains, just panic, terror, and violence, until it dissolves into a lone cimbalom ringing.

Even without the story's context, the music would be overwhelming, but for me, it wouldn't cut as deep. The abstract emotional reaction isn't as visceral as envisioning our protagonist completely helpless, consumed by the orchestra around her.

I wonder if we heard the Adams and Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazades back-to-back without knowing their titles whether we would guess that they are even based on the same story. It goes to show that even if the first link in the interpretation chain—the original source material—is the same, the musical experience can outgrow it in very different directions.

From Programmatic to Absolute: Price and Dvořák

Each chapter in this section looks at a type of program music, but then looks at how a piece of absolute music can be viewed with the same lens.

In both Scheherazades, we saw composers taking inspiration from a famous legend to transport their listeners to a new world.

Antonín Dvořák (pronounced dvor-zhak) accomplishes the same world-building with his Ninth Symphony, which comes with no accompanying story, just a hint to the audience that it comes “from the New World.” In this case, the new world that Dvořák is referencing is the actual “New World,” America.

In the simplest approach to plot-less music, we can just attempt to add our own plot. We can take the Jaws-like opening to Dvořák's finale, and say, “sure sounds like an impending confrontation.” Maybe the brass fanfares remind us of the cavalry from the “Festival of Baghdad” (sans battle cry), or maybe the emphatic, deliberate string playing has a militant vibe. ^💬

Then we can keep probing. This nostalgic English Horn solo might remind you of the oboe solo from earlier, Scheherazade spinning tales to tell her husband. It, too, might give the comfort of being curled up by a fireplace with a good book. But now we have even more freedom to imagine the words to the story for ourselves. We can choose a favorite scene from a book or even a special memory from our own lives.

So now for an experiment: compare this excerpt, which does have an explicit program, Ethiopia's Shadow in America—the narrative of the Black experience. This movement is called His Resignation and Faith. Does it make our relationship to the music more detached or more connected?

Both Price and Dvořák fuse the Western symphonic tradition with African- and Native American folk music. And both capture the experience of finding home in a new world—I hear nostalgia, longing, consolation, and solace all held simultaneously. I bet some folks could even be fooled into thinking that the Price was an unknown piece by Dvořák.

Actually, the Dvořák was based on Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, inspired by Native American stories—but most audiences wouldn't know this. I would even bet Dvořák considered adding the program officially and deliberately chose to withhold it. Does Price's addition of a program constrain the listening, anchoring it to a specific moment from history—or does it force us to empathize with an experience we couldn't have accessed from the music alone?

I don't feel that she needs any “help” from text to convey the emotion, but I can't answer on behalf of other listeners. After all, I am not in their interpretation chain (except now I kind of am, since you're reading this). But I will say that if a program—real or imagined—really changed nothing, then it wouldn't be used so extensively by composers from Rimsky-Korsakov to Price.

In the subsequent chapters we'll continue this conversation between absolute music and different types of program music. The next chapter will start with arguably the most concrete form: the movie score.