Plot: Film Music

In 1933, Adolf Hitler rose to power, and when many of Europe's artists were forced to flee, the classical music avant-garde were among them. Arnold Schoenberg arrived that same year, and by the end of the decade, both he and his rival Igor Stravinsky had “settled down in Hollywood,” wrote composer René Leibowitz, “which is about as far as a European can 'go West.'” Among this wave of emigrants was Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who scored The Adventures of Robin Hood, setting the groundwork for an orchestral sound that we still associate with Hollywood today.

And so programmatic music continues in a new medium—film music—standing alongside opera and ballet as music for both eyes and ears. Not only is film now sought out by students and professionals for its commercial prospects (or as Stravinsky put it, “feeding the composer”), it has also proven itself as an effective outlet for personal expression in its own right. When Hans Zimmer looked to compose a requiem for his late father, he found himself doing so with The Lion King.

Film music now frequently finds a home in the concert hall just like Tchaikovsky's ballet suites and Mozart's opera overtures. With each new interpretation, this music, too, enters the repertoire, ready to take on new meaning outside its original context.

Soundtrack storytelling: Silence and structure

Soundtracks are inextricably tied to what's happening in the story on screen, so they're a perfect place to dig deeper into the key elements of storytelling in classical music.

Over the coming chapters, we'll see how the six major elements of music—structure, timbre, texture, melody, rhythm, and harmony—achieve expression across many areas of the classical repertoire. ^💬

The first five minutes of Pixar's Up create an entire world without a word of dialog, just a waltz by Michael Giacchino. The fullness of life in these five minutes is so palpable that a friend asked me to play excerpts of this music at his wedding. But let's listen in particular to when the music stops moving forward—when it slows down, holds a note, or pauses completely, and when it resumes.

What's amazing is that the music for the whole scene—and really the whole movie—is just based on one short tune, called a “theme” or “motif,” heard over and over again, marking time as it moves forward. Subtle variations are enough to convey an entire lifetime.

But there are two moments that we remember most. The first is when Carl and Ellie decide to have kids and then lose the baby. The second is when they decide to finally go on their adventure, but Ellie gets sick and passes away. In both cases, the music holds still and makes us hold our breath.

Then the music picks up again, and the story resumes.

Daniel Barenboim writes (not about Up):

Unless [the musician] provides added energy, the sound will die… The terminology is plain: the note dies. Of course within a composition, it is temporary death, followed by the ability to revive, to begin life anew. In this way music is more than a mirror of life… even death is not necessarily final.

In Up, this pattern—the suspension of time where we wait to see if the music will be revived—is an example of structure. The music—like the story—is divided into sections for artistic effect.

Here's just the last minute as pure music, without the film. As it ends, sit in the silence. Outside of the film, the final silence doesn't have to specifically mean Carl's loss of Ellie, but there is a sense of absence nonetheless.

Even without remembering exactly what's happening as each of these notes is played, the emotional weight remains in each moment, and the progression towards that final silence feels inevitable. In the context of the full movie, however, that silence is not final; it's the beginning of the rest of the story.

It was a silence that finally drew me into the cantatas of J.S. Bach. For decades I just didn't resonate with Bach's sacred music the way I did with his secular music. Then I discovered the silence in the middle of the Actus Tragicus—a silence that is not one thing or another, but poses a question—is this the end? The performer and listener must decide how to interpret it.

The conductor John Elliot Gardiner writes,

The most impressive feature of Bach's fusion of music and theology occurs in that central silent bar to which we as listeners are irresistibly drawn. There is no resolution… so it is up to us how we interpret it in the silence that follows. If we hear it at face value… that would indicate death as a kind of full stop. But perhaps we are being gently nudged to hear the final oscillation [as leading to the next movement]. In that case Bach's message is one of hope… that death is only a midway point on our journey, the beginning of whatever comes after.

In addition to that example from Bach, you can use the dropdown below to choose other examples from George Walker's Lyric for Strings, written for his grandmother, a former slave, and Anna Clyne's Within Her Arms, written for her late mother.

Transformation and Timbre

More of Bach's music will come back in a moment. But first, here's a different flavor of character transformation from Up. The music takes center stage in this scene rather than playing a supporting role. ^💬 In fact, when actor Joaquin Phoenix first heard Hildur Guðnadóttir's music, standing in the bathroom, he started dancing, spontaneously. It became the entire scene in the film.

Even though Up's first five minutes give us a great, tear-jerking tragedy, the Joker's internal turmoil bears no resemblance in feeling or sound. In this track, the first thing we notice is the timbre of the cello. Timbre, or tone color, refers to the quality of the sound—what makes a flute sound different from a violin playing the same notes. Certain music, in which the composer exploits instruments' ability to make varied, unexpected sounds, we would call “colorful.” Here's a bit of the opening from a live orchestral performance of the Joker.

Cellists (myself included) regularly claim that the cello holds a special place as the instrument closest to the human voice. Frederic Chopin—who wrote almost exclusively for piano—used the cello or imitated it for his most personal, introspective statements. Guðnadóttir is a cellist herself, and I imagine it was never a question for her which instrument would play the Joker's music. The soundtrack to the Joker's sequel even uses a trench cello—a World War I cello variant played in the trenches.

The Long Play

This brings us all the way back around to see the same elements of silence, form, and timbre in Bach. Bach was a devout Lutheran, and for the deepest moment of desolation and transformation—the death of Christ—he chose the gamba, a predecessor to the cello that he had used only once before.

In his Johannes-Passion, Bach gives us Christ's last words on the cross, stated simply, "es ist vollbracht“: ”it is finished," and then silence.

The gamba emerges from silence with a sighing, elegiac figure. The instrument's vocal qualities are used to their fullest effect here—the phrases rise and fall like heavy breaths or sobs, with pregnant pauses between each statement.

And then all of a sudden, the gamba has disappeared under the strings in a celebration of Christ as God. But the feeling of triumph is only temporary. Before we hear the next aria, we will hear silences—endings, transitions, and beginnings all without sound—that are as poignant as the gamba's music itself. This music again asks us the question of how one can hold sorrow and celebration side by side. Which one wins out is again up to the performers and listeners.

Here's the Netherlands Bach Society:

A whirlwind tour

Sometimes there's no substitute for quantity, and I think the best way to explore timbre and form may be through a whirlwind tour of short clips from different themes. If you want to listen to more of one, feel free to go back and keep watching!

After silence, theme and its shorter variant, the motif, are the primary building blocks of musical form. The key to following a film soundtrack is the same as following a 10+ minute long work of abstract classical music: remember the theme. The best way to do this is to mentally link it to character, either general (humorous) or specific (the dog from Up). Once the listener has some sense of the theme's initial character, it's much easier to follow as it develops.

Multiple ingredients determine how a theme achieves a certain character, but these selections focus on demonstrating the range of timbre. This way we can see not only how distinctive choice of instrument is, but also within an instrument's range how it can conjure different scenes.

Following a couple examples of film music will be a selection from the non-film classical repertoire, showing how classical themes can portray character just as strongly without a plot to describe a specific situation.

First, a contrasting use of the cello from television:

And now here's a theme from the Dvorák Cello Concerto. You might now listen to it and connect the theme to a Game of Thrones-esque character.

And now an inspiration from Dvorák's New World Symphony, here is a folk flute that a shepherd might play, transporting us instantly to the Shire:

From the same family of instruments, a recorder also brings us to the Wild West, and then to one of the most unique timbres in film, courtesy of a combination of woodwinds imitating a coyote's howl with the human voice:

From the Wild West to Dune—another kind of desert, and another kind of vocal timbre…

And now from the man we started the chapter with and the avant-garde classical repertoire, here's the opening to Arnold Schoenberg's fantastical, crazy Pierrot Lunaire, using another possibility for the human voice, a timbre somewhere between speaking and singing he called Sprechstimme.

Now to the brass family:

And an iconic fanfare -

Here is one of Williams' brassy inspirations from the symphonic repertoire, Gustav Holst's Planets.

We could listen to more John Williams all day—here is Ann-Sophie Mutter playing the theme from Schindler's List.

And a much less lyrical violin (turn down the volume) -

The classical repertoire is known for the type of lyrical violin music as in Schindler's list, but it also uses dissonance (“ugly sounds”) for expression as well. Here's a waltz from Schnittke's Piano Quintet that starts out simple like Schindler's list and breaks down into dissonances as it goes on.

And finally, to the piano, and the music of Joe Hisaishi played by Hayato Sumino.

Next up is the piano in an ensemble with the cello. This isn't the original, in which we see the upright saloon player-piano from the show, achieving Westworld's Western-meets-sci-fi aesthetic. But it is an excellent example of explicit action and drama that Spirited Away was not.

And from the classical piano canon, here is some Rachmaninoff, who moved to Los Angeles in 1942 and spent the rest of his life there. This music has no story but has drama equal to any movie.

This list could go on for days, but for now it's sufficient to demonstrate how a memorable theme can be crafted for film and how the same type of listening can be applied to mentally “latch on” to a non-film theme. The next section will focus on the music that was written for its own sake (not for film)—but directors have seen its impact and included it in their soundtracks.

Classical music used in film scores

Imagine for a moment: Strings burst upward, fusing with trilling woodwinds. The strings scamper now, up and down the fingerboard, almost frenetic but somehow in control, and at last the horns emerge, heavier, yes, but their rising fanfares, expelling pent-up energy, propel us forward. Finally the strings dive downward chromatically, gathering momentum and preparing to climb again. Our bodies may stay in our seats, but with each successive layer added, our adrenaline pumps and our minds take flight as we feel the beating of wings we do not have.

This music feels like it was made to describe the helicopter assault scene in Apocalypse Now so much so that for most of the world, that war cry is their association with the music. In fact, it was written as a battle cry for the Valkyrie soldiers:

If you keep watching, you see the absolute destruction of a Vietnamese village by the US Air Cavalry as Wagner's music blasts from the helicopter-mounted loudspeakers. The opening visual is almost a literal adaptation of Wagner from Valkyries to helicopters. (Wagner's grandson once said, “If my grandfather was alive today, he would undoubtedly be working in Hollywood.”) But as the scene develops there's an undercurrent of something amiss—the triumphant music belies the helplessness of the Vietnamese village. And for those who know more of Wagner's legacy—how his music became the music of the Nazi regime—the insinuation is clear.

But this music has been a part of culture since long before Apocalypse Now. Proust wrote, in a scene set during World War I:

The sound of the siren, mingled with the sound of the 'Ride of the Valkyries,' which I had been playing when the alarm went off, seemed to be a new instrumentation of that same music, rendering more accurately than the orchestra the tumult of the combat, the galloping horses, the tragic ride. It was almost as though the siren were the theme, and the orchestra the accompaniment.

Since then, “Ride of the Valkyries” has shown up in hundreds of films, becoming a piece of music that can never be heard “for the first time”—that is, without all of the cultural references that it has accumulated. As Knausgaard writes about Edvard Munch's painting “The Scream” (😱), “that's how it is with the familiar, isn't it, friends we've known for years – we no longer see them, we just note their presence, allowing it to fill the category we have created for them.”

This has become true for a large number of works featured in film. The first time I performed Carl Orff's similarly-epic Carmina Burana, my assumptions of what the piece was about—based only on what I knew from the introduction—were shattered by the lewd irreverence of the text. We can either let these cultural associations take over our own interpretation of the work, or we can use them as another input into our own thought process.

Classical music as symbolic

Different styles of music have become more popular in soundtracks, but classical music remains the go-to choice for monumental scale.

Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture—with real cannons actually in Tchaikovsky's score—finds new meaning in V for Vendetta. Originally written to commemorate Russia's defense against Napoleon's invasion, it now underscores V's symbolic destruction of the Old Bailey courthouse.

I have to admit that this overture is not a piece that I ever really liked. Even Tchaikovsky called it, “very loud and noisy, but [without] artistic merit.” But its use in V for Vendetta I find more engaging than the work by itself, as if the movie provided the artistic merit that Tchaikovsky found lacking.

One could learn all the historical context of the original work—what it commemorates, where its themes come from, etc.—and it may be interesting in an academic sense, but it doesn't help achieve the visceral reaction of actually seeing the power of the music. In this scene, even before we know V's philosophy and motivations, we feel what the music means to V and we witness and question how it holds violence and beauty simultaneously. It is not just music that changes how we interpret film, but film, too, can offer an interpretation of music.

There are many similar scenes in the media that use classical music as the background to destruction and villainy, but unlike this one, most are ironic. The music is there as a stand-in for beauty and properness (not unlike in Isabel Hagen's comedy)—the notes themselves are not as important as what the institution of classical music represents. Or the evil billionaire listens to opera, because who else would listen to opera?

This is not entirely without basis. In Proust's 19th century Parisian high society, opera-goers in their boxes are “white deities who inhabited those sombre abodes,” primarily there to be seen with the show itself just a pretext. The patrons of classical music were all, let's say, of a type.

Still, this does not have to be true today, and it's unfortunate for me to see the idea of “classical music for the rich” being perpetuated instead of dismantled.

Abstraction in film

When I first read 2001: A Space Odyssey as a teenager, it instantly became one of my favorite science fiction books. Stanley Kubrick's movie is a work of art in itself, much more abstract and experiential than the book's traditional narrative, and uses classical music to achieve that end. Kubrick had actually originally commissioned an original score, but ultimately decided to keep the temporary classical pieces he had been using as placeholders during filming because they were so successful.

The most well-known scene in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is its opening, accompanied by Richard Strauss's epic and now forever-linked Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In contrast to Richard Strauss' epic tone poem, (the unrelated) Johann Strauss Jr.'s Blue Danube Waltz accompanies the weightless dance of the Pan Am space plane docking at Space Station V, bringing elegance to space travel and imbuing the old Viennese dance with a new timelessness.

But it is several pieces from György Ligeti—music that mainstream audiences might hear and initially think “that's just noise”—that give outer space its atmosphere of simultaneous beauty, awe, and terror. There is no trouble distinguishing it from Star Wars's vision of space, which is filled with heroic adventure and swashbuckling action. In my view, soundtracks can be credited for presenting avant-garde music to mainstream audiences with a built-in interpretation, helping listeners to make sense of “noise” and transform it into atmosphere. Here's a brief excerpt from the trailer:

If it were in a film from the 2020s, modern audiences might even take for granted the soundtrack as of course being “creepy scifi music.” But this was actually music in its own right first. In a way, the film acts as a music video for the audio, showing listeners a concrete interpretation of its abstract goals when many may have given up on the piece by itself. Even setting the rock band Pink Floyd to the film (which “coincidentally” synchronizes quite well) gives new interpretations to the music and the film.

With “Lux Aeterna”, Ligeti wanted to create music that “was already here when we did not hear it” and would “still be there when we no longer hear it”—captured by voices that start at the same pitch and then overlap as they expand. Many listeners may have found this music too abstract to engage with it on its own, but this goal is essentially realized by its use in the movie—man in deep space. Here is the music by itself, alongside Ligeti's own description.

Using a film to provide context to the music does limit the listener's interpretive options, but the case of 2001, the movie is atmospheric enough that I find it does just the right amount of leading the listener towards an interpretation.

The inspiration of Ligeti's Lux Aeterna (“Eternal Light”), with its ethereal, overlapping voices, can be heard in the opening of Clint Mansell's piece of the same name. I find Mansell's take to be less atmospheric and instead more suggestive of a specific menace and foreboding—it is easier to listen to without a nudge towards a certain meaning. Still, it leaves enough room for interpretation by listener or film director that it was used not only in Requiem for a Dream, but also trailers for Lord of the Rings and Assassin's Creed, and many others.

In the next chapter, we move from film, in which music accompanies a story, to opera and song, in which the music itself is also the story. This small increase in freedom—removing the film's plot and director from the interpretation chain—opens up a corresponding range of interpretive possibility.