Way In #2: Stories

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, he's definitely not a silent 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 interpretative choices in this music, and to me, they definitely tell a story—he is, at least, the only conductor I've heard start a war cry in the middle of this “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. ^💬

Over the next several chapters, we'll look at the relationship between music and storytelling—from vivid depictions in film to increasingly abstract tone poems—and build an intuition for musical meaning as we go. That is, to quote Charles Lamb, to gaze upon empty frames and fill in the pictures for ourselves.

But this approach raises one of music's fundamental debates: should music tell a story at all?

On one side, you have 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, you have 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 straightforward ballet telling the story of newlywed American pioneers.

So were they 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.

In the other direction, much absolute music is really just storytelling with a little imagination.

So let's dive back into the story of Scheherazade, and see what happens when source material is added to 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?

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.

To me, unlike the Rimsky-Korsakov, without the story's context this clip would be less effective. We might have associations with this type of sound from film scores, but that abstract familiarity is less visceral than when we hear 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 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

As we go through various types of program music, we'll also see how it can provide a new perspective on more absolute music.

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 most straightforward approach to plot-less music, we can 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 probe a little deeper. 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 that passage to this excerpt, which does have an explicit program.

There are many musical similarities between this excerpt, from Florence Price, and the Dvořák. I bet some folks could even be fooled into thinking that the Price was written by Dvořák.

Both Price and Dvořák fuse the Western symphonic tradition with African- and Native American folk music. And both capture the emotional blend of finding home in a new world—I hear nostalgia, longing, consolation, and solace all held simultaneously.

But Price's has a program: Ethiopia's Shadow in America, and she gives us the narrative of the Black experience from “The Arrival of the Negro in America when first brought here as a slave” to “His Resignation and Faith” and finally “His Adaptation, a fusion of his native and acquired impulses.”

(For fun, guess which section this excerpt belonged to. Tap the footnote for the answer: ^💬)

Dvořák once told the New York Herald that his slow movement was based on Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, a Native-American inspired epic poem—but Dvořák would not count on audiences knowing this. I would even bet he debated adding the program officially, but deliberately chose to withhold it.

Why these choices? It's tempting to read into the composers' biographies—Dvořák, an established Czech composer living as a foreigner in America with no personal claim to these traditions, and Price, a Black woman from Little Rock, Arkansas trying to break into the Classical world.

That's an interesting question for musicologists and historians—but the more important route of exploration for audiences is how the program changes our experience as listeners.

Does Price's program constrain the listening, anchoring it to a specific moment in history? Or does it force us to empathize with an experience we couldn't have accessed from the music alone?

If she had removed the title completely—as she did with the rest of her oeuvre—would a hypothetical songwriter put different words to the melody?

I can't really 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).

I will say that if a program—real or imagined—changed nothing, then composers from Rimsky-Korsakov and Adams, Dvořák and Price, all the way to Wagner, Strauss, and Copland, wouldn't have used them so extensively. But we can also follow their lead by releasing a piece from its program and letting the music take on even newer, more personal meaning.

In the subsequent chapters we'll continue to see a dialogue between programmatic music and absolute music. The next chapter will start with arguably the most concrete form: the movie score.