Story

What do I love about music? There are so many different layers of music to savour, and different people will cling to different parts of it; yet the ingredient I consider to be most crucial is one which often seems to be overlooked. The basic elements of music are melody, harmony, rhythm and texture. These four elements are not necessarily distinct or independent, and there may be other elements at play (such as lyrics, or context if the music is just part of a larger whole), but as far as pure music goes they do a pretty good job of categorising the components. (But in a surprise twist, the crucial ingredient will turn out to be NONE of these! You'll never guess what it is from the title of this post.)

Melodies in music are like the characters in a film. They are what draw the attention of the audience and are generally the most memorable part. To continue this clumsy analogy, harmony is akin to the direction in a film. Directors shape the delivery of the dialogue and the physical acting, just as the harmony informs how a melody is heard and interpreted; moreover they are responsible for setting the overall mood of each scene. Rhythm is like the editing; these tell us whether our heart rate should be presto or adagio, or whether the climax is approaching or behind us. Finally, musical texture is the set design, the lighting, the cinematography, everything which brings to life a world for the other elements to play in. I could stretch this even further by explaining how the wah-wah pedal is the best boy grip, but I should probably move on to the actual point before your eyerolling at this analogy threatens to upset the angular momentum of the planet.

The actors, directors, editors and miscellaneous crew may all do their jobs superbly, but it's not going to make me like the film unless all of these elements are working together to tell a story. The story is the reason that I'm watching the film; I want to find out what happens to all these characters, how the conflicts are resolved (or not). It doesn't matter how wonderful a scene is — if it doesn't fit into that point of the film, it's not going to work.

The same goes for music. Each moment of a work of music may sound great, but it won't make for a satisfying experience unless the whole tells a coherent story. I'm not talking about operas and musicals, or film scores, or even programmatic music; I don't mean stories with literal characters and events. I'm talking about an emotional path that the music takes us on from start to finish.

Now I'm using the word "emotion" in a rather broad sense here, and perhaps it's not really the right word to use. While music can definitely inspire such typical emotions as joy, pain, longing, awe, and fear, there are many other types of feelings triggered by music which may be more subtle or complicated than these: feelings associated with recognising a pattern in the music, or hearing a change from what was established, or grouping sounds in threes rather than twos. These may seem too intellectual to be "felt", but they work on a subconscious level, just like assonance and alliteration and all that balderdash you learned about in poetry.

Good music should organise these emotions into a cohesive narrative. Emotions have a logic to their progressions: fear leads to relief or pain; struggle leads to triumph or despair. On the other hand, you don't want the music to be too predictable (unless you're a boring fart), so it needs to balance unpredictability against congruity.

Some of you might be thinking that a lot of music you listen to does no such thing. After all, a huge chunk of popular music is just verse-chorus-verse-chorus-verse-chorus, right? Not so! I would be extremely hard-pressed to find a song which consisted solely of three or four repetitions of a verse and chorus with no variations other than the lyrics. Listen more carefully. Is the texture of the final verse identical to that of the first? Is there a bridge after the penultimate chorus? Is there a change of keys between repetitions? The general rule for this particular structure is that the end of every chorus except the last must leave you wanting more, so that the song feels like a journey with several points of arrival at milestones but always heading towards that satisfying final chorus.

To illustrate this with an example, I randomised my music collection, then went down the list and picked the first song which was in verse-chorus form. Then I decided I didn't want to use that one as an example, so I looked at the second one. After discarding several options, I decided to just choose a song I like. So here is the end of the first chorus of Arcade Fire's Intervention.

The chorus ends with a fairly decisive perfect cadence, which is a good indicator of the end of a chunk of music. It's like an answer to all the questions which have been raised. But on that last syllable of the chorus, the drums enter. Clearly the song is not in fact over, but just starting to warm up!

Now let's hear the end of the second chorus.

Again right on that last syllable, the song starts building up a chord to let us know there's still more coming. And then it modulates into the next verse — thankfully not up a step, as has become so clichéd, but instead quite pleasingly to the dominant key of G major. A change of key is a sure sign in verse-chorus songs that we're racing to the finish line, and indeed here is the end of the third and final chorus.

Each verse-chorus section stands by itself and has its own fitting ending, but the short interludes in between ensure that over the course of the song there is a clear direction and overall resolution. Okay, so I've chosen a very exaggerated example here, but you should be able to find an overarching structure like this in any song you pick.

A similar story has been told by the traditional sonata-allegro form for centuries. Here we have a movement which is divided into three parts. First we have the exposition, which introduces all of the thematic material for the movement, but it somehow does it all wrong and ends up in the wrong key! Here is the opening of Beethoven's Fifth; it begins in C, but after not even one minute, things start to go horribly horribly wrong.

That second theme announced by the horns is in E flat! And so the exposition finishes with what would be a very final-sounding sequence of chords if they weren't in the wrong key. Since the movement cannot possibly end like that, the exposition is followed by a long convoluted development section in which the music tries desperately to undo this mistake and get back to the right key. It takes a lot of wrong turns along the way, encountering many strange distant keys, but somehow it finally makes it back to C.

So then we get the recapitulation, which is basically a repeat of the exposition except that this time it's done correctly. The music learns from its error, and debugs the naughty passage which led to the wrong key before.

Hurrah, the second theme is now in C! Now all is right with the world, and the movement can finally achieve a satisfying resolution in the key in which it began.

What is the similarity between verse-chorus and sonata-allegro forms? When we listen to music, we are always waiting for resolutions. When a melody hits a leading note, we wait for it to get back to the tonic. In the harmony, we wait for the circle of fourths to return home. The verse-chorus and sonata-allegro forms allow the music to have several intermediate resolution points before the end of the piece. At these points, the audience should be feeling, "Okay, that wraps up that part of the story, but what about this other thing that's still brewing?" It's also nice that these intermediate resolution points are previews of the final ultimate resolution: they kind of sound the same, but don't quite deliver the full emotional punch which is saved up for the big one.

Verse-chorus and sonata-allegro forms are a very convenient way of telling a story in a safe way. Going back to my fantastic music/film analogy, they're kind of equivalent to something like the [two people fall in love, then have a misunderstanding, then work it all out in the end] story structure. They're effective: they help the audience know what to expect along the way, and deliver a satisfying ending. I'm not being derisive. Just as not all movies with the aforementioned story structure need turn out to be mindless chick flicks, there's a lot of great stuff which can be done within the verse-chorus and sonata-allegro forms (for example, the two examples above).

But things really get interesting when we start looking at non-traditional story forms. Think about a piece of music like Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody which has barely any discernable structure and is more like a moodswinging fantasia. Without the guidance of an organised form, how do we know that the parts are going to combine to form a meaningful story? This is the challenge faced by musicians/composers who experiment with new ways to sculpt their stories.

Of course, deciding whether a musical story is any good is just as subjective as judging any elements of music; ultimately different individuals will like different stories. I love the verse/chorus parts of Muse's Butterflies and Hurricanes (apart from the terrible lyrics), and think the piano interlude is great, but together they make about as much sense to me as a David Lynch film. (To be fair, probably one of the more accessible David Lynch films.) However, the song seems to be among many Muse fans' favourites, so clearly this is just a story which doesn't appeal to me.

At its best, music has the ability to sway our emotions just as profoundly as any novel or film. If I'm looking to lift my spirits, or feed my depression, or escape reality, all I need to do is look through my collection for some music which tells the story I'm looking for, and in a moment it will be taking me with it on a journey. That's what I love about music.