Musical images

Since I live in Louisville, Kentucky, it’s hard enough not to get carried away by the Kentucky Derby fever every spring. I’ve already had my mandatory chocolate cake. This type of chocolate cake is more or less a giant chocolate chip cookie that is poured and baked into a cake base. Anyway, this got me thinking about horses and horse racing, and one thing led to another, and as always I started thinking about music. Specifically, I began to think about how composers and musicians can be quite resourceful in using musical images to create, or imitate, other images or feelings.

My connection to the Kentucky Derby is because one of the best examples of musical imagery features a racehorse. He’s in Franz Schubert’s ‘The Elf-King’ (although he has other great images as well). A father and son are riding wildly through a dense forest while being pursued by the ghostly Elf King. The bottom note represents the Elf King. As they run through the woods, the notes ebb and flow. Sometimes the notes are too far apart. At other times they are very close. Finally, the movement of the note slows down when the parent arrives home. He realizes that his son is dead. The music becomes very sad, sad and solemn.

Some other musical songs with images of horses come to mind. Of course, you have ZZ Top’s La Grange, where you can imagine the protagonist galloping through the dusty Texas town of La Grange to Billy Gibbons’ guitar riffs. Aerosmith adds their song Back in the Saddle. (This is one of my favorite songs for guitar fillers.) And then there’s Steve Vai’s over-the-top song Bad Horsie. Vai’s guitar riff makes it sound like the horse is tearing apart the earth with its hooves. Then, to push it further up, use its hit bar to add a horse neighing sound.

Musical imagery, or the deliberate use of imagination by musicians, has traditionally been seen and regarded as the ability to imagine sounds even when there are no audible sounds.
-From the book ‘Musical Images and Imagination: The Function, Measurement and Application of Imaging Skills for Performance’

Since we are on this line, we could also stay with the animals. The Barracuda Heart Song has the great galloping guitar riff to represent the fast and ferocious fish flying through the water. [You know somebody should compose some musical imagery for the scene where the nihilists drop a ferret in the bathtub in The Big Lebowski.] Speaking of water, you also have the Jaws theme, the low and ominous hits. Like Pavlov’s dog, we were conditioned to search for fins when we heard the Jaws tune.

Creatures don’t have to be natural either. You have Godzilla from Blue Oyster Cult. The main musical riff sounds to me like a 50,000 ton lizard stumbling around like a Frankenstein, a one year old. (In other words, it sounds just like it should.) Blue Oyster Cult also used a bit of slide guitar to let Godzilla break some wires. Movies sometimes have great musical imagery. There’s the iconic Alfred Hitchcock Psycho where you have the Eek! Eek! Eek! in the shower scene. In Riders of the Storm, The Doors used a recording of a thunderstorm. However, keyboardist Ray Manzarek also used musical imagery to create a falling rain.

We believe that musical images are at the very core of music as a phenomenon because, after all, what would music be like if we didn’t have sound images in our minds?
-From the book ‘Musical Images’

There are many other great examples of classical music. When Mozart’s wife, Constanze, was at the peak of childbirth, in a nearby room, Mozart wrote the Crescendos to his Andante in (K. 421) quartet in D minor. Then after the baby was born, he wrote Menuette and Trio. Richard Wagner, in Das Rheingold’s opening piece of The Ring Cycle, attempts to musically represent the creation of the universe no less. It does this in about three minutes using variations of the E-flat chord.

An advance in this sense is the fusion of music with science. Some symphonies have begun to perform a selection of classical musical pieces with a multimedia presentation of the latest images from the space. A popular selection is The Planets by Gustav Holst. Holst was an amateur astronomer, so he based his musical images on the planets based on astrology and not astronomy. However, some of the selections were not originally written with heaven in mind. That’s where the flexible and abstract nature of music can also come into play. It’s kind of like lying on your back on a sunny day and looking at the clouds. In the clouds, you can see many different things.

So pay more attention the next time you watch a movie or TV show. Listen to real music. Think about how music is used to enforce what you are seeing, what the characters are feeling, what is about to happen, or what has already happened. If you write music, start thinking about how you can create musical images for what you are seeing and feeling. Musically, how would you represent the flock of geese that just flew over your head? I’m still trying to think of what it would sound like when the nihilists dropped the ferret in the bathtub in The Big Lebowski …

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