(MAF) The Relationship of Music to the Other Fine Art Disciplines Lesson

The Relationship of Music to the Other Fine Art Disciplines

The arts represent an outlet of expression, that is usually influenced by culture and which in turn helps to change culture. As such, the arts are a physical manifestation of our internal creative impulse. Major fine art disciplines include music, drama, dance and visual arts.

From prehistoric cave paintings to modern day Broadway shows, art serves as a vessel for storytelling and conveying mankind's relationship with its environment.

In its most basic abstract definition, art is a documented expression of a sentient being through an accessible medium so that anyone can view, hear or experience it.

The Relationship Between Music and Drama

Music and drama have many similarities and complement each other very well. Since the earliest days of the theater, music has played an important part in stage drama. In Greek drama in the fifth century BC, odes (songs) were written to be chanted and danced between the spoken sections of both tragedies and comedies. Only fragments of the music have survived. Attempts to recreate the form for revivals from the Renaissance to modern times have branched in several directions. Composers have composed chorus music for productions of plays by Sophocles, Aristophanes and others. Playwrights have written original plays in styles derived from ancient drama, with sung commentaries by a chorus or narrator. In late 16th century Florence, Italy, attempts to revive ancient Greek drama, with sung vocal contributions, developed into the modern genre of opera. Folk theatre has always deployed dance music and song.

The writer Roger Savage notes in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians: "The classic forms of Asian theatre from India to Japan rely heavily on music, as do the dramatic rituals of sub-Saharan Africa and of the indigenous peoples of the Americas." In Western theater genres, Savage writes that music features importantly in medieval drama, 18th-century vaudeville, musical comedy, the musical, and other forms of musical theater. In common with radio, cinema and television, the theater has long made use of incidental music (background music) to accompany spoken drama.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, theater music was performed during the action of plays. Shakespeare's use of stage music (fanfares to introduce important characters or accompany battle scenes), illustrated the high, low, sad or merry natures of the characters. By the early 18th century, music was firmly established as part of practically all theatrical performances in Europe, whether of opera, dance, or spoken drama. Theaters were built with orchestra pits, and music was either specially composed for the production or appropriated and arranged from existing material.

Music is still widely used today in many theatrical productions.

The Relationship Between Music and Dance

Try dancing without music and you will end up looking like a ludicrous caricature of someone like the late Patrick Swayze who held one and all spellbound dancing with Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing. Whether you are listening to one of Beethoven's 9 symphonies or to a rap song by Eminem, you might not be able to sit still for a long while. You would be energized into moving your body parts and some dance form will not only overtake you but flow out of you.

Scientists have known for some time that even a fetus in the womb can hear music and react to it. It starts moving its limbs in an attempt to dance though it does not even know what dance is. In a local experiment, children between 1 and 2 years of age were made to listen to Credence Clearwater Revival's "Heard it Through the Grapevine". Guess what happened? Within a minute of listening to the insistent drums and guitar riffs, the babies started to move together with the song. They fell, as they were bound to, but, resumed immediately even as they were sitting or lying. This proves that one does not have to learn dancing to break into a spontaneous dance routine. All it takes is for the music to play.

The two art forms, music and dance, together seem to create an emotional quotient, always complementing each other. Researchers at Dartmouth had two groups of very different people taking part in a complicated experiment that was to decide the connection between music and dance: College students from the U.S. and villagers from a Cambodian village. They found that an emotional reaction was the result of being subjected to music in both the groups. Dancing erupted in them both irrespective of their background.

While dancing is the most natural outcome of music, there are other emotions that can result too. For example, songs by Bob Dylan had a whole generation seething with anger. Did they dance as well to these songs? They certainly did. The many concerts in which hundreds of songs with themes like the futility of war, the essentiality of peace and brotherhood of man had millions dancing to the tunes.

Didn't Woodstock have people dancing together around the country if not around the world? In 1979, Jesse Colin Young had put together an anti-nuke rally at the Battery Park, New York. The initial anger in the people on the stage and the audience had to give way to sanity. And, sanity gave birth to dance. Chet Powers' beautiful song "Get Together" sung by Jesse, Graham Parsons, Steven Stills and others had the record crowd of 250,000 joining in the singing and swaying with perfect timing.

We can deduce from the above narrations that music, be it a lullaby sung to a baby in the cradle or a soldier with his gun marching in a parade ground, can make you dance. We can also see that music can produce emotions and that emotions can find an outlet in dancing.

The Relationship and Music and Visual Art

Music can also play a role in having connections with the visual arts. Music can be described as being different colors or artists can draw what they feel certain music is depicting, etc. But there is no better example of how music and visual art combine then in filmmaking.

A film score is original music written specifically to accompany a film. The score forms part of the film's soundtrack, which also usually includes dialogue and sound effects, and comprises a number of orchestral, instrumental or choral pieces called cues which are timed to begin and end at specific points during the film in order to enhance the dramatic narrative and the emotional impact of the scene in question. Scores are written by one or more composers, under the guidance of, or in collaboration with the film's director and/or producer, and are then usually performed by an ensemble of musicians  - most often comprising an orchestra or band, instrumental soloists, and choir or vocalists  - and recorded by a sound engineer.

Film scores encompass an enormous variety of styles of music, depending on the nature of the films they accompany. The majority of scores are orchestral works rooted in Western classical music, but many scores are also influenced by jazz, rock, pop, blues, new-age, and a wide range of ethnic and world music styles. Since the 1950s, a growing number of scores have also included electronic elements as part of the score, and many scores written today feature a hybrid of orchestral and electronic instruments.

Since the invention of digital technology and audio sampling, many low-budget films have been able to rely on digital samples to imitate the sound of live instruments, and many scores are created and performed wholly by the composers themselves, by using sophisticated music composition software.

Songs are usually not considered part of the film's score, although songs do also form part of the film's soundtrack. Although some songs, especially in musicals, are based on thematic ideas from the score (or vice versa), scores usually do not have lyrics, except for when sung by choirs or soloists as part of a cue. Similarly, pop songs which are "needle dropped" into a specific scene in film for added emphasis are not considered part of the score, although occasionally the score's composer will write an original pop song based on his themes, such as James Horner's "My Heart Will Go On" from Titanic, written for Celine Dion.

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