Music can’t tell stories.
It just can’t. Music doesn’t have the transitive power of language that words have and therefore it can’t itself be a narrator. Music is not a proscenium arch or a television screen or a ride vehicle at a theme park. Music is not an apparatus through which one can tell a story.
And that’s a good thing.
The power that music does have is suggestion. Music is complex information that forces our brains to engage with it. Music’s greatest asset is its power to suggest that our brains tell us a story to justify why music is. Music has the enormous ability to subvert, confirm, or exceed expectations. Music has captured our imaginations for generations for generations and will continue to do so because no one justifies why it is in the same way.
Music is suggestive, an opportunity for our brains to engage in imagination. Music transcends diegesis, suggesting a wider world that any individual apparatus could capture. Music is sublime and subjective, sometimes surprising, occasionally devastating — satisfying and provocative, unyielding and mystifying.
But it can’t tell stories. Trust me — I’d know.
I’ve been trying to make instrumental, textless music tell stories for years. I probably spent most of my composition education doing this, but there are a couple (very unavailable and no longer public) works written around late 2017/early 2018 that are emblematic of my storytelling music. In my grad degree, after writing a large ensemble work that unsuccessfully centered the story of the Quidditch World Cup (yeah, I know… cringe content, now), I was finally confronted with the reality that music can’t tell stories by a composition teacher and I proceeded to write an unnecessary, unpublished thesis about it that consumed my creative life for way too long. All in all, my efforts have been mostly fruitless, but yet have yielded some pretty spectacular music.
Music can’t tell stories, but it can suggest a motorcycle chase through the American Rocky Mountains. Music can’t tell stories, but it can suggest a ride on one of the last historic wooden roller coasters on the West Coast. Music can’t tell stories, but it can suggest a feeling of adventure, bittersweet melancholy, or slapstick comedy.
I used to call this power of suggestion musical worldbuilding, because, in a storytelling practice, that’s essentially what it is. It’s suggesting a more complete world that the music inhabits without actually forcing the music to tell a particular story.
This has been problematic for a lot of reasons.
First, it makes composition way, way harder. It probably triples the amount of time I spend working on any individual piece. If I have to spend months wondering about the world a work inhabits instead of simply writing the music, I’m wasting composition time on building a world no one will ever experience because it is only suggested and not actually communicated.
Second, worldbuilding is work. I’m glad I have the skillset to do it when I do work with text, but applying it to nontext music is committing to a huge amount of work that will never be communicated to an audience. It ends up just being for you and your performers, and yeah, sure, it might make the experience of commissioning more immersive and intimate, it does nothing for the listeners of your music. It’s doing the work to generate lore that the audience doesn’t have access to because music can’t tell stories.
Third, there is a huge danger in the idea of musical worldbuilding in general. If I use musical tropes to suggest a world my music can inhabit, there is a constant vigilance required in order to not appropriate someone else’s culture in the service of worldbuilding. While I’ve been pretty careful about it, a lot of composers who engage in musical worldbuilding have not, appropriating timbres or forms from other cultures to suggest, say, an alien world. This has forced me to walk on eggshells during the act of composition, which adds more effort to writing music that is not a result of actually writing the music.
Lastly, worldbuilding is only really useful in the delivery of a story. If you’re writing a book, it’s useful to suggest a wider world because that makes the story more immersive. If music can’t tell stories, why does it need to be immersive at all? Is it not enough for the music to be a compelling prompt for the listener to rationalize with their own stories? If I accept that (on its own) music can’t tell stories, why am I miring myself in lore of my own creation in the composition of my music?
In other words, why I am making writing music so much harder on myself?
It is okay if lore radiates outward from my music. It is okay for me to prompt an audience with immersive program notes written after the composition is finished. It is okay (and encouraged) for performers to make decisions in their performances that reinforce the themed experience of my music. And it is okay for me to return to a work and strengthen the thematic material after principal composition.
But unless you commission me to work with text (or media), I am not going to do the work of storytelling or the work of worldbuilding while I compose. That kind of work is overcomplicating the act of composition that I am no longer sanctioning for myself. Storytelling and worldbuilding are forms of emotional labor for which I should be compensated, and I can’t continue to be composer, storyteller, and worldbuilder in the same breath for my mental health and the health of my creative practice.
For my works that involve text, I’m fine with engaging with worldbuilding and storytelling. That’s part of my process in creating those works. Storytelling and worldbuilding are tools in my toolbox, but that doesn’t mean I need to use those tools every time I write something. Each project is different, and we can have a conversation about what’s required for our collaboration at the start. My ability to tell stories and build worlds is something you can include when you commission me, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.
Not every work needs to be a complete story in a complete world. And if my work on something feels bogged down and made heavier by a compositional tool at my disposal, that’s probably a good indication that it’s not useful for the project.
So for most of my music, I’m fine with writing a program note after composing a work that acts as a framing device to prompt the storytelling instinct in people who are about to experience my music. I’m not down with the actual composition of my work getting dragged out because of extra steps in the service of something that will never be communicated because — what was it again?
Music can’t tell stories.
Music can’t tell stories, but it is powerful. My best music engages that power, but not because I overthought it to death while I was writing it. It’s powerful because it’s good music that suggests you think while you listen to it. That’s it. It’s that simple.
I’m not always a storyteller. I’m not always a worldbuilder.
But I am always a composer.