Homework 3: Due 10/5

Make a listening guide for music from On the Waterfront

You will benefit from making a preliminary draft first and listening to the piece several
times to make your decisions.
1-2 page, single-spaced text if using a computer, but leave a line space between items in
your musical guide.
The subject of this assignment is an excerpt from Leonard Bernsteins music for On the
Waterfront (Track 10 on our course CD). For the assignment, you will focus on the music
rather than the film.
The purpose of the assignment is to:
1) practice listening skills 2) review music terms (see chapter 3 in our book, and class
notes from the beginning of the term), 3) use the terms in the context of written prose,
and 4) develop good descriptions for your imaginary reader that connect musical sound to
ideas and effects
Most movie soundtracks dont have a cohesive form, but are a succession of cues that are
removed from each other in time in the context of the film. The music from On the
Waterfront, however, was arranged by Bernstein into a twenty-minute piece of music for
concert performance. Track 10 gives us the beginning of this piece.
How to make a musical guide:
First, listen to the whole excerpt (about five and a half minutes long), and jot down the
times (e.g. :35 to indicate thirty-five seconds from the beginning of the track, etc.) you
hear something jump out at you - like a sudden change in volume, tempo, or the entrance
of a new instrumental sound. You should listen more than once to figure out what the
most important moments are, and when they occur.
Big changes in timbre, tempo, mood, usually indicate a new section in the overall musical
form. Your main task is to make clear where these big sections begin and end, and
describe the distinguishing characteristics in each section.
You may list and describe as many important musical moments as you like, but set the
three most important ones in boldface. For your three most important moments, provide
two or more sentences describing what you hear in terms of musical features (again, see
chapter 3), and what the effect is (this part is subjective, and creative: you can say things
like, the sound of the woodwind instruments evokes a natural setting on a calm day or
the stinger chord makes it seem like a monster has just appeared). These descriptions
do not need to reflect what actually happens in the film On the Waterfront. You may
make the guide before or after seeing the film.