Austin Baduria

Chopin C# Minor Prelude Essay

10/16/2020

Music Analysis

I found the comparison between a thriller movie and this piece interesting. When I taught

general music, I had the fourth-grade class come up with stories about the music and share it with the

class. That particular unit engaged the students very effectively, and made them think very creatively. It

causes you to connect two separate parts of your working brain to help you put the intangible feelings

you get from music into words. In that case, I find that exercise to be particularly useful. However, I still

asked the question of “would this be useful in my own performance practice?” while reading the essay.

To me, the answer to this question evades a quick explanation. In my comments on the Perusall

document, I stated that the analysis of a piece based on another form of media (when the piece was not

based off of that media to begin with) may detract from the analysis of the piece. Because the analysis

focuses so much on this relationship, the analyzer might fail in making relationships that would be

considered a stretch (or just completely unfounded) or by missing different key elements of the piece.

While thinking about this topic in depth, I came to the conclusion that statement might be a bit

reductionist.

I still believe my point holds true for many scenarios. For example, a music major in their first

year attempting to find the connections between a piece and some movie would quite possibly (and

almost definitely) fall flat on their face when attempting to analyze in that manner. Certain elements of

the piece would almost certainly be misinterpreted to fit the student’s narrative. They would conjure up

scenarios in which the movie (or other form of media) and the piece align through faulty means.

However, when a qualified expert makes these connections, the result is far more compelling. This
becomes especially true when the author uses the comparison sparingly as an element of the analysis

rather than the entire premise.

There are also many other types of art besides movies that can make connections to music. For

example, the painting “The Scream” strongly evokes the memory of Shostakovich’s 8th string quartet.

There is also an incredible array of music literature based off of other art as well. A piece I am

particularly fond of is Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Linden Lea, a piece based off a William Barnes poem by

the same name. In this way, I feel like Vaughan Williams totally encapsulates the feeling of nature in fall.

The piece elicits the feeling of a chilly breeze while walking through the forest on the way to the local

tavern, with the fall colors in the trees and the forest floor covered with leaves while birds sing

overhead. If such a powerful connection can be made from a piece to a movie, why can’t the same type

of connection be made with a piece and a movie?

In my own performance practice, I find that it would be useful to compare specific moments in

the piece to other specific moments or parts of other art. In fact, a moment in one of the pieces I’m

working on was compared to the moment in the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King where Gandalf

arrives with the eagles. While I do think this way of thinking may lead to the “pigeon holing” of certain

elements in a piece, I also think it helps us make connections to particular musical moments that might

escape us if we solely focused on traditional music analysis.