Bridging Music and Story: Creative Connections in Music Education

Throughout history, the bond between story and music has been both consistent and ever shifting. This link appears in the song of Moses as personal commentary before the people, in the news-bearing ballads of traveling minstrels, in medieval liturgical dramas staged on hayracks to educate the illiterate, in Renaissance word painting that musically illustrates narrative details, in early opera designed to capture the subtle feelings of Greek drama, in the heroic ethos of Baroque expression, in the refined musical pleasures of classical ballet, in the passion of Romantic program music, in the sharp social critique of musical theatre, in the emotional intensity of modern films, and in the artistic merging found in rock videos. Yet where does this connection show up in the education of children?

Language teachers have explored this link in a limited way, using it as a reading-response or creative-writing activity, often without understanding its role in constructing meaning or recognizing the potential story holds within music. Free musical creation inspired by composers and educators like R. Murray Schafer and John Paynter faded with the 1970s into the conservative decade that followed. With referentialism discouraged by aesthetic absolute expressionists and practice-oriented performance favored by praxialists, music teachers have increasingly avoided forging the connection to story. Unless they are studying historical examples where the story-music link is already present, teachers hesitate to guide students in making that connection through their own imagination. While MIDI technology and curriculum changes have placed new emphasis on creativity in music, improvisation instruction usually remains dominated by "musical practice," and composition in junior and senior high schools too often leans heavily toward pop styles. A fresh impetus for musical creativity is needed — one that allows students to explore music as character, sound effect, illustration, moodscape, referent, or personal response to story, without being constrained by the rules of conventional musical practice.

In language instruction, the use of text-sets has created especially rich learning environments with great potential for webs of integration. Patterns and questions arise as children engage with text and talk about it, responding to and shaping their personal and shared understandings. Children's literature can offer a natural foundation for imagination and meaning-making, and therefore for musical creativity as well.

This literature, along with a psychological stance of play, releases creative energy in junior and senior high students and also provides an integrative opportunity for elementary students. Whether the sound sources used are MIDI or acoustic, the depth of the experience remains comparable. The learning works both ways: musical perception and appreciation deepen through the context of the stories, and literacy achievement grows through the meaningful context of the music. Seeing music as another kind of text reveals many parallels between the processes of storying and musicing.

The roles music takes on with story

At least four distinct relationships exist between story and music. The most basic one may be where music simply carries the text that tells the story without directly expressing it. Folk songs like "The Cruel War," "Froggy Went A-courtin'," or "Black Day in July" tell stories, but the tune could easily carry different words. This shift of text onto a tune is often seen in hymns — a folk melody like "Greensleeves" becomes "What Child is This?" In a school setting, a song like this can be illustrated or turned into an extended story. Alternatively, a story could be rewritten as poetry and set to music. Here there is no direct match between the reader's response to the text and the music. If the story is melancholy, the chosen music may not even serve as a referent to that mood. This resembles an illustration that decorates rather than illuminates what is known from the text — it does not create meaning independently.

A different relationship emerges when music carries the text while also contributing to the story's emotional impact, as in Schubert's "Der Erlkönig." Here the music shifts as the characters in the poem change. The agitation in the accompaniment strongly adds to the suspense and fear expressed in the song. This relationship can become a focus for storytelling through musical sounds, or for manipulating sound to achieve dramatic effects. In both cases, meaning is made beyond the surface level of everyday understanding. The music itself becomes text; it is full of meaning, functioning as actively as an illustration.

A similar but distinct relationship occurs when music does not carry the story or attempt to depict it, but directly enhances its dramatic effect or interprets its mood. The story is usually presented by another means — film, dance, or spoken word. This relationship is perhaps most evident in silent movies, where the piano or theatre organ improvised to provide dialogue, sound effects, mood, and emotional reactions. In the soap operas of the 1950s and 1960s, music typically interpreted over-the-top emotional moments. In ballet, music does not directly respond to the story; dance conveys the narrative and emotional expression. When spoken story links directly to music as in Peter and the Wolf, the music is usually heard as a musical retelling of the tale. In story tapes, music may function as "movie music" does, establishing soundscape and dramatic context.

In the previous relationship, story was dominant and music played a supporting role by enhancing, elaborating, or extending meaning. In traditional Romantic program music, the roles are reversed: music is dominant, and the story supports it. In pieces like Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, or Smetana's The Moldau, the story or landscape painting that informs the music serves mainly as an interpretive layer. The music can be heard for its own sake and not as a story. Yet if the intended story is known, listeners can draw rich details from the musical events. Without an indicated story, listeners generally find it difficult to create a consistent narrative that relates chronologically and integrally to the music. In our experiments, such attempts proved quite challenging. We found it was easier to create free verse or extended metaphor rather than a straightforward narrative in response to music.

How music functions within story

Examining the historical use of music alongside story and exploring possible connections reveals at least six functions.

Music as character. A particular timbre or melodic fragment can stand for a character — for instance, the different characters in Peter and the Wolf. Music may simply signal that a character has changed, such as the strings surrounding Christ's words in a Passion. It may directly and overtly represent the character's presence and actions.

Music as sound effect. Music can imitate real sounds — bird calls, like the cuckoo in a Handel organ concerto, or a sigh, cannon fire, or thunder and lightning.

Music as dramatic illustration. The music adds referential contextual links, expanding a story through elaboration and extension. It enriches the story's emotional aspects in a fairly direct, referential way. This is essentially what film music does today.

Music as moodscape. This resembles dramatic illustration but works in a more general emotional manner. It can be understood as a parallel to evocative illustrations in a picture book.

Music as referent. Here music is used that carries meaning because of existing referential links — for example, the French national anthem, hunting horns, or the theme from Rossini's William Tell Overture.

Music as personal response to story. This may be most like the use of chorales in Bach's Passions — moments of personal reflection and response. This music is most fitting as a personal reaction to an experience or story.

These functions spring into action through various musical connections typical of our culture. While there are many possibilities, a few key associations stand out. People tend to connect: musical tempo with speed (quick music may suggest running); pitch level with size (a tuba is more likely to be associated with an elephant, a piccolo with a small bird); texture with complexity and energy (chaos is linked to many instruments playing at once, solitude to a single instrument); tonality with general mood (minor keys signal sadness — these associations vary across cultures but tonality and modality carry general emotional meaning); and articulation with communicative tone (the same instrument playing the same notes at the same tempo can sound angry one moment and patient the next). Blending these and other features can convey strong meanings. Exploring these links between story and musical composition can enrich both literary and musical understanding.

Forms the music-story connection takes

The creative synergy between music and story takes a variety of forms, each of which can become a curricular focus or a specific learning activity.

Drama using sound dialogue between two players. Two students receive a particular scenario and then create expressive musical dialogue through improvisation. For instance, one person wants to go out on Saturday night; the other wants to stay home.

Musical illustration. A section of a story is chosen, and a sound composition acts like a picture illustration of the scene. This could resemble the alternating story and music of Peter and the Wolf where the music retells the story. In another approach, the music is created as a soundscape to convey the story's mood or atmosphere, describing what is happening in the tale.

Story to graphic to music. Elements of a story can be turned into a visual depiction, which then sparks musical creation. An example is the Manitoba landscape in R. Murray Schafer's "When Words Sing." It could also be the contour of a car: one instrument follows the rise and fall of that line, another provides a baseline, and a third captures the circularity of wheels.

Sound composition based on a visual collage metaphor. Rather than following a story-based chronology, sound compositions may fragment and layer sounds like a visual collage — each piece inspired by some story idea.

Interlude in story. Music here may comment on or prepare for a story segment, either looking back or ahead. Music in the film Breaking the Waves is a prominent example.

Narrative. This is the most typical program music form, where the music tells the story in sequence of events.

Personal story. Music created to represent a part of one's own life or to interpret an emotional aspect of life, a psychological reaction to experience. An example is music made in response to the prompt: "How did you feel when…"

Sound resources

A synergy exists between the sound sources used, the story, and the resulting music. The possibilities for learning change based on whether students must find sounds within constraints — using only body sounds, for instance — or whether they can choose from a large array of instruments and other sound sources, such as those available on a synthesizer. Possible sources include: body only (claps, pats, whistles, stamps); voice only; objects carried on the person (combs, pens); found objects in the building, at home, or elsewhere; instruments created from found objects; traditional instruments played in their usual way; traditional instruments played in unusual ways; electronic sources; and recorded sounds — including noise, created and environmental. Sound sources both spark ideas and impose limitations. This becomes particularly important given today's prevalence of synthesizers and computers.

Workshop activities

The interactive workshop began with presentation and demonstration of the theoretical and practical ideas described above, using a text set focused on wolves as a thematic context. Participants took part from the start: they listened to musical fragments and composed a story from them, explored a children's book about wolves to find the "music" inside it using readers theatre combined with musical characterizations, listened to story segments paired with different musical illustrations composed by university music students, watched a video clip of an opera written by elementary children to tell a child's story, and examined various possibilities for synergy between story and music. The overarching wolf theme helped tie the stories together and provided intertextual support for constructing meaning. Once participants had heard wolves howling in a piece of music and seen them in the storybook, they were attuned to that particular context and its associated images and sounds.

In the second half of the session, participants engaged in four creative composing strategies — examples of the approaches already described. Groups formed when facilitators described each task and invited attendees to choose the option that most intrigued them. An array of instruments was available: recorders, glockenspiels, Autoharp, handbells, and unpitched percussion. Participants were reminded they could use their bodies, voices, found objects, or the instruments provided; no limitations were set. An interesting aside: although participants were invited to try the instruments when they first arrived, none did. Similarly, few explored the literature text set until the demonstrations helped them feel comfortable. After the demonstrations and practice session, however, everyone participated wholeheartedly. This raises a question: why are we, as music educators, so hesitant to explore, play, and be creative in so many contexts? When the possibilities are there, why does music-making so rarely feel natural among educators? Children do this instinctively — what happened to us?

The four group tasks were as follows.

Create a soundscape from a story-poem. This group received the book Night in the Country by Cynthia Rylant, with pictures by Mary Szilagyi. The opening sentence reads: "There is no night so dark, so black as night in the country." Readers are invited to listen, look, and feel through the pages and into a melodious, mysterious, alive night framed by the colours of day.

Retell any folktale involving a wolf using music and mime. Suggested stories were Little Red Riding Hood, the Gingerbread Man, and the Three Little Pigs.

Create a story from the assigned music. A tape recording of an excerpt from Reconnaissance by Canadian composer James Montgomery was provided. This passage was chosen for its evocation of night, the country, and the imagination.

Compose music to illustrate a story. This group received The True Story of the Three Little Pigs — a fractured tale retold from the perspective of the very allergic and apologetic B. B. Wolf. Certain passages in this book demand passionate musical composition. The main character is highly complex, requiring multiple layers in the musical portrayal. The dilemmas presented by the story are equally layered.

The groups worked on these compositions with evident enthusiasm and interest. Through their engagement, they produced some noteworthy performances in a remarkably short period. During the debriefing after the performances, participants identified parts of the tasks that were highly complex and especially difficult.

Curriculum implications

Music curricula today give greater priority to creativity than ever before.

Clearly maintaining the narrative flow and image position from the prior output chunk, a degree of letting artistic exploration run free is challenging. The ubiquitous “story to music” exercise may be a common classroom event, but its capacity to develop students’ ideation, selection, criticism, interpretation, and performance of musical sounds as a coherent “story” is seldom fully exploited or valued. Writing it off as “only an activity” diminishes its educational worth. What truly earns the label “creative” music making? Must creation adhere to traditional theory, appear as notation on a staff, or follow historic conventions? We suspect a root of the problem lies in seeing story-to-music as a one-time event, without recognizing the deeper learning embedded in it or envisioning a sequential curriculum where such creativity fits. Crafting that sequence is an urgent, undeveloped territory. When students’ compositional attempts and encounters with “new” music are placed alongside the standard expectation of learning established repertoire and performance practice, the story–music reciprocal can unfold across an extended series of works. These efforts then draw on musical tradition, demand technical growth, encourage sound exploration, stimulate imagination, sharpen critical judgment, enhance meaning-making from all music, foster engagement (Bartel & Cameron, 1996), and honour the child’s unique musical insight. No such written curriculum currently exists; turning the idea into practice is a challenge worth embracing.

Though no prescriptive syllabus exists, promising examples abound: improvisational activities in Orff classrooms that spring from stories; the Toronto Symphony’s Adopt-a-Musician projects, where student compositions take energy from their own narratives; the DAREarts/University of Toronto “Creating the Voices of the Future Together” initiative (1996–97), in which young composers worked with elementary children’s story ideas; the Canadian Opera Company/Samuel Hearne School opera project that used students’ own tales; and the approaches of Katz and Thomas (1992), R. Murray Schafer (1970), Hanson (1997), Paynter and Aston (1970), and Mendres (1975).

The fundamental issue is recognizing music as a form of text — a carrier of meaning that can be explored, critiqued, and interpreted much like a novel or poem. It can reveal character arcs, plot shapes, disruptions, and dynamic settings, demonstrating and deepening comprehension. As Christianson (1995) wrote, “Feelings can be communicated by music that words simply cannot express.” Consider the power of Elton John’s performance at Princess Diana’s funeral: a purely musical eulogy, an emotional poem without words. Music can extend, expand, and enrich a story. It also actively draws learners in. The two modes — story and music — forge synergy, letting young readers become interpreters not only of text but also of silence and lyrics and soundscapes. The whole enterprise of literacy — reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, representing — seeks meaning. Pairing music with story offers rich literacy experiences that carry learners toward the mature, consolidated stage of making meaning.

Contemporary literary theories — deconstruction, postmodernism, cultural criticism — emphasize that no text has fixed meaning; readers produce multiple readings based on structure, context of production and reception, and personal identity. Workshop activities like the ones at hand support this outlook: validating divergent interpretations, producing options, encouraging diversity of voice and opinion, and recognizing the legitimacy of musical ways of knowing.

References

Bartel, L. R., & Cameron, L. (1996). What really matters in music class? Canadian Music Educator, Fall 1996.

Cameron, L., & Peetoom, A. (1994). RefleXions (K–8 Series). Toronto: Scholastic Canada.

Christianson, J. R. (1995). Making the Music Decision. Bookcraft.

Hanson, T. L. (1997). United in story and song. Storytelling, (3), 14–15.

Katz, S. A., & Thomas, J. A. (1992). Teaching Creatively by Working the Word: Language, Music, and Movement. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Mendres, K. M. (1975). A Report on Creative Musical Activities for Enriching a High School Concert Band Programme. Unpublished M.Ed. thesis, University of Manitoba.

Paynter, J., & Aston, P. (1970). Sound and Silence. London: Cambridge University Press.

Rylant, C. (1986). Night in the Country (illus. Mary Szilagyi). New York: Bradbury Press.

Schafer, R. M. (1970). When Words Sing. Scarborough, ON: Berandol Music Ltd.