How to Make Your Music Tell a Story

By Anne Sullivan 

It’s a dark summer night and you’re sitting outside under the stars with some friends. The campfire is dying and you can hear the sounds of nature around you as the birds go to sleep and the animals of the night begin to move around. It’s time to start telling stories, ghost stories, the spookier the better. 

Telling a good ghost story starts with the right atmosphere. And telling a story through music, no matter what kind of story it is, is not different. But it’s up to you, the harpist, to create the atmosphere.

Every piece of music has a story to tell. It may not be revealed in the title: “Gavotte” doesn’t immediately suggest a dramatic plot. Whether the title hints at a story idea or not, it is the performer’s task to create a musical story, to engage the listener in it and to lead them through the tale to the ending.

This is the essence of music and musical expression. Expression isn’t merely playing dynamics and phrasing; it is creating a compelling musical story through a combination of dynamics, phrasing and more. While musical expression can be involved and complex, basically it’s not much different from telling a spine-chilling ghost story. 

Let’s look at three simple and interesting ways to tell more interesting musical stories through your music.

Create the mood. Like ghost stories around a campfire, choose a mood or an atmosphere for your piece. Should it be quiet and calm? Excited and energetic? Thoughtful? Scary? When you decide on the mood you want for your piece, then you can make decisions about how fast or slow it should be and which dynamics would help create or sustain the mood. Once you know what you want the music to say, your choices will become clear. 

It’s a little bit like having a box with a hundred different crayons. It’s hard to choose between the colors until you know what you want your picture to look like. Then the choices are easy and fun.

Identify the characters. Every good story has several characters, and a skilled storyteller gives them different voices. Every piece of music has different characters too, which might show up in the form of different themes or different sections. Look for the characters in your piece and think about how you might make them stand out from each other. Could you use different dynamics or a change of tone to set them apart? Did the composer already give you some indications of this in the music? How many characters can you identify in your piece? 
 

Become the storyteller. Famous storytellers like Mark Twain or the legendary Scheherazade knew how to captivate their audiences. They brought listeners into their stories by putting their own energy into it first. Music is the same way. When you love the music you are playing and are engaged in telling its story, your energy pulls a listener in and engages them in the musical tale you are creating. It may seem like a difficult thing to do, but it’s truly the easy part. When you are enjoying playing your music, the audience will enjoy it too.