Music and language. Visual & Performing Arts Essay

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Music and Language
Language and music have been in tight collaboration since the ancient times. The two go hand in hand in terms of form and the manner in which they support each other. Music is critical to most of us and tellingly, most listeners are choosy when it comes to genre and musical components that make up music. Different music genres elicit different emotions and music can be used in literature to represent different emotions, lack of emotions and to covey other expressions. Not all messages are understood fully in fiction stories and other literary works, and music is used to ensure that the message gets understood well and that emotion or lack of emotion can is understood either immediately or a few moments after reading. Music also offers encouragement and amplification and support tentative and valuable dispositions and emotions. A Wagner Matinee and The second bakery attack are two perfect stories that have various examples of the application of musical elements in literature to show emotions, struggle for fulfillment, and to indicate what it means to be human.
One of the reasons musical elements engage listeners emotionally is that each element expresses a different emotion. Music writers and performers take advantage of the strong emotional effects of music (Pagliaro & Michael 16). The film industry has also capitalized on the strong emotional effects of musical components to convey emotion and other strong feelings. There are different studies on how musical components arouse human emotion in different ways. In the Second bakery attack literary work, melody can be used as a self-report measure for listeners to recognize emotions and experiences that they know when listening to music. In the literary work, melody can be used to indicate emotions such as shock and tension. For instance, when the narrator explains to his wife the plan for attacking a small bakery to get bread, a melodious sound that is neither too sad nor too hideous can be used to express the narrator’s emotion of committing a crime to avoid dying of hunger.
A melody that mimics booing sounds could also serve to indicate the lack of emotion by the protagonist who plans to attack a bakery. A normal person would consider the implication for attacking a bakery to steal food, but the narrator indicates slack of emotion when explaining the attack to his wife to an extent that he assumes that his wife has accepted the idea. On the other hand, the antagonist who is the narrator’s wife could make use of a saddening melody that starts from high pitch to low pitch to indicate disappointment by her husband, a melody that seems to ask “why would you even refer to the participants of the bakery attack as ‘us’”. The protagonist in the literary work clearly lack the capacity for genuine emotion especially due to the manner in which he explains the idea of robbing a bakery as if there are no consequences. Worse even, the narrator tries to convince his wife how the plan is a good idea by telling her a story of how they had committed crimes as teenagers with his room-mate when they were too broke to afford food. All the lack of emotion and genuine attachments can be expressed through different types of melodies as musical elements.
Musical elements can also be used to reveal a fictional character’s struggle for self-expression, fulfillment or survival (Stewart, Rebekah & Erin 22). In the real world, each individual goes through different struggles when trying to survive or find fulfillment. In the second bakery attack literary work, the narrator struggles to express his lack of physical fulfillment in terms of hunger to his wife, a struggle that forces him to come up with the ides of robbing a bank. Although the lack of fulfillment and the struggle to explain it may be partially visible in the story, the use of Harmony as a musical component can be used to further convey the struggle for fulfillment. As an element of music, harmony arise when different pitches are combined vertically in groups of three notes. Chords provide the accompanying notes that get blended with melody. Harmony is a critical musical element especially in cinema since it works well in conveying emotion and the current atmosphere. Harmony can therefore be used in the literary work to indicate the narrator’s lack of fulfilment and his struggle for self-expression.
As the narrator tells his story of how he and his friend had tried to attack a bakery for bread, he cites a moment when the baker was...