How to Excel

Emotional response can often only be prescribed to work after it has been composed rather than during the process of its creation. This is not an exclusively true point to stand by, but it does raise the issue of transmitter and receiver being separate entities in the compositional process. For a piece of work to reach a compositional conclusion, an audience with an understanding of social lexicon and meaning must interpret it by their own experience, attributing to it their own set of meaning and bias towards a topic. Again, this raises another issue of whether art can truly ever be finished. As culture and societal values change, so does the value of interpretation.

Music is widely deployed as a narrative device across TV and other moving media such as film. Documentary makers will often use music to imply tension over imagery or speech that is otherwise mundane to help build their story. The audience may even be unaware of the effect music is having when it is deployed successfully.

A notable example of this is David Bowie’s 1985 Live Aid performance. Bowie famously presented a video to the audience depicting moving imagery of starvation and famine. The video was accompanied by The Car’s 1984 hit, ‘Drive’. In doing this, Bowie allowed for the lyrics of the song to adopt new meaning, no longer was this a standard love song but instead a plea for help.

The concept of inducing and expressing emotion, which is recognised as being a fundamental attribute of music, has been explored. Philosopher Peter Kivy has noted we might recognise emotions, but not necessarily feel them. He stated: “Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony sounds happy to me even if I am feeling rotten, and even of it doesn’t make me feel any better”. (Cited in: Ball, Phillip. The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without it, 2010, p.259, Vintage)

The ‘Kuleshov effect’ was an example by filmmaker Lev Kuleshov that demonstrated how controlling the context of imagery through cuts and edits can emotionally influence the audience. It could be proposed that this idea, coupled with music, might result in a greater effect on the audience.

‘How to EXCEL’ is an exploration of how the strategic deployment of music and imagery can directly alter the emotional response of an audience. The ambiguous speech should allow for music and visuals to take the audience, willingly, on an unexpected journey through a range of responses. A visual and auditory narrative is formed based on personal reaction to this work and a diverse response and speculation is fundamental and allows for the audience to truly be a catalyst for the work.