Original subtitles

This programme contains very strong language.

DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS

My name is Stewart Copeland.

I make noise for a living. I hit things with sticks.

But I also compose, listen to,

and have pretty much built a life

on the strange phenomenon that we call...

..music.

My first recollection of being captivated by music,

being enslaved by music, was sitting in a darkened room, aged seven,

listening to Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

CARMINA BURANA PLAYS

Something powerful took hold.

Some seriously strong mojo which never let me go.

It led me through a career in bands including The Police and beyond.

What was going on was that the heart of a seven-year-old was being

lit up like a bonfire of emotion.

But why?

How did music ignite this flame?

# Girl, you really got me going... #

What exactly is this stuff that has ruled my life for more

than 60 years?

And that makes everyone else jump and shout, laugh and cry?

Shakespeare doesn't do that, Spielberg doesn't do that,

Rembrandt doesn't do that.

So, in this series, I want to find out more about its mysterious power.

Why does music bring us together?

How can it transport us to a higher plane?

And in this programme, what does it do to help us

understand the stories that we hear?

Yeah. That's a great cue!

# Don't ever set me free

# I always want to be by your side... #

From film scores with Francis Ford Coppola... Great to see you.

..to folk songs and old friends.

Often, they'd sing about magical stories, you know?

Witchcraft, spells.

And from stirring symphonies,

to a story in just three seconds.

I recognise that.

Stewart Copeland. Film one, take one.

Music and stories are perfect partners.

And they help each other out in so many ways.

# Johnny's in the basement mixing up the medicine

# I'm on the pavement thinking about the government

# The man in a trench coat

# Badge out laid off

# Says he's got a bad cough... #

Whether it's a vintage piece of Bob Dylan...

HE SINGS IN GERMAN

..or a magnificent slice of Wagnerian opera...

..music has always helped us tell stories, setting the tone

and adding a framework and emotion to any narrative...

# My gift is my song, yeah

# And this one's for you... #

..especially when the lyrics tell you stuff

and the music helps you to feel it.

# And you can tell everybody

# This is your song

# It may be quite simple but

# Now that it's done

# I hope you don't mind

# I hope you don't mind

# That I put down in words

# How wonderful life is

# While you're in the world. #

But what about when there are no words at all?

Music alone can't help but prompt emotion,

but what I want to know is, can it tell an actual story on its own?

Welcome to New York City and meet Yun and Hugo.

We're here because of a heavyweight bout that started 170 years

ago in Germany.

In the red corner, Richard Wagner.

Wagner wanted the story told by his music to be precisely the one

outlined in the programme notes, hence the name -

"programme music".

And in the blue corner, Johannes Brahms.

Brahms preferred what he called "absolute music",

music for music's sake.

He believed any story the composer was trying to tell was not

so important. And composers have been arguing about it ever since.

But I reckon what really matters is what listeners might think

when they hear the music with no idea of the story it was

designed to tell.

..little experiment with these musicians here. Sure! Ready?

This is Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens.

The storyline is this. It's Halloween.

And Death is summoning the dead from their graves to dance for him

while he plays his fiddle.

So, let's see how they do.

Beautiful. Right. Yes.

Did that one evoke anything in particular?

It was, like, really suspenseful.

It sounded like something you'd hear in a horror movie, when

there's like, someone around the corner and then it

kind of got lighter and it sounded like Pirates of the Caribbean.

That's pretty detailed. That's a lot of story in there.

She got more out of it than I did. I'm sorry. I have to listen again.

I would say sounds almost mysterious and a little suspenseful.

Suspenseful? Like someone's in a rush, maybe?

Yeah. Someone's in a rush?

A race, maybe. A race? Like a chase. OK, a chase.

Made me feel pretty anxious, actually.

Made you feel anxious? Yeah.

It seems as if these folks, at least, make sense of what they're

hearing by beginning to turn it into some kind of narrative.

And even without a clear storyline, music suggests one.

And when that occurs, strange things happen.

One minute, this guy is listening to Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams.

And the next, it's as if the music has suggested a story to him,

in which he proposes to his girlfriend, and she accepts!

And by the way, this is real life. Not a set-up!

Music is powerful stuff!

WISTFUL VIOLIN MUSIC PLAYS

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

CROWD WHOOPS

Daniel Levitin is the author of This Is Your Brain On Music.

Maybe he can shine some light on this mysterious force?

What we've found in the laboratory is that music activates more

areas of the brain than language.

It creates greater amounts of neural activity,

more electrical firing in the brain.

Some parts of the brain that have nothing to do with audio, even?

Yes, exactly.

It reaches into different crevices of the brain, if you will,

and it activates these regions that you don't get from speech alone.

It's a lot more engaging for the brain to have the music there.

Music is the language of emotion.

GROUP CLAMOURS

And that is why music is the best friend story could ever have.

Look what happens to a nice day out at the seaside...

..when you add John William's threatening iconic

score for Steven Spielberg's Jaws.

MENACING MUSIC PLAYS

MUSIC CRESCENDOS

MENACING MUSIC PLAYS

And imagine Star Wars without the stirring

Imperial March by the very same composer.

Creating or selecting music specifically for a particular

scene mixes its natural narrative structure and emotional power

with pictures and sound in a marriage made in music heaven.

This is Danny Elfman.

I'm not an expert boobam player.

One of the most important and gifted film composers on the planet

and, by no accident, damn fine drummer!

And if you press the pedal it acts like a mute.

His studio is a museum devoted to movies and musical storytelling...

..where he wrote brilliant scores for an amazing range of projects,

from the Gothic comedy The Nightmare Before Christmas,

to the barnstorming blockbuster Spider-Man.

And from eccentric oddity Edward Scissorhands, to the

infectious tune for a little show called...

Which, it is said, took him just one day to write.

Not bad.

SIMPSONS THEME PLAYS

Above all, he's a storyteller. He just doesn't use words.

Yet that's a tradition in cinema that goes back to the 1930s.

Why do the directors need this?

They're telling a perfectly good story with a perfectly terrifying

antagonist, a handsome protagonist,

beautiful love interest.

Why do they need music?

Because the music does something they learned very early on,

that the pictures couldn't do.

Take the decidedly lukewarm chills of early horror movies, for example.

In the very first Frankenstein and the first Dracula, no music.

FRANKENSTEIN GROANS

All music was in the first films was opening

and closing, like a play, and then they figured out a few years

later, 1933 and 1935, "Why don't we take it up a level?"

If you put this dramatic music, it really raises the stakes.

As shown in the pioneering movie King Kong.

And if you put something heartbreaking when, you know,

your hero or heroine is going to die, it really raises the stakes.

As seen in this stirring scene from The Charge Of The Light Brigade.

So, who do you think the audience is going to believe

and why are they going to believe not their lying eyes,

but your minor chord?

Because they're not thinking about it and it happens unconsciously.

Goes straight to their heart? It goes straight to the heart.

So, the idea that you see somebody walking,

but you hear music that's disturbing.

Now, it's not saying this person is good or bad,

you're not saying he's evil, you're not saying this, you're

saying there's something going on that's disturbing right now.

Hitchcock's Vertigo did this so beautifully.

Where the score is just expressing obsessiveness with

Jimmy Stewart's character.

He's driving and there's all these things, he's doing nothing

but driving. Well, you could put anything behind it.

The music is telling us that he's not just driving,

he's driving absolutely obsessed with this woman,

that there's nothing else that matters more to him

in his life than figuring out what the secret of this woman that

he's in love with is, and what is going on around him.

The music tells you that.

As I'm with a master of this dark art,

I'm dying to see if he can score something for us,

and show us how music can actually tell us what's happening.

You can sit here, Stewart.

OK. So, we will demonstrate how the music can entirely change

the atmosphere of this handsome guy walking through what

looks like the streets of Paris.

OK.

Here's a non-descript Joe, walking down the street,

and without music, it kind of lacks a point.

But there are multiple stories that these simple images could tell,

depending on the use of some basic musical devices. OK.

So, we start out here as a blank template.

OK, I'm going to set a tempo here.

DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS

Even a single drumbeat can begin to tell a story.

I can feel that tension.

There's definitely a feeling that either he's planning

something illegal or something bad's about to happen to him.

Something really simple here.

Mandatory drone? There you go.

Something you probably find yourself having to do is cure bad acting.

I've never worked with a bad actor.

I don't know what you're talking about. Right.

Oh, a little heroism there.

Ummm, hopefully not!

Next, Danny tries dissonance, a combination of notes

that are not in harmony and suggest that something is wrong.

MUSIC INTENSIFIES

OK. So, there's generic 101. That completely nails that. Yeah.

How about I do the same scene again? Yeah. But let me do it my way.

Now, if I were having fun with this scene...

Pizzicato, the plucking of strings, is often a clear

signal that this will be a playful, mysterious or mischievous story.

I'm turning this into something completely different. Yeah.

Well, you're adding emotional layers to it, because

when you first start playing with the pizzicato,

it was straight comedic.

But now, these other, giving it more nuance of a black comedy.

Yes, exactly.

It's exactly what we're doing here.

We're giving a little bit like, "What IS going on in this scene?" Yeah.

You're posing a question. Exactly. Posing a question.

Put that well.

TENSE MUSIC

Yeah, yeah. That's a great cue. Something's up.

You just don't know what. Yeah.

You've taken something completely neutral

and given it information, emotional information. Right.

So, there you are. It's as easy as that. Now, that's my day's work.

I'm going to go home and enjoy the family for the rest

of the evening, because that's a typical day of a film composer.

You work for about 45 minutes... That's right, yeah.

..then we're off.

Danny's music exploits our expectations of what will

happen next - tension and release,

and dissonance and resolution

transform the way we understand a scene.

Now, believe it or not,

I actually spent 20 years of my life composing for films.

And it was no less a legend

than Francis Ford Coppola who gave me the opportunity to

write my first score on the radical teen art flick Rumblefish.

Francis wanted a rhythm-based score for his movie,

and the recording process, like the film itself, was kind of...

..free-form.

Working on that movie with the maestro was an education,

a masterclass in music and composing to visuals.

It taught me that sometimes the music,

as much as the dialogue and acting, is telling the story.

But Coppola is as famous for using found music

in his movies as much as custom-written scores.

Ask me a question.

What is music and why?

Cut to what I said. Yeah.

How come all you guys sit on your helmets?

So we don't get our balls blown off.

HE LAUGHS

Francis's use of pre-existing music is a key factor

in the success of the extraordinary Apocalypse Now.

Big Duke 6 to Eagle Thrust. Put on psy-war-op.

Make it loud.

This is a Romeo Foxtrot. Shall we dance?

MUSIC: Ride of the Valkyries by Richard Wagner

Here is a brilliant example of what the industry calls needle drop.

Using the story the piece of music already carries as a counterpoint

to what we're seeing now, creating a whole new narrative.

Add Wagner to the Vietnam War and you get thrills, of course,

but you also get brilliant irony.

MUSIC CONTINUES

I've always used music in an aggressive way.

And the choice of who's going to do the music for me is never,

"Oh, I'm going to get my long-time composer

"and he's just going to do a score."

I always have a kind of concept of how I want the music to function.

The couple of instances where you have really used

music dramatically is where you pull it out.

In Apocalypse Now, the famous use of the Valkyries,

where it's really thrashing away.

RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES CONTINUES

Cut to the village. Silence.

DOGS BARK

You know, with sound in particular, contrast is very important.

So, if you just have bombastic loud music all the time, it starts

to be monotonous. Like sound effects, too.

So, you try to always,

you're always trying to pose opposites and use silence.

Silence is very powerful.

Silence is a very powerful sound, you know,

especially when you've been hearing a lot of sound

and suddenly you pull it out, but you really feel it gone.

RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES CONTINUES

BABY CRIES

Coppola uses music as a formal narrative device,

not just as mood-setting accompaniment.

And this seminal scene from The Godfather

is about as good as it gets.

With the baptism scene, it starts like baptism music, with these

nice major chords,

and then suddenly, when the bad stuff starts to go down,

it cuts to this very dark piece of... I think it's Bach.

Michael, do you believe in God,

the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth?

I do. Do you believe in Jesus Christ...?

What happened with that is we had cut that sequence not to

any music, and originally the book had 50 pages of revenge on all

of the various opposing families.

And I had the idea to intercut it all with the baptism,

basically as a way of,

"How do you get 50 pages of a novel into five minutes of movie?"

You know, I had to shorten it.

So, I wrote it that way in the screenplay

and it didn't work at all.

One of the editors, Peter Zinner, just added this organ music

which he got, and suddenly the whole sequence worked.

Michael Francis Rizzi, do you renounce Satan?

DRAMATIC ORGAN MUSIC

I do renounce him.

I remember being astounded,

because I was worried about what was wrong with my idea.

Conceptually it was great, he was becoming the Godfather and he was,

you know, doing all these diabolical things, but it didn't work.

And it was only when Peter Zinner cut that organ music in it

that it worked.

In a scene lasting nearly six minutes, there are only a few short

lines of dialogue,

but there's a lot for us, the audience, to take in.

To move the story along,

the church music is used in juxtaposition with the mob violence.

But how? What in our human brains is going on?

How does wordless music give us so much information?

Elizabeth Margulis directs the Music Cognition Lab

here at Princeton University.

She's spent her career trying to understand

how our brains are affected by music

and the mechanics of how it helps to tell stories.

Now, we might say that a piece of music we love really speaks to us.

So, maybe the idea of language is a good place to start.

Humans seem to have a fundamental need to make

sense of the world through stories.

There's no such thing as abstract music, right?

Music carries with it these signatures of where it comes from

and who does it, and all that is

an important part of how people hear it.

So, one of the things we're interested in is what's

happening from moment to moment while people are listening.

So, if you want to understand musical syntax, it might help to

understand how each, you know, moment sounds.

Not just the whole overall piece. What do you mean by musical syntax?

So, if you think about syntax in language,

you think about grammar, right?

And how things are structured together,

and that this clause is dependent on this one,

and if you think about syntax in speech, right, if I say,

"Linda eats broccoli",

that's really different than, "Broccoli eats Linda".

Right? Mm-hm.

So, similarly, the way you string together these various notes

and these various chords with these different functions

can impact where you feel.

You know, you can use the same notes,

put them in a different order and really

create a completely different path through this tension space. Mm-hm.

Like, "Oh, this note doesn't normally go to that note,

"we went there, what's going on?

"Something interesting is happening." Exactly.

# Satan

# Sitting there

# He's smiling... #

When Ozzy Osbourne plays with our sense of expectation,

when a melody is expected to go somewhere nice

but goes...wrong...

# Watches those flames get higher and higher... #

We feel the dissonance.

# Oh, no, no, please, God, help me... #

This example is called the devil's tritone.

Gustav Holst famously used it in his Mars Suite.

And the lack of expected resolution just sounds dangerous.

And that tells a story of its own.

So, the idea with music is that you can use, you know,

musical syntax, you can use this kind of organisation to build

tension as you're listening, so the music seems like it's getting

tenser, and then like it's relaxing and dissipating that tension.

Silence creates great tension.

Yeah, like... That's what reggae is all about. Right.

STEWART MIMICS REGGAE INSTRUMENTS

So, in the same way that reordering words in a sentence

changes the meaning of what's being said,

reordering notes, creating pauses and silence,

and playing with our expectations of what comes next

can really affect the story being told.

And that's not all.

The convention, in the West at least,

is that a major key is happy...

ORCHESTRA PLAYS BOUNCILY

..and a minor key is sad.

ORCHESTRA PLAYS MOURNFULLY

All of these conventions of music are part of a composer's toolkit,

and I for one have been using them in film music for years.

But that doesn't mean the rules can't all be broken.

Caroline Shaw is one of the most exciting composers

in the new classical scene.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2013

for this stunning piece of vocal music,

Partita For Eight Voices.

MUSIC: Partita For Eight Voices by Caroline Shaw

So far, so conventional.

But all kinds of rules are about to be broken,

or at least stress-tested by this piece.

VOCAL LINES START TO MIX

There are conventions of storytelling

and use of music in storytelling.

Music will take a tale and give it emotional power.

I suspect you do not observe these conventions faithfully.

No, you can always take a rule

and some kind of convention like that in a frame and then...

..break it. Mm-hm.

Either from the bottom or from the side or from behind.

And make something that tells that story and does

what you want it to do in an oblique way,

but much more effectively. Mm-hm. That's what I've found.

Or you're not trying to tell any particular story at all,

but you organise the elements that you have, erm,

in a narrative way, and that, sort of,

can lead someone who's experiencing that thing

to a particular conclusion, which may just be a gut feeling.

MUSIC: Plan and Elevation: IV. The Orangery by Caroline Shaw

This is one of Caroline's latest pieces,

Plan And Elevation: IV. The Orangery

performed by the Attacca Quartet.

From austere and strange to heart-stoppingly beautiful,

Caroline's music is a full-on narrative of pure emotion.

Who needs words?

There's something about writing a piece for a string quartet

or orchestra, just instruments, where I feel, like,

I'm just trying to write a story for people.

There is nothing else there.

You think about foreground and background

and colour and narrative and pacing and space... Mm-hm.

..and all of those things, sort of, elevation of pitch

and quality of speaking, all those things can be, sort of,

funnelled into a piece of music

and they come out the other end in some way that I can't quite trace

the relationship. So, you have a broad definition of story?

Broad definition of story. OK. Sure.

Units of things that are organised in a particular way

where you can follow them and be invested in them, I guess.

Well, I guess that's one definition of story.

But there are others out there, if you know where to look.

The avant-garde is always looking for new ways to tell tales.

Matthew Herbert is one of Britain's foremost experimental

and esoteric musicians.

From forming a band of European jazz musicians

as a protest against Brexit...

..to recording an album made entirely

of sounds from the human body,

Matthew's approach to music has never been conventional.

Pushing ideas of storytelling to the limit is a big part of what he does.

And, in 2010, he recorded the entire life cycle of a pig,

turning the subject of the story into its musical, raw ingredients.

So, I've come to his farm in the Kentish countryside

to find out more.

When you're tinkling away at your piano, staring out the window,

composing a tune, how did it cross your mind

to make music out of this pig here?

Well, I think that a revolution has happened in music and, actually,

with microphones, tape recorders,

studios and those kinds of things, we can now make music

out of literally anything that makes a noise.

Well, this guy wants to get on the mic.

He saw the microphone there and said, "I want some of that."

Do you want to hold that?

If they ate my phone, you owe me a new one.

I'm not worried about your phone, I'm worried about my finger!

NARRATION: OK, so, we've captured some sounds

of a very live pig snuffling away.

Now we will encounter a dead one.

So, I'll do some bacon. As an American, I need to ask,

will it be crispy and crunchy?

Is that how you'd like it? Well, I...

It's my birthright.

Birthright!

So, I'm just recording the sounds of cooking bacon here.

It's a very simple demonstration for me about storytelling.

So, we've got a live pig... Mm-hm. ..and now we've got a dead pig

within a little piece of music.

The dance of life and death!

Yeah! You got me.

But then, er, I'm going to try and write it

in about four and a half minutes. Let's give it a rock.

Would it spoil the concept if I were to

borrow your fork for just a second?

HE BEATS THE PAN RHYTHMICALLY

Right, so, we've got this collection of sounds and beats,

but how are we going to change these oinks, bangs and sizzles

into a musical story of a pig's life?

I just wanted to do it as a very simple exercise

to show about storytelling, that just with two noises

you can set up a very simple, quick little story.

So, over here we have your...

STEWART'S PAN DRUMMING PLAYS

..drumming and then turn it into a sampler instrument.

THE SOUNDS WARP SLIGHTLY

I haven't actually played any notes, it's still your part.

BASS TONES START PLAYING

NARRATION: Once you're aware that the notes you're hearing

are actually made out of the subject of the story,

the theory is that the music is suffused

with an extra special layer of narrative.

So, I've made an instrument out of that.

It's as if Vaughan Williams made The Lark Ascending

by throwing larks in the air.

Hold it longer and that's actually a pig, but...

PIG SNORTS PLAY RHYTHMICALLY

I just need to find the right tempo for this.

There you go, look! Triplets against it.

HOLLOW BEATS ACCOMPANY THE PIG

THE HOLLOW BEATS ALTERNATE PITCH

Then you start to enter the, sort of, slightly more

traditional realms of composition, which is like...

Melody and pitch? Yeah.

We're starting to get normal again, here. Yeah, exactly.

At that point, you have to think, "What is the story we're telling?

"Is it appropriate to take the sound of a live... A once-living animal

"and make it... Turn it into bacon...?" Turn it into a gag?

Yeah, it's like, "Is that appropriate,

"is that an appropriate response to the animal's life?"

Do you consider this to be storytelling?

I...

I do, yes. The normal thing with a musician or a composer is,

particularly in pop music,

is to turn the microphone towards yourself.

The most common word in pop music is "I".

"I feel like this, I feel like that. You did this to me."

For me, I guess, over the last 30 years,

I've realised, actually, I'm much more interested in turning

the microphone away from me and recording what's out there.

For me, this is all storytelling, this is all pulling at

threads of the world around me and the universe to try and work

out how it fits together and how we can organise ourselves differently.

I'm impressed by Matthew's experimentation and this is

a work in progress, but there is no denying his music is pretty high

concept, and like so much conceptual art, if you didn't know the story

of how it was made, I'm not sure you could tell from the outcome.

It's an exercise in form, not emotion.

And most of us probably prefer our musical narratives a little

more explicit.

So, it's lyrics that help musicians create the biggest hits

and tell the most memorable stories.

# You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar

# When I met you

# I picked you out, I shook you up and turned you around

# Turned you into someone new

# Don't, don't you want me

# You know I can't believe it when I hear that you won't see me

# Don't... #

The relationship of lyrics and music is very symbiotic.

A poem can exist without music and music can exist without lyrics.

But they sure do rock together.

MUSIC: An Englishman In New York by Sting

Humanity has always loved having its stories dramatised by music,

giving it emotional impact, and to explain,

to unravel how these two elements work together, I know just the guy.

Now, I may be just a little biased here,

but I think Sting is a pretty good storyteller.

His combination of lyrics that draw you into a narrative,

and infectious melodies have always impressed me.

We are trying to figure out the relationship between music and text

and how music supports, and what it contributes to, a message or a story.

My method, the most common method I use, is to write the music first.

Structure it so it already has a narrative shape, beginning,

middle and end.

And all I have to do as the lyricist is to ask the music to tell me

a story.

And be open enough to hear what that story is.

So, it's the music that writes the lyrics.

And then you just have to fit them in.

It's like a sculptor looks at a piece of stone

and sees a leg there and a bit of a hand there.

And you sort of add it up like a jigsaw.

And then you wind up with a song.

It's a fascinating puzzle, and even though I have written

hundreds of songs, I'm still not sure how it's done.

I really, I don't know.

If I could press the button now that had a hit song or a good

song, even, I would keep pressing it.

Your finger would be on that button.

# Giant steps are what you take

# Walking on the moon

# I hope my legs don't break... #

I've performed with this guy all over the world

and he's written more hit songs than I can remember

and apparently than even he can remember.

One of your tricks as a songwriter is bait

and switch, we can call it. And the most famous example is...

"Who, moi?"

The most famous example is Every Breath You Take,

which on the surface is a cheerful song about love...

I wrote Every Breath You Take on the back of the bus.

We were driving from Dusseldorf to Frankfurt or

somewhere on the autobahn.

You must have been driving, or Kim, and I came up with this.

And went, "Whoa, hey!

"I've got something!" That's not Every Breath You Take.

No... It's... What is it? Message In A... Message In A Bottle.

I remember that.

Anyway, back to Every Breath You Take.

This song has serenaded weddings, first kisses

and romantic moments the world over.

# Every breath you take... #

But the tale Sting is spinning goes deeper.

The haunting chords draw you in,

so you hardly notice the sinister lyric.

# I'll be watching you... #

Every breath you take has a kind of patina of being

romantic and soft and squishy. But it's also about surveillance.

And the chords are dark. The chords are dark. Yes.

The chords tell you... You know, who are you going to believe? I love ambiguity.

I'm fascinated by that, that ambiguity that, as you say,

a bait and switch job.

It's more interesting.

There's nothing more boring than an "I love you and you love me" song.

Although folks love that. I'm not sure they do. It's a closed loop.

It's kind of smug and... You can't join in.

But I love you and you love somebody else is a three-dimensional problem.

Suddenly, you start to hurt. It's a drama. It's a drama.

Sometimes you write and you can feel that you're writing about you.

Other times, sometimes, when I feel that this is

you you are talking about, you put some other person as the subject.

You may be right.

You may be right, although that's my process to take it out from me

and objectify it, somehow. And control it, therefore.

We're talking about jealousy, we're talking about very dark human

emotions, you don't really want to own them that much.

Put it on someone else.

It's good therapy to put it on an imaginary person.

Storytelling, it helps me, I'm trying to make sense of my world.

But you also, by accident, might be making sense for other people, too.

Which I never really anticipated.

That's what good songs can do.

Whether they're brand-new or very, very old.

Believe it or not, Sting started his career in folk clubs like this,

singing traditional songs to contemporary audiences.

And this was one of his earliest influences, Martin Carthy.

# A fine young man, it was indeed

# Mounted on his milk white steed

# Rode and he rode and he rode all alone

# Until he came to lovely Joan... #

I think a hugely important step to becoming a songwriter myself

was the learning those folk songs and how they were formed

and what they were singing about.

Often they would sing about mining disasters,

or working-class concerns.

Or, older folktales from a much older tradition,

magical stories about witchcraft and spells.

I sang in folk clubs, learned the Martin Carthy canon

and he was the man who brought Scarborough Fair into the world.

And Martin Carthy'd play...

# Are you going to Scarborough fair?

# Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme... #

# Remember me to one who lives there

# She once was a true love of mine. #

Simon and Garfunkel's version of Scarborough Fair has become

an essential part of the story of 1960s America.

But the original author of the ancient English song is unknown.

Many different versions exist.

Paul Simon first heard Martin Carthy's version

when he was on tour in England in the early 1960s...

..and famously borrowed it without giving credit, until many years later.

But Martin is still playing it, in a new arrangement of this

traditional song.

# Are you going to Scarborough fair?

# Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

# Remember me to a lass who lives there

# For once, she was a true lover of mine. #

It became my song, if you like.

Bob Dylan picked up on it and loved it and ran with it,

and Paul Simon learned it and he and Art Garfunkel had a big hit with it.

It's a traditional song.

As young people in the mid-1960s tried to make sense of a grim,

turbulent future, they looked back to the past,

to folk music for a soundtrack and songs evoking a simpler time.

If you want to find out about history from ordinary people,

look at the songs they sang.

Hut, 2, 3 and...

Music keeps stories alive, and not just in England.

When slavery brought people from Africa to the Americas,

music helped preserve their culture, their language and their stories.

SHE SINGS IN OWN LANGUAGE

French Cuban sisters Lisa Kainde and Naomi Diaz - better known as Ibeyi -

often perform in the language

and musical traditions of the Yoruba people from Africa,

a language they only speak when singing.

SHE SINGS IN YORUBA

An ancient Yoruba melody, no doubt? Oh, yes, it is.

It comes from Benin in Nigeria, and when the slaves were shipped to Cuba.

And they were shipped to Brazil and...

Brazil, and Puerto Rico and America.

Those slaves kind of kept their song alive

and kept the tradition alive, making sure that those songs would

remain and they remained in the culture.

And we are French Cuban, we grew up listening to Yoruba chants.

It's such an important part of our culture, of our beliefs.

How is it that the songs have kept Yoruba culture alive,

as opposed to just stories?

Why does music make the story last longer, have more dramatic effect?

The melody, the rhythm, you know, it's things that connect with

more people than just the voice or someone saying something.

Can you play some of your songs that take us...?

This song is For Elegua, and in the Yoruba beliefs,

Elegua is the God that opens and closes the path.

# Bara suayo

# Omonia lawana mama kenirawo e

# Bara suayo

# Omonia lawana mama kenirawo e. #

But Ibeyi don't just sing in Yoruba.

One of Lisa and Naomi's most powerful songs tells a more local

story in English.

# He said, he said

# Do you smoke?

# What's your name? #

The song Deathless demonstrates how music can provide catharsis,

and comment on stuff happening right now.

It comes out of an experience Lisa had as a teenager at the hands

of French police.

# We are deathless

# We are deathless

I was 15, I was 16, but I had an Afro and an overall, and I don't know, they thought,

"Oh, she's a drug dealer." And they took my bag, they threw it on the floor.

They talked, like, 3 cm from my face. Like really if I was a criminal.

So, the women did what songwriters can do -

they decided to capture and share their story in music.

# Do you smoke?

# What's your name?

# Do you know why I'm here?

# Innocent, sweet 16, frozen with fear. #

If you had said to an audience, say after me, "We are deathless"

and spoke it without rhythm, without melody,

do you think it would have the same power? No.

There's such an amazing power in rhythm,

such an amazing power in repetition, because

if you say it once it's not the same as if you say it five times.

You need to repeat it and every time you repeat it, it becomes truer,

and stronger, and you believe in it more. That's exactly it.

The first time they say, "We are deathless," they think it's cute.

Because they are dancing and bouncing and the rhythm

and it's fun.

We're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. We don't want cute.

"We want this.

"We want you to use it and we want your true energy

"and we want you to use that thing you have.

"We don't want you to just have fun, this is your moment."

# Whatever happens

# Whatever happens

# Oh, hey

# We are deathless. #

Music has always been a way to grab the mic.

# You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge... #

To tell stories that might otherwise be ignored.

And perhaps the best example of this is hip-hop.

# Straight out of Compton, crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube

# From a gang called Niggaz Wit Attitude

# When I'm called off, I got a sawed off

# Squeeze the trigger and bodies are hauled off. #

40 years old and still the most consumed pop

music on the planet, accounting for one quarter of all music sales

and streams.

That's a lot of stories getting told in words and beats.

Regarded as one of the best storytellers in rap music,

Talib Kweli has grown up in this culture and seen it go thoroughly mainstream.

How are you? How you feeling? Good to see you. Good to be here in your town in Brooklyn.

Welcome home.

# Yeah... #

His track Get By became an anthem for a generation of hip-hop fans.

# We sell crack to our own out the back of our homes

# We smell the musk at the dusk in the crack of the dawn

# We go through "Episodes II" like "Attack of the Clones"

# Work till we break our back and you hear the crack of the bone... #

The stories he's telling shine the light on the struggling

within his own neighbourhood.

# We commute to computers

# Spirits stay mute, while you eagles spread rumours

# We survivalists, turned to consumers

# Just to get by, just to get by

# Just to get by, just to get by... #

That song is about people who are doing whatever

they have to do to survive.

That song is about survival.

Even if just to survive, they've got to shoot themselves in the foot.

Were you singing about yourself, or about what you saw around you?

Were you in that position of being driven by desperation

to do things like that?

No, I have never been driven by desperation to have to do

something illegal to survive.

I've been blessed to not have to be in that position.

But I certainly have lived in, for half of my life,

I lived in communities where people had to do those things.

Not in my home, but the home right next door to me.

So, I was speaking about the community in general,

and the video for that and everything about the song

is about community, Get By is a rallying cry for a community.

Music has carried stories like this

right around the world into the top of the charts.

Tales of African-American life that might never have been heard

otherwise.

Why do you suppose it is that music brings power to whatever

story you're trying to tell?

I've heard it said, I could make 1,000 speeches,

one good song could convey that better than 1,000 speeches.

It's absolutely right. Music is our last...

Especially for marginalised people and poor people, particularly,

music leaves the realm of art that you just appreciate on the wall,

or there's a nice song in the background and you like the melody.

It leaves that realm and goes into the practical

realm of a necessary, natural resource to tell our story.

It becomes necessary to your blueprint, to your DNA.

We're made up of our memories, people attach memories to music.

There's things that you did on the drum that are part of my DNA,

because those records were playing when I was a little kid.

That's why people who grow up, nothing is better than

the music they heard when they were in high school and college,

because they've attached that music to their memories.

Nothing could be better.

This makes total sense to me.

I think this is why music is the best way to remember stories.

But I'm just guessing.

What's the science?

Will a human brain remember something better

if it has an emotional charge? Absolutely.

The things that we care the most about are the ones that have a

privileged position for memory storage and for memory retrieval.

And music makes us care, so therefore it makes us remember?

Yes, this is one of the most robust principles of the cognitive

neuroscience of human memory.

It turns out that when we care about a piece of music,

our ability to identify and remember a sequence, its basic narrative

structure, is pretty powerful, even when it's heavily disguised.

I thought we could try some experiments to demonstrate

musical memory.

He wants to see what I can recognise. And listen carefully,

because it is pretty short.

Sounds like a chord I use all the time.

From one of my own scores.

That's Stravinsky, Rites of Spring. Yes!

Or, yeah... Yes, it is.

And that's why I use that chord a lot, because I nicked it from Uncle Igor.

Just one chord is a mnemonic for a whole musical story.

A hook, sure, but also kind of a shorthand.

That texture is very Stravinskyan.

Yes. Nice job. Now, here is a piece of music that I have reversed.

MUSIC PLAYS

Well, it sounds like Sting.

Does Everyone Stare The Way I Do? Yes. Surprising, isn't it?

That is surprising. Even though I wrote that song.

So, here is the operation that happened in your brain.

Your eardrums are wiggling in and out from the molecular motion

created by the speaker.

They start off a neurochemical chain of events that ends up invoking your

auditory cortex, and in the auditory cortex,

the pitches and the rhythms and the timbres are processed

in different special processing circuits, and then your brain starts

looking for what computer scientists would call a template match.

What is it that fits this particular arrangement of pitches

and rhythms and timbres?

Your brain then had to say, "Wait a minute, it's backwards,

"but it's still a match."

And your brain did it in a couple of seconds.

In a couple of seconds, the brain can recognise musical structure

and remember the story it's telling.

And the people trying to sell us stuff know this all too well.

Consumer brands are really little more than stories that,

corporations want us to believe and these, too, can be set to music.

Last up on round would be Old Ma Peggoty's place.

Director Ridley Scott knew this in 1973 when he used Dvorak's

New World Symphony to create Britain's favourite ever TV commercial.

I knew baker'd have kettle on

doorsteps of hot Hovis ready.

"There's wheat germ in that loaf," he'd say. "Get it inside you, boy."

"You'll be going up that hill as fast as you come down."

Hovis still has many times more wheatgerm than ordinary bread.

It's...

But 47 years later, we like our musical brand messaging shorter.

Much shorter.

And Walter Werzowa is the creator of one of the shortest

anywhere in the world.

So, what is your thing? My little thing, it doesn't take too long...

Play me your hit.

I recognise that.

The Intel bongs!

It's a highly memorable distillation of a company's whole

story in as few notes as possible.

Let's be bold. OK. One note.

Combinations like these pair logos like Xbox, McDonald's, or

Netflix with short musical phrases to tell a brand's story in seconds.

So, have you no shame, Sir?

That this wonderful attribute of humanity has been put to use

to sell product.

How do you feel about the fact that this wonderful thing of music can be

exploited by flinty-eyed people who want to sell stuff?

Last night I was praying that you would not ask me that question.

I, basically, enjoy writing music.

Writing music is the greatest thing. It's what you're going to do anyway.

So, how did you go about selling a computer chip?

It definitely, looking back, was the toughest assignment I ever had.

For the first time I heard creatives talk about brand attributes,

those things like the chronology and the faction.

You're nodding your head sagely like you know exactly what they're

talking about. "Shit, what is he talking about?"

All this incredible branding verbiage.

And, yes, of course, I can do technology and positiveness.

Emotional stuff is easier, as you know, that's what

we do with music, that's what we instinctively do.

It was not easy, especially when I walked home

and I thought, "Three seconds!" It's no time to come up with a full

musical piece in three seconds, it's just almost impossible.

So, I played around on the piano, nothing worked really well,

on the guitar, listened to music...

Thought, "I need to steal something great," I listened from The Beatles

and Rolling Stones and everything, and nothing really worked.

Finally, I saw the board again and read Intel Inside,

and thought, if this were lyrics to a song, it has four notes.

Tell me, the mental equipment that we have in our brains

that we are born with, to understand music,

storytelling is a part of it, to make a story

happen, storytelling and music are so intertwined.

But down to three seconds.

What do you think? Is three notes, really... It's a mnemonic,

is a mnemonic a story with a beginning and a middle and an end?

What do you think?

There is a beginning, middle and end that are carefully constructed.

Let's start with the end.

If this thing doesn't have a ring out, if this would

sound like this...

SHORT PERCUSSIVE NOTE

..you would think this was a little company.

If it ends like this...

RINGING PERCUSSIVE NOTE

..and has a little sustain, you need the ring out. Or a fade-out.

OK, actually, maybe, maybe... I'm wrong here.

The beginning...

Yep. We've set up a whole world of emotion there of...

And then we have our plot development.

That's our action and then we end up with a happy ending.

Yep. Happy ending. And so the beginning...

..middle...

..end.

Three parts.

I give it up, it's a story, in three seconds you have told a story.

Wagner needed nine hours.

Yeah, I tried to talk to him, but he didn't take my calls. No.

MUSIC: Flight Of the Valkyries by Wagner

Music's direct connection to our subconscious is its superpower.

Walter knows this and so did Wagner.

And so does every other musician and composer who has ever lived.

Music may have been the first language.

Before we formed words, we made sound.

Somebody can pitch a note. A high one and then a low one is actually telling a story.

Try something really simple here.

I think different music

and sound speaks to different people in wildly different ways.

Music is storytelling and narrative, that's what it is for me.

It's like telling other people's stories

and trying to make sense of them and trying to hear them in new ways.

Trying to use music at the service of those stories.

There are so many ways to store and retrieve a musical memory -

the pitch, the contour, the timbre.

We only need one or two of them to help us

remember the story associated with it.

We all like stories. You know, Harry Met Sally, they fell in love,

they fell out of love.

You're not really feeling much, but if that was set to music,

if it was Sting writing a song about that,

your hearts would be broken, you'd be getting married to this,

you'd be on the dance floor gazing into each other's eyes.

Music gives a drama to it, it gives an impulsion to it.

CHEERING

Music somehow takes a story and gives it an emotional impact,

and that's the real thing.