A Good Screenplay is Like a Bach Fugue
Something I love about being an artist in multiple mediums is the way the brain makes connections between creative processes. I can argue that writing and playing the piano are wholly different experiences, and I can just as easily argue that they are, at their core, the same thing. Writing a screenplay in 2021 and practicing music first published in 1722 may seem like wildly different activities, but the brain makes all kinds of fun connections when both activities are regular parts of your life.
Screenwriting is essentially about guiding (which I find to be a nicer word than “manipulating”) an audience’s emotions throughout a temporal experience (a journey with a beginning and an end, unlike the experience of viewing a painting). The audience experience is passive. When you watch a movie or a TV show, all you have to do is sit there and take it in (unlike the more active experience of reading a novel, where the temporal experience is controlled by you through how long it takes you to read—not to mention how much your imagination is involved).
I might be relatively new to screenwriting, but guess what else is all about guiding an audience’s emotions throughout a temporal experience? Ding, ding, ding!
I find myself using my piano training all the time when I’m writing. In the world of screenwriting, there are already musical terms in the jargon—a character might be too “one-note,” for instance, and scripts move in “beats.” For me, sitting through a good movie is virtually the same experience as sitting through a good musical performance—my system is captivated from the first moment and the experience pulls me in, takes my emotions on a journey, and leaves me feeling like a changed or renewed human being who’s just experienced something whole and well-made. Good art does something with you.
Of course, music can be compared to all kinds of writing. In Absolutely on Music—writer Haruki Murakami’s conversations with conductor Seiji Ozawa—Murakami says: “So how did I learn to write? From listening to music. And what’s the most important thing in writing? It’s rhythm. No one’s going to read what you write unless it’s got rhythm. It has to have an inner rhythmic feel that propels the reader forward.”
Screenwriting in particular is all about architecture. Rhythm matters, but first the pillars have to stand. Billy Wilder compared F. Scott Fitzgerald—who failed at a Hollywood screenwriting career despite being a brilliant novelist—to “a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job.”
This is where Bach’s fugues come in (really, any fugue, but let’s agree Bach’s are the best). Bach’s fugues are all about expert architecture—or an expert plumbing job, at the risk of fellow classical musicians wincing at the comparison.
What are you talking about?
For readers who are not classical musicians, here’s a quick explainer on what a fugue is:
According to Oxford English Dictionary, a fugue is “a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.” (Think of the subject as a script’s protagonist, and the interweaving parts as the other characters.)
Music that has two or more independent lines is “contrapuntal.” (Think Breakfast Club instead of Cast Away—there are more opportunities for interactions, and no one character is more important than another. However, even island-bound Tom Hanks had a volleyball to interact with.)
Josef Hofmann, one of the greatest pianists of all time, defined “fugue” as coming from the word “fuga,” meaning “flight”: “the flight of one musical thought through many voices or parts.” Is a screenplay not a flight of one central idea through many voices or parts?
This is the opening of Bach’s C-sharp minor fugue, with my diligent-student highlights from a decade ago (if anyone is horrified at the desecration, the highlighting was done to a photocopy and not my original score):
This fugue is in five voices, which is why you see five different colors. When I studied this piece, I knew each individual line (color) and every possible combination of lines from memory. Here’s a recording of the first part of the green line above:
Here is the green line again, now joined by the pink line:
And here are the green and pink lines joined by the yellow, and then the blue, and then the orange (dare I point out that The Breakfast Club, too, is a group of five voices? It would be difficult to add more characters, right? But less isn’t as fun to play with.):
Each of these lines functions independently. Each leads to and from points of interest and each is balanced with places of heightened activity and moments of silence. They intersect in intentional ways, creating harmonies and tensions throughout the piece. If you think of each line as a character in a screenplay, the same concepts apply. Each character needs to make sense on their own life track with their own motivations and desires. When characters intersect in scenes, it cannot be totally random. Characters come together in harmony or at each other in conflict that serves the greater story.
It was a screenwriting craft essay by Glenn Gers that got me comparing characters in screenplays to the voices in Bach fugues. In his essay, “Go Ask Rosenkrantz,” Gers writes:
Every character moves through your screenplay unaware that he or she exists for the sake of a plot. They all believe they’re the star, the hero, the fulcrum of events. They enter each scene intent upon their own agenda and act according to their own needs. … If your characters do not operate from the rules of cause and effect, objectives and obstacles, then your movie will fall apart. Your story is literally made out of characters.
It takes a great deal of plumbing and architecting (maybe screenwriting is both) to create those independent journeys and then bring them together in the ways that are needed for the story at large. Just like lines in a Bach fugue, characters can meet each other in harmony (think Mad Men, in which many episodes end with a moving montage of scenes of different characters’ lives that all relate to the theme of the episode), or they can bump up against one another in conflict. With screenwriting, you want lots of the latter.
Take, for example, the breakfast scene from Little Miss Sunshine (written by Michael Arndt), which I’ve highlighted with my colorful Bach-fugue approach. It’s a simple scene of people ordering breakfast, but each character’s order tells us something about their distinct personality. The tension grows, culminating in young Olive’s “Sorry! I’m sorry!” as her system struggles to process the conflicting information coming in from the adults around her.
If playing a fugue and writing a screenplay are both about using certain tools to direct an audience’s emotions through a temporal experience, it’s worth taking some lessons from music-making and seeing how they can help a screenplay. These are a few approaches I take to my piano practicing that are helpful to apply to scripts:
10 Musical Questions to Improve Your Screenplay
1. Do you know all of your lines individually? Do you know each character’s storyline from the perspective of that character being the star of their own life? If you get rid of everything else in the screenplay, is that character’s storyline cohesive, necessary, interesting on its own?
2. Does it flow? Does your story move from moments of conflict to moments of harmony—and back again? Does every scene feel like it’s leading to a point or coming away from a point?
3. Do you know where your moments of harmony are? Do you know exactly where they are and what they are? Do you know why they are when they are? Is the “harmony” clearly expressed? Is it earned? What does it lead to?
4. Do you know where your moments of tension are? You should probably have more of these than you do of harmony. Does the balance between harmony and tension feel right? Are the tensions believable for each of the characters involved? What does each tension result from, and what does each tension lead to?
5. Are any of your characters one-note? A one-note character can be good or bad, depending on what you’re doing with them. For example, Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is pretty one-note (“Anyone? Bueller?”) but it works perfectly. On the other hand, most women roles for the majority of the twentieth century were one-note in a pretty wasteful way. Think roles that are confined to “mother,” “daughter,” “love/sex interest.” Not only is this sexist, but it’s poor writing. It’s a waste of an entire arc. Imagine if one of the lines in that Bach fugue was just a soft C# played every once in a while, adding nothing interesting to the rest of the texture. That’s “one-note.”
6. Does every beat matter? I’ve always felt that good art has a certain inevitability to it. Any piece I’ve played by Beethoven, for example, has always felt inevitable, as if there is truly only one way this piece could exist, and every note is essential. There are movies that feel like this, too. Does yours? Since you are probably human and not Wes Anderson, I’ll follow up with, why not?
7. Which key are you in? What’s the theme, or the question, or the tone of your story? (Ideally you have answers for all three.) How are you communicating those? The key of C-sharp minor is expressed with the notes C#, D#, E, F#, G#, A, and B#. What are the tools at your disposal to express your tone? Are you using them? How?
8. Does it breathe? Are there breaks from characters and storylines, or are you intentionally going Queen’s Gambit on your viewer? Are there moments of calm? Is there stillness? How much? Is it in the right places?
9. How’s your voicing? Are your characters and storylines clearly layered so the audience knows what’s most important to focus on at any given time? All of your characters should have wants and motivations, but if they’re all on display at the same time with the same level of urgency, it will just be a bunch of sound.
10. Is there motivation behind the movement? Are your scenes along the lines of “woman goes to a grocery store”? Or are they more like “woman races into a burning grocery store to save her father”? This is the difference between playing every note the same way and playing every note as part of a motivated gesture. You want clear phrasing, the music growing slightly louder or softer with each new note. The music isn’t just there; it’s saying something, and as the interpretive artist/performer, it’s your job to know what it’s saying. Do you know what you’re saying in your screenplay? Does the thing you’re trying to say propel each moment to contribute to a sense of escalation or recovery or to be itself an “arrival point” at a harmony or conflict? Not only should each moment be moving toward something or away from something, but purpose should be driving it there. Just as there is a reason for every note in a Bach fugue, there is a reason for every piece of a good script.
Thanks for bearing with me today. Now Write! Screenwriting has great craft essays (including the one I quoted from above) and exercises by people who really know what they’re doing.
Here’s a recording of the complete Bach Fugue in C-sharp minor by Kimiko Ishizaka, with a mesmerizing visual to illustrate the piece’s five layers.
More Little Miss Sunshine vibes, anyone? This is a perfect example of screenplay “harmony” (spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the film), where the characters unite (may I point out that we are again facing a five-character conglomerate?). This is an especially rewarding moment because we’ve mostly experienced them in conflict up to this point—so, boom, emotions manipulated!
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