Scholars Mind

The Sound of the End

The end of the world can have a soundtrack, too. Consider the musical selections below. What were the circumstances around each one’s creation, and what techniques do they use to achieve their messages and moods?

Key concepts

Program Music
Instrumental music written to depict a specific scene, story, or idea rather than just to sound pleasing — so a clarinet's shriek can 'be' a bird over an abyss, or a grinding riff can 'be' a city collapsing. It lets sound carry meaning the way a painting carries an image.

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Every work — at a glance

  • Quartet for the End of Time: Abyss of the Birds — Olivier Messiaen (song)

    A long, exposed solo-clarinet movement from a 1940 quartet Messiaen composed in a German POW camp and premiered for fellow prisoners. He wrote that 'the abyss is Time, with its sorrow,' while the birds are 'our longing for light.'

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What to know

  1. 01
    What technique creates each mood? In “Abyss of the Birds” Messiaen strands a single clarinet in near-silence so the listener feels the void; “Electric Funeral” grinds on the tritone at a dragging tempo to sound like collapse; “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” does the opposite — a breathless, almost cheerful torrent that makes the apocalypse feel absurd. Dread, doom and irony, each built from one specific musical choice.

Across subjects

History gives Messiaen's piece a weight no analysis of the notes can: he wrote and first performed the Quartet for the End of Time in 1941 inside a Nazi

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

The end of the world gets a soundtrack, and each era scores it differently. Should apocalypse be made to sound beautiful (Messiaen) or even fun (R.E.M.)? Turning catastrophe into art can help us face it — or it can anesthetize us, letting us hum along to our own extinction.

Practice — a sample

ARTInstrumental music written to depict a specific scene or idea, rather than just to please the ear, is BEST described as —

  • A A cappella
  • B Improvisation
  • C Absolute music
  • D Program music
  • E A round

Sign in to answer and see why each option is right or wrong.

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