Significance of Music in the Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman

The Death of Salesman is about an individual who in pursuit of the great American Dream, miserably fails, as he is addicted to his false illusions, which finally lead him and his family to utter chaos and dispersion. This paper will focus the musical element in the story and briefly the discuss it's significance.

From the first the flute is used to create a mood or an atmosphere. Even though Willy is a heavy-set, aging man, lumbering in with weighty valises, he is also an individual forever pursuing an elusive vision or dream. And the light music of the flute, never pronounced or intrusive, keeps this side of Willy before the audience. The flute is used to smooth over the frequent shifts and to help set successive scenes. [1]

The flute music derived the theme by playing it to creates a mood and soothing effect in an otherwise dull atmosphere. Since the entire story of the Death of a Salesman has a somewhat lumbering feeling in a dull environment, the music of the flute at the background presents the character of Willy as an individual who is forever in pursuit of an elusive vision or a dream. [2] The audience is thus kept in a trance like atmosphere by the playing of the flute.

Another aspect of the music in the Death of Salesman is the ever conscious portrayal of present day scenes duly combined with the flashbacks into history and vice versa. These transitions thus keep the audience from moving away from the scene, as he never really leaves one scene and enters another scene, as is the case in conventional works. On the contrary, the author makes a very good use of flute music to keep the audience from one place to the other or from one moment to another.[3] An example is the flashback period often remembered by Willy, as he goes back fifteen years, and then suddenly we are in the present day circumstances. These transitory movement are excellently controlled by the flute, as the music not only smoothes out the frequent movements of the characters, it also paves the way for the next scene. Hence, the process is repeated, as we hear the continuous playing of the flute. [4]

One of the most significant aspects of the concept of music was the use of the flute to represent the role of the father. Willy's father was a roving salesman too, and he made and sold flutes in the olden days. Travelling in a wagon in the days of the old west, Willy's father roamed the countryside selling his hand made flute. The flute then to Willy serves as the motivating force as he imagines his father in the old west, sitting on a wagon playing the flute. [5]

The play has a lyrical tone. While this is not poetic drama in the old sense, the preoccupation with the past often gives it a nostalgic, or elegiac, quality. All the Lomans look back a little sadly to happier days of untroubled comradeship when Willy capably directed his sons in carpentry projects for the home. Willy can remember, too, when the business world had in it an element of respect and gratitude. And he can look further back to wagon trips through the developing West. There once was a time, too, when the little house was not jammed in among tall apartment buildings and when Biff waved to Willy from the football field, a young Hercules with the sun all around him. The delicate flute music that hauntingly plays now and then and even the leafy green effect of the lights upon the "fragile-seeming" house add still further to the lyrical effect. Death of a Salesman is thus not only a drama of social criticism and a modern tragedy but also a mood piece, wistfully looking back.