Students in two senior English electives are gaining a deeper understanding of how music and film can work together to create powerful narratives.
Tom DiChiara, who teaches “Page to Screen,” and Emily Matthews, who teaches “Lyrical Lives,” brought their classes together for a joint project after realizing their courses had a lot of overlapping objectives.
“My class focuses on film, and Emily's on music, but at their hearts, both courses are about storytelling, and all stories are built to resonate emotionally with their audience,” said DiChiara. “Music and film can tell stories and create feeling just fine on their own, but they do it better and more efficiently together.”
The collaboration has been a highlight of the trimester. First, they read excerpts from the Nick Hornby novel, “High Fidelity.” Then, they watched the movie adaptation.
“The central character in both the book and the movie uses music to explain his feelings, to process emotion, and even to reconstruct the chronology of his life,” explained Matthews.
DiChiara and Matthews wanted the boys to take inspiration from what they read and watched to write a “breakup scene” involving well-known characters from movies, TV, or literature that prominently featured a song.
“The whole purpose was to test our creativity, consider different perspectives, and see what we can come up with as a group,” said Caden Southworth ’25. “It was a very creative assignment. I'm really glad we did it.”
Whether it was an imagined breakup between Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen, or the Chipmunks breaking up the band, boys used that creativity to write a script and pick a song that perfectly fit the moment.
“It was really interesting, because I haven't taken the movie elective yet, so I got to learn a lot more than if I were just tasked with the music aspect of the scene setting,” said Brad Bondi ’25, whose group concocted a breakup between Ironman and Batman.
During the 2023-24 school year, the classes screened the film “CODA,” a music-centered story that explores the role of sound and silence in storytelling. The joint discussion was enlightening, but DiChiara and Matthews knew they wanted to take the project a step further with a writing assignment this time around.
The goal was for students to leave with an appreciation for the symbiotic relationship between music and film; to examine how a great song can elevate a scene in a movie, and how a movie can give its audience an appreciation for the power of music to tell a story and convey and create emotion.
“We also wanted our students to try their hand at screenwriting, something 99% of them had never done before: to get a sense of the working parts of a scene, to attempt to create meaningful dialogue and action, and to use music as a complement and catalyst for the conflict, characterization, and change that occurs within the span of a couple pages of good writing, DiChiara said. “Of course, we also wanted them to have a good time working with one another.”
The hope is to keep this collaboration going as the approach keeps boys engaged and reminds them that learning is interconnected.
“I love any lesson plan that reminds students that our subject matter never exists in a vacuum," said Matthews. “That what they learn in one department is relevant in others and that the world is an interdisciplinary place.”