Soundtrack Assignment – Fahrenheit 451

Your task is to create a soundtrack for the Ray Bradbury novel, Fahrenheit 451.  A soundtrack often has music that directly comes from the movie itself – what is termed the “score.”  However, often a soundtrack is simply a compilation of songs that relate to the story in one way or another.  This is the type of soundtrack you will be creating.

This soundtrack should have at least 6 songs on it, and each song must relate to a theme from the story, a character from the story, or have some other type of connection to the story.

Your soundtrack, when completed, will include:

Each song and its supporting work is worth 10 marks

Sample:

“Video Killed the Radio Star” – The Buggles

 I started my soundtrack for Fahrenheit 451 with this song because of its timely subject matter.  Bradbury depicts a terrible future in which technology has become a prevalent and menacing force in our lives.  This book is very much a messenger, warning those who read it of the dangers of proliferating technology.  In their song, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” The Buggles also refer to the progress that technology inevitably makes, and will continue to make.  Their line, “…we can't rewind we've gone too far,” makes reference to the advancement that society has made in technology, and that they see a potential hazard in such rapid progress.  Both texts act as acknowledgements and as warnings to the consumer.

(a printout of the song lyrics would follow)

       Good places to start on the internet:

http://www.lyrics.com/hits.html - good site for basic lyric information (search songs by title using particular themes, as well as those songs that you know)

http://www.stlyrics.com/ - this site is full of soundtracks and is a good place to look for examples

http://www.amazon.com  (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/5174/ref=sd_allcatpop_mu/102-4495219-8829712) - Amazon has many different albums with complete song lists for you to look at

Top Ten Quotes

1. Beatty, explaining the history of censorship and periods of human education: “Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries of more.”

2. Beatty, touting the role of technology in man’s aim to abolish individual thought: “The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a mechanical hour.”
3. The captain continues by defending the moral aims of the ideal of censorship: “Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal.  Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.”
4. Beatty, explaining the need to cremate the dead to make the living loose their memory: “Forget them.  Burn all, burn everything.  Fire is bright and fire is clean.”
5. Montag asserts, “Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave.  They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!” In this way, Montag sees books not only as helpful tools, but as vital agents of salvation for his diseased world.
6. When Mrs. Bowles rejects Montag’s “poetry lesson,” the fireman can restrain himself no longer.  He tells her, “Go home and think of your first husband divorced and your second husband killed in a jet and your third husband blowing his brains out, go home and think of the dozen abortions you’ve had, go home and think of that and your damn Caesarian sections, too, and your children who hate your guts! Go home and think how it all happened and what did you ever do to stop it?”
7. Beatty continues his attack, saying to Montag, “[Fire’s] real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.  A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it.  Now, Montag, you’re a burden.  And fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later.”
8. Montag gets the last laugh when he turns to Beatty’s dead body and says, “You always said, don’t face a problem, burn it.  Well, now I’ve done both. Good-bye, Captain.”
9. Montag realizes his own special role in the rebirth of thinking that must occur if the world is to go on.  Bradbury narrates, “Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and the keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people’s heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches.”
10. Granger reflects over the city’s destruction, saying, “We know the damn silly thing we just did.  We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them.” He goes on, “But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use what we got out of them.”

 www.novelguide.com

Review Brainstorming – some potential ideas

 Themes

 Technology

 Hope in destruction

 Fire

 Drugs, the effects of

 Pervasive violence/war

 Censorship

 Relationships (beginning and dying)

 Mentors – those that affect us

 Apathy in the general public

Similes

Metaphors

            Men as dust jackets

            Books as birds

Symbols

            Phoenix

            Salamander

            Fire 

Characters

            Montag

            Clarisse

            Faber

            Granger

            Mildred

            Beatty

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