10 Movies About Music Worth Watching, and What Each One Teaches
The ten best movies about music to watch, if you want to come away understanding music a little better, are The Sound of Music (1965), Amadeus (1984), This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Bird (1988), School of Rock (2003), Once (2007), 20 Feet from Stardom (2013), Whiplash (2014), Sound of Metal (2019) and Tár (2022). The criterion is not box office or awards. Each film shows one true thing about how music works, such as tempo, harmony, hearing or playing together, and each comes with a lesson on this site where you can practise that thing.
The Sound of Music (1965): a melody is a walk up a scale
Directed by Robert Wise. In “Do-Re-Mi”, the governess Maria teaches the von Trapp children to sing with a scale lesson. The syllables climb the major scale one step at a time, from Do up to Ti and back to Do. Then the song rearranges them into new tunes, which is the real point: a melody is a path through the steps of a scale. This is movable do, where Do is whatever note the song treats as home; in fixed-do countries, Do always names the same note. The film is loosely based on the real von Trapp family and changes a great deal of their story. The scales lesson builds the same seven-step pattern from any starting note.
Amadeus (1984): composing starts in the ear
Directed by Miloš Forman, from Peter Shaffer’s play. Antonio Salieri, a successful court composer, tells the story of recognising that the young Mozart’s music is better than his own. The rivalry is dramatised: there is no evidence that Salieri harmed Mozart, and the film’s image of Mozart writing finished music without drafts is part of the legend, because his sketches survive. What it gets right is what a trained ear can do. Near the end, Mozart dictates a movement of his Requiem part by part, the bass, the voices, the orchestra, while Salieri writes it down. Both men hear music that is not sounding yet and turn it into notes on paper: ear training at its far end. The ear training lesson starts where everyone starts, telling two intervals apart.
This Is Spinal Tap (1984): a dial does not make a sound louder
Directed by Rob Reiner. A mockumentary, a fake documentary about a fictional British heavy-metal band on a disastrous American tour. Its best-known joke is about sound: the guitarist proudly shows an amplifier whose knobs go up to eleven instead of ten, sure that this makes it louder. It does not. The numbers on a dial are labels. Loudness depends on the size of the vibration, how far the speaker actually moves the air. The lesson on sound and its properties separates loudness from pitch and timbre, the three things every sound has.
Bird (1988): improvisation follows the chords
Directed by Clint Eastwood, with Forest Whitaker as Charlie Parker, the alto saxophonist who helped create bebop in the 1940s with Dizzy Gillespie and others. Much of the drama is about Parker’s addiction rather than his playing. What it shows, club after club, is improvisation as a skill with rules: a bebop soloist invents a melody on the spot over a chord progression the whole band knows. Many bebop tunes are themselves new melodies written over the chords of existing songs. The backbone of those progressions is ii–V–I, the movement that the progressions everyone uses lesson calls the one jazz is built on. Improvising over it starts with hearing where each chord is going.
School of Rock (2003): a band is a set of jobs
Directed by Richard Linklater. Jack Black plays a failed rock guitarist who poses as a substitute teacher and turns his class of schoolchildren into a band. It is a comedy with no claim to realism, but it gets one thing right: a band is not everyone playing the tune, it is a set of jobs. Drums and bass hold the beat and the bottom of the harmony, guitars and keyboards fill in the chords, singers carry the melody. It works only when every part sits on the same pulse, the subject of the rhythm basics lesson.
Once (2007): songs travel as chords and a melody
Directed by John Carney. A Dublin street musician and a Czech pianist meet and, over a few days, write and record songs together. The two leads, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, are musicians who wrote the songs themselves. Watch the music-shop scene: he shows her one of his songs, she follows the chords on the piano, and soon they are singing it in two parts. That is how most songs pass between musicians: a short chord loop with a melody on top, not sheet music. The progressions everyone uses lesson takes apart the three loops that do the most work.
20 Feet from Stardom (2013): harmony is holding your own note
Directed by Morgan Neville. A documentary about backing singers, the voices behind the lead on famous records, among them Darlene Love, Merry Clayton and Lisa Fischer; one of its stories is Clayton’s voice on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”. A backing singer’s craft is harmony: singing a different note from the lead, often a third above or below it, and holding that note while the melody pulls somewhere else. That is interval hearing done live. The ear training lesson starts with the major third against the minor third, and the singing intervals lesson asks you to sing one.
Whiplash (2014): rushing or dragging
Directed by Damien Chazelle. A young jazz drummer at a conservatory plays under an abusive bandleader, and the film follows how far he will go to be great. The cruelty is the drama, not a teaching method. Take its ear for time instead. The bandleader stops rehearsals over tiny errors and demands to know whether the drummer was rushing or dragging, ahead of the beat or behind it. Those are the two directions every timing mistake takes, and knowing yours is the first step to fixing it. The tap the rhythm exercise and the metronome lab both tell you whether your taps land early or late: the same question, without the shouting.
Sound of Metal (2019): sound is vibration before it is hearing
Directed by Darius Marder. Riz Ahmed plays Ruben, the drummer in a loud two-piece metal band, who suddenly loses most of his hearing. The sound design is the lesson: it keeps switching between what the room sounds like and what Ruben hears, muffled and distant, so the audience loses the sound with him. Sound is a vibration travelling through the air before it is anything you hear, and hearing is only the body’s way of receiving it. The lesson on sound and its properties starts there, with something vibrating.
Tár (2022): what a conductor’s hands are for
Directed by Todd Field. Cate Blanchett plays Lydia Tár, chief conductor of a leading Berlin orchestra, who is preparing to record Mahler’s Fifth Symphony while her life comes apart. Tár is fictional, set among real names and real music. Watch the rehearsals for what a conductor does: set the tempo before anyone plays, show where every bar begins, and shape how loud and how fast each passage goes. In every standard beat pattern, beat one is a downward stroke, the downbeat, and the last beat rises into the next bar, the upbeat, so a hundred players can see where they are. The rhythm basics lesson explains what a bar is and why beat one is the one you feel.
What to practise after watching
- Keeping time (Whiplash, School of Rock, Tár): the rhythm basics lesson, then the tap the rhythm exercise.
- Hearing intervals and harmony (Amadeus, 20 Feet from Stardom): the ear training lesson.
- Chord progressions and improvisation (Bird, Once): the progressions everyone uses lesson.
- What sound physically is (This Is Spinal Tap, Sound of Metal): the lesson on sound and its properties.
- Scales and melody (The Sound of Music): the scales lesson.