The Color Purple

Just like the plot of the film, the music within "The Color Purple" is characterized by emotional lows and joyous highs. The music in the beginning of the movie is innocent and childlike, characterized by instruments that invoke emotion, such as strings and woodwinds. Underneath the seemingly childlike music, the music has a deep emotional complexity that foreshadows the trials and tribulations Celie will grow through.

At the beginning of the film the music is mostly underscoring,with the exception of a wedding scene in which the organ music is diegetic. Also, to establish time and place, some more folksy instruments are used, such as the harmonica which can be heard clearly during the scene in which a young Celie cleans the house, or the banjo, which is present during the cloudy day when in Celie sees a drunken Shug Avery for the first time.

Certain characters don't necessarily have a leitmotif, but the music changes drastically to represent them. Sofia, for example, spunky and sassy, especial in comparison to the meek Celie, is represented with equally spunky music. Shug Avery, the sexy jazz singer, is characterized by a saxophone music. One hears her music even before she appears on screen, when Mister gets ready to visit Shug as he leaves, the nightclub music is played. Throughout the film, that nightclub music is played whenever Shug is around, and sometimes it is diegetic, such as the record player when she's in the bathtub or when she sings to miss Celie at Harpo's club.

As the Miss Celie grows and the time period changes, the music also matures to indicate the passage of time. When the time is shown as 1922, I first noticed that the music began to change from the strings and woodwinds of the beginning of the movie to Ragtime music, which is more appropriate for the time period.

In another scene to establish time, a record player plays "Noel" over the radio and then the diegetic music changes to underscoring and plays during the period when a considerably less spunky Sofia, broken by circumstance, is greeted by her family.

Overall, the music in "The Color Purple" reflects the joie de vivre of certain characters and moments while simultaneously representing the tragedy of the characters lives.