Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

The wishing song the princess sings at the well in the castle courtyard and the serenade the Prince answers with from beyond the wall run together as a single track. The two leads' first meeting is itself an exchange of song.

• Listen for the echo passage, where the well sings back the ends of the princess's lines. A solo becomes a form of calling and answering (call and response), turning the scene into one of a lonely girl reaching out to the world.
• Adriana Caselotti's voice is high and slender, and the light tremor at the ends of notes (vibrato) sounds like birdsong. It was a voice deliberately chosen to differ from the weighty production of adult singers of the time.
• When it moves into the Prince's song, the range drops and the melody grows long and even. Harry Stockwell's courtly, baritone-leaning timbre pairs with the girl's song to create the moment when two worlds meet.
• While the Prince sings, the princess hides behind the balcony. The song goes on, but the two never sing together, a hint that this meeting is not yet over.

The scene in which the princess and the forest animals clean the dwarfs' cottage. Housework becomes play, and each of the animals' gestures becomes a beat.

• Movements like the squirrel's tail-flicking and the deer's plate-licking land squarely on the beat. This is where the technique of matching on-screen motion to the music beat by beat (Mickey Mousing) draws laughs even in a feature.
• There is a moment when the princess can't whistle herself and a bird whistles in her place. This small device, alternating human voice and birdsong, adds a playful touch to the song.
• The melody is built from the repetition of short phrases, so you can sing along after a single hearing. Churchill's knack for short, catchy melodies, honed since the days of the shorts, shows through plainly.
• Also included on the first soundtrack album, released by Victor in 1938, it is one of the songs that reached the public outside the film first.

The march the seven dwarfs sing as they file home after a day's work in the mine. The audience meets the dwarfs through song before the princess does.

• The footsteps of the dwarfs walking with pickaxes on their shoulders are the beat itself. The steady, two-by-two rhythm of the march drives the whole song, so that it sounds like walking itself.
• The chant-like refrain and the whistling come round again and again. Simple repetition, like a work song, binds the seven into a single band.
• Many voices overlap, yet each has its own timbre, so you can hear who is who. It was arranged so that the voice actors' individuality would not be erased even within the chorus.
• Heard right after the cleaning song before it, it reveals a design in which two work songs each introduce one group and bring them together in the same cottage.

A little party the dwarfs throw with homemade instruments on the first night after taking in the princess. A comical yodel becomes a welcoming ceremony that makes a stranger one of the family.

• An Alpine singing style that flips the voice to leap rapidly between high and low notes (yodel) breaks in between the lines of the song. It is a choice that tints the forest-cottage setting with the color of mountain folk song.
• Each dwarf takes a different instrument and a different sound, so every time the sound changes, the character on screen changes. The music works like a set of introduction cards for the seven characters.
• The lyrics run on as nonsensical wordplay, and thanks to that absurdity the song warms the mood rather than moving the story forward.
• When the number ends, it passes straight into the quiet dream song. Setting commotion and stillness side by side makes the next song sound all the deeper.

The song the princess sings, as if in a dream, when the dwarfs ask for a story at the end of the merrymaking. It is the film's quiet center and a promise aimed at its ending.

• A three-beat dance rhythm (waltz) that turns one-two-three holds the song up like a rocking cradle. That is why it sounds less like a song for dancing than a song for dreaming.
• Unlike the short, repeating melodies of the earlier numbers, this song is built on a long-breathed line. Here, if nowhere else, Churchill wrote with a breath close to that of an art song.
• After Miles Davis played it on the 1961 album of the same name, it became a tune jazz musicians love to take up (a jazz standard). Many recordings survive, by Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans and others.
• It placed 19th on the American Film Institute's (AFI) list of 100 American movie songs.
• This melody returns in the final scene, for chorus and orchestra. Fix it well in your memory here, and its weight at the ending will sound different.

The background music for the scene in which the witch hands the princess the apple at the cottage window. The tender music of the pie-baking scene that came before is slowly turned inside out here.

• This is background music without song (underscore). As the witch's hoarse voice and the princess's clear one trade lines, the orchestra piles up unease beneath them.
• The music grows urgent as the birds peck at the witch and the animals run off. In effect, the music tells us in advance even what is happening off-screen.
• Heard straight after the previous track, “Makin' Pies,” it lets you feel the music's temperature drop from warmth to chill within the same kitchen scene.
• Low-register instruments and colliding harmonies (dissonance) wrap the moment the apple is offered, making a beautiful red apple sound dangerous.

The chorus that flows over the grieving dwarfs, and the film's final music. Voices arriving after the silence fulfill the promise the film has been building.

• This hymn is a chorus in which several voices move slowly together in the same rhythm, like a church hymn (a chorale). For a moment the fairy-tale forest feels like a chapel.
• The scene just before the chorus has almost no dialogue and almost no music. Because the voices enter after that hush, the chorus's first sound seems unusually loud and deep.
• In the final music, the melody of the dream song from Chapter 4 returns. Through this technique of singing an earlier song again to recall its meaning (reprise), a melody that began as a wish now carries a different weight.
• A melody once sung alone unfolds broadly for chorus and orchestra as the film closes. One person's dream, in effect, becomes everyone's song.