The music in the play serves to fulfill its cinematic and expressionistic demands, as Williams suggests, to “give

emotional emphasis to suitable passages.” While examining the extraliterary, intermedial musical insertions made by
Williams, it is necessary to separately focus on, first, the recurrent theme ‘The Glass Menagerie”, and second, the other
instances of music appearing in the play. The theme, Williams describes, must be a music that is “the lightest, most
delicate music in the world and perhaps the saddest. It expresses the surface vivacity of life with the underlying strain
of immutable sorrow.” Structurally, it provides spaciotemporal coherence, acting as a “thread of connection and
allusion between the narrator in his separate point in time and space and the subject of his story”, uniting the
aforementioned ‘tableaux’ of Tom’s memory. It contributes significantly in creating a liminal, subjective, and
dreamlike atmosphere, for in memory “everything seems to happen to music.”
The original score for the play, composed by Paul Bowles for the 1946 premiere of the play, was initially thought to be
lost. Upon its retrieval from the archives of the University of Illinois, Henry Mancini arranged the preexisting material
for Paul Newman’s 1987 film adaptation. Mancini’s arrangement, though orchestral, preserves Bowles’s original in the
beginning of his score. The music operates, affecting the audience subconsciously. Williams explains in his production
notes to The Glass Menagerie the emotional impact that the theme must have, and Bowles’s composition
communicates the “lovely fragility of glass that is [Laura’s] image”. A solo violin plays a lilting melody, soft and
expressive, evoking an intense sense of nostalgia and a tenderness, which is characteristic to this play, and more
specifically to Laura. Recapitulated, the melody modulates to a minor key, building an awareness of aching loss and
hopelessness. It is proleptic, pointing forward at the final catastrophe. The theme, so inextricably linked to Laura’s
personality, is accompanied by a piano which lends it the acoustic quality similar to a music box, connecting it to
Williams’ ideas of “circus music”, while some strategically placed high-pitched staccatos mimic the effect of tinkling
glass. Even without explicitly indicating the abject vulnerability of Laura’s breakable universe, the music impacts the
audience in such a way from the very beginning, that they too realise that upon looking at it “how beautiful it is, and
how easily it can be broken.”
There are numerous other instances where Williams utilizes music to complement character portraits, make subtle
commentary upon situations, or simply for heightening the sensory artistic effect of the play. It is important, therefore,
to take into consideration some of these cases. In Scene 4, following Laura’s departure from the apartment, there hangs
an ominous silence between Tom and Amanda – an aftermath of the previous night’s quarrel. Before Tom apologises,
strains of Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ are heard, which anticipates Tom’s attempt at restoring momentary peace through an
apology. It also adds to the image of Laura as similar to that of the Virgin Mary. In Scene 5, the strains of ‘The World
is Waiting for Sunrise’ wafts from the Paradise Dance Hall immediately before Tom’s long monologue that describes
the drudgery of postmodern urban life where music as this is “the only compensation for lives that passed like [his],
without any change or adventure.” The monologue ends with him declaring “All the world was waiting for
bombardments!”, a variation of the words of the song. The monologue, framed by these two lines, works on the
principle of contrast – the energetic and optimistic dance tune is only a façade, a fleeting illusion for people like Tom;
the bombardments of reality are imminent. Later in the scene, the music changes to a “tango that has a minor and
somewhat ominous tone”, foregrounding Tom’s assertion regarding how the outside world perceives Laura as
someone crippled, both physically and psychologically, as someone trapped in her world of glass ornaments, removed
completely from the reality of life.
Throughout the scenes, the music acts as an extraliterary cue, conditioning the audience’s emotional response to the
play. The latter part of the concluding scene has the music acting as a mural-like backdrop – changes in volume, key
modulations, and changes in tempo occur in tandem with the events of the scene. It explicitly reflects Laura’s state of
mind at various instants. Furthermore, the sound effects of a thunderstorm continue from the end of Scene 6 to the
middle of this scene. Juxtaposed with melody and the ‘La Golondrina’ waltz, it simultaneously represents the duality
of the two worlds in the play – the one of glass, and that of the bombardments. An “ominous cracking sound in the
sky” prefaces Jim’s departure from the house. The implacable roar of reality drowns the tinkling of glass. The sky
falls. Tom’s final monologue, much like a cinematic voiceover, is counterpointed by the rising dance hall music,
connecting his narration in the present to the synchronized pantomime of his memory. Tom had “turned back time”
and as Laura blows out the candles, the audience is anchored to reality once again.