8. the Rich Culture and History of TV Music
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How Film & TV Music Communicate – Vol.1 Text © Brian Morrell 2013 Chapter 8 T H E R I C H C U L T U R E A N D H I S T O R Y O F T V M U S I C The history of music is the history of the world through music. Music is a product of its time. If you look hard enough music tends to be littered with clues betraying the age it was created. That said, film music, especially orchestral film music, could be considered to be almost timeless; if you watched ET: The Extra Terrestrial , a film from thirty years ago, what dates it is not the music. Thirty six years after Star Wars was made, it is not the music that dates it; orchestral film music is generally speaking ageless and enduring. Music composed for TV, however, is much more a product of its age and, one might say, a victim of its age. Quite often if you play old TV themes, the music will take you back to the era in which it was written. That is because the music is usually drawn from what was culturally and stylistically popular at the time. There are other important distinctions between television and film. Movies are scaled toward big images; television is a more intimate experience. In movies the on-screen drama is a shared experience between the movie and its captive audience. Distractions are few. In television the images are smaller and TV shows suffer the disruption of ad breaks and a much smaller, less attentive audience, some of whom might get up and leave the viewing during the show. Thus, composers sometimes have the option to be more subtle in film than is possible in most television. As TV drama budgets have grown some TV shows have become more filmic. Big budget shows like Lost and 24 tend more toward a filmic approach in music, which sometimes makes it more timeless, unique and less wedded to the age in which it was created. That said, the time given to composers of TV shows is even less than that given to film composers, with writers often expected to turn round an hour’s worth of TV music in a week; there is little time for deep conceptualization or for composers to get all their points across, so they are more wedded to stylistic, generic writing to achieve their point. Also the scale of instrumentation and time given to production is generally inferior in TV music. So despite a more filmic approach being encouraged, television will always be television. Also, whereas film music has stayed reasonably loyal to the orchestra as the main vehicle for musical expression, again, TV music is often a snapshot of our time. This chapter will analyse the compositional styles and emotional impact of music from a wide and diverse range of TV shows. The aim is to expose specific consistent stylistic and compositional methods and to analyse and interpret how music communicates in TV. Music Analysed: Black Beauty (Dennis King) Coronation Street (Eric Spear) The Avengers (Laurie Johnson) Tomorrow’s World (1980s) (Paul Hart) Mr Benn (Don Warren) Father Ted (Neil Hannon) The Simpsons (Danny Elfman) The Life and Times of David Lloyd George (Ennio Morricone) The Sweeney (Harry South) Tales of the Unexpected , Man in a Suitcase & Dr. Who (Ron Grainer) The Persuaders (John Barry) Kojak (Billy Goldenberg) Ironside (Quincy Jones) Starsky & Hutch (Tom Scott) The Streets of San Francisco (Pat Williams) The Professionals (Laurie Johnson) Hill Street Blues (Mike Post) Harry’ Game (Ciarán Brennan and Pól Brennan) Emmerdale Farm (Tony Hatch) The X Files (Mark Snow) Soap (George Aliceson Tipton) Brookside (Dave Roylance) EastEnders (Simon May) Bouquet of Barbed Wire (Dennis Farnon) Owen MD (Johnny Pearson) The Odd Couple (Neil Hefti) Match of the Day (Barry Stoller) Dynasty (Bill Conti) Blake’s 7 (Dudley Simpson) Thriller (Laurie Johnson) Keeping up Appearances (Nick Ingham) Red Dwarf (Howard Goodall) Poirot (Christopher Gunning) ER (James Newton Howard) Zen (Adrian Johnston) 1 How Film & TV Music Communicate – Vol.1 Text © Brian Morrell 2013 THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE Ennio Morricone The Life and Times of David Lloyd George was a political drama series broadcast in 1981. Arguably it was more famous for its evocative, haunting theme, which entered the British pop charts and its cultural consciousness. Since then the theme has been used on numerous productions. It has achieved the kind of following and longevity the show itself never managed. As ever the most important aspect for us is how the music manages to create and convey the right emotion. Below is an abbreviated transcription. Fig.1 Audio - The Life and Times of David Lloyd George High Strings Harp Piano There is more than a nod toward the recognisable harmonic characteristics of Baroque, but beyond this obvious observation there are a couple of other characteristics which make it distinctive and memorable. There are two interesting melodic points where the melody line hits intervals which are crucial in articulating the emotional content of the music. First of all the first melodic note of bar five and six states the A note (the important and descriptive min3rd and 7 th respectively). The harmonic interaction between the two A notes is notable due to their changing intervallic contexts. Fig.2 th 3rd 7 2 How Film & TV Music Communicate – Vol.1 Text © Brian Morrell 2013 What is also notable here is the A melody note over the Bm chord dropping to the D melody note on beat two. This interval of a bare 5 th would normally sound quite stark but representing as it does the 7 th leading to the min3 rd the melody displays emotion. The A to D transition therefore sounds simultaneously both warm and striking. Also the tension and release between the C#sus4 and C# chords is particularly poignant given that the sus4 chord lasts an entire bar before it resolves. Running through all the points mentioned is the exquisite instrumentation (piano, harp and strings) which breathes life into the various harmonies. Fig.3 One of the most effective aspects of the first few bars of this piece is the cross-rhythmic piano part (lower stave, fig.3), which plays six continuous straight crotchets per bar underneath the other parts which play the more standard 12/8 oriented rhythms. Although mathematically the six crotchets ‘stack-up’ to the 12 quavers in each bar, they repeatedly create a mesmerizing sense of unease. The top two staves (piano and harp) ‘line up’ but of the six crotchets in each bar on the bottom piano stave, only two line up (underneath the first and third group of three quavers). Although these cross rhythms do not create an uncomfortable listening experience they do very subtly and slightly skew our aural perception. There are, effectively, two separately functioning rhythmic entities. One is triplet-based and has real momentum and inertia, whereas the bottom stave cross-beat piano part has an entrancing exquisite monotony. Television as Patrons of Music In the same way the Church was the biggest patron of music centuries ago, and illegal drinking venues were the patrons of early Jazz, so TV and Film have become and still, to a degree, remain the main commercial patrons of instrumental music. Composers of many of the 1970s TV shows had studied music academically and had a thorough knowledge of the essentials such as harmony, counterpoint, orchestration and arranging. Although many of the themes were ‘cheesy’ by today’s standards, this was simply because it mirrored the styles and approach of music popular at that time. Many of the TV composers in the 1970s wrote copiously for library music companies and some of them played with the leading big bands, groups and orchestras around at the time. The biggest single stylistic influence in film music over its history has been the classical tradition, but certainly one of the biggest influences in television music in the 60s and 70s was jazz; many of the great TV composers were jazz musicians, composers and arrangers. The excellent musical pedigree lots of them shared came to the fore in the memorable themes and incidental music they created for many of the landmark shows of the time. Music for the moving image is rationalised often not by how ‘good’ the themes sounded as music but what the function of the music was and how well it addressed and served that function. The main prerequisites in TV were, and still are to an extent, that the images and characters are brought instantly and vividly to mind by the music. Essentially music ‘functioned’ as a second way of remembering TV shows. Hearing the music would trigger a memory of the characters, pictures, context and narrative. Back in the 1970s music’s function was also largely duplicative; music sounded exactly how you might imagine it ought to sound for the scene and for the show. For this and other reasons many of them passed into public consciousness. Today music is sometimes less obvious and more oblique in its function but back then most things were ‘on the nose’. 3 How Film & TV Music Communicate – Vol.1 Text © Brian Morrell 2013 One important reason thematic music was remembered was partly due to the fact that it could be hummed or sung, and in some cases it could even be sung to the name of the show. Many themes from the 1970s and 80s have remained unchanged over the years, save for a few new arrangements; Dr Who being perhaps the most obvious example.