BREAKING NEWS: Clandestine Plot Information Delivered Musically

We might not even notice the music accompanying a movie or television show, but that soundtrack has power. The music gives us information, for example, when the music turns ominous in a police drama such as "Law & Order," we know someone is about to give up the ghost. The music can establish a place or time, too. Without taking the time to consciously identify a clarinet and accordion with an 'Oompah' bass, we instinctively know that we're in some part of Germany. The other night during the Grammy Awards on TV, I was instantly transported back to the 1970s when the band Chicago began to perform. The people and places I knew then were conjured to the front of my imagination, just from hearing those familiar songs. Close your eyes and listen if you don't know what I mean (this will only work if you were, in fact, a thinking person in the 1970s).

I'm convinced that the theme music from the extraordinarily popular PBS series "Downton Abbey" has something to do with its success. First of all, it sets the scene for the viewer; we know just from the music that this is going to be a drama, and that the characters (or at least some of them) are going to be aristocratic. Then, it's so darn lush and intriguing that we're drawn in to the program even if we are not familiar with the story. I know this is true for me: I react like one of Pavlov's dogs whenever I hear it!

Have you ever heard of circular breathing? Very few musicians can pull this off, and those that do practice for years before finding success. Very simply, the musician plays by blowing out through his or her instrument, and at the same time breathes in through their nose! This is an effective way of creating tension in music because the listener expects to hear slight pauses where a musician breathes. Just like with language, music has phrases and sentences, and these are set apart by small pauses (commas and periods). I've enlisted everyone's favorite curly-haired soprano saxophonist to demonstrate this to you:

Musicians in bands and orchestras can work around having to learn this technique if more than one person is playing a given part. They will work out ahead of time which player will breathe where, and the other will continue to play. The result should be a seamless line of music without pauses which creates tension. Music is all about tension and release, after all.

Richard Wagner, King of the Leitmotif

The idea of using music to communicate information is not new. Richard Wagner was a revolutionary opera composer who assigned leimotifs or themes to characters, places, and even things, and then wove them together to support his opera story. So there's a character named Siegfried who has a theme, and he has a sword which has a name (Nothung) and a leitmotif. When Siegfried thinks about his sword, we'll probably hear Nothung's leimotif. Even if we don't consciously notice the sword's theme, our brain processes it. Wagner uses this technique of weaving together his many leitmotifs in all of his operas, but most prominently in his masterpiece four-opera Ring Cycle. The leimotifs are used to identify concepts and telegraph information to us before the characters on the stage even know what's going on. Here's the brass section of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra explaining and demonstrating the leitmotifs from Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle:

From now on, when you watch a movie (or opera) listen for these techniques and let me know what you find!