Underscoring

… or “How Hollywood Has Changed Theater”

OK, I have absolutely no proof that it has anything to do with Hollywood, but that’s where I see the trends as coming from.  Not that this is a bad thing, it’s just a thing.

We’re all familiar with underscoring from any movie made in the last 40 or 50 years.  That music underneath a scene that helps build tension when the good guys are going into a risky situation, or feelings of victory as they’re winning (whatever that means), or helps make everyone teary in that touching moment.  Note that I do not mean a character’s theme, generally, I mean music that exists to elicit an emotional response.

Using Star Wars as an illustration, the Imperial March of Vader’s Theme are used to introduce the character and then to underscore his appearances.  They may help set a mood, but they’re more closely tied to the character than the mood.  Obi-wan’s theme, on the other hand, after his death, quickly becomes an underscore meant to induce feelings of loss, loneliness, and maybe a bit of “dammit, we’re going to win for him.”  But really, the music in Star Wars is far more sound track and far less underscoring – while it may inspire emotional response, that isn’t really what it’s good at.

To pick on another movie I’ve seen recently, in Pacific Rim the vast majority of the music really is underscoring.  Yes, the various bits of theme are associated with various characters, but not strictly so.  When kaiju appear there’s scary music, when the jaegers are heading out there’s triumphant music, when the jeagers are getting their butts kicked there’s scary music again, then the jaegers are kicking butt there’s triumphant music.  The movie gets a real visceral response, even out of scenes that are otherwise pretty normal for a modern SF/action flick.  This is part of why it got pretty poorly reviewed, and yet has a pretty serious cult following.

So how does this all apply to theater?  Doing precisely the same thing theatrically as they’ve been doing in Hollywood for decades is really coming in to its own, and really gives the opportunity to add a whole new dimension to our shows.

It’s also where my own skills and experiences are thinnest, so I can speak more conceptually here than anything.

My first experience with the concept was doing a production of The Diary of Anne Frank where the Director had a really solid feel for what he wanted and could really communicate it with me.  He wanted to underscore the readings from her diary, staged as her in a spotlight and everyone else frozen in the dark, with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.  I spent some time looking for other options, but that’s what we went with, and my biggest lesson was that I didn’t know nearly enough about classical music, and my second lesson was that I didn’t understand his vision until after I saw it done.  He wanted the juxtaposition of the terrified words of Frank, the horrors that the Germans had committed, with the hauntingly beautiful music… that the Germans had created.  It stabbed right through you.

I managed to use the concept years later when I underscored the murders in Jekyll & Hyde with a boys’ choir version of Barber’s Adagio for Strings.  Unusual that I managed to do this in a musical, this is mostly used as a straight play concept.

This has lead to an entire new focus for the field of Sound Design.  College Sound Design programs are turning up with a focus on composing your own scores, precisely for this purpose.  Seems to be that composition programs have existed forever, but composition purely for the underscoring effects is new.  It is becoming expected that resident sound designers at major regional companies will be able to write music, as well as be able to wrangle massive sound boards and fleets of wireless mics.

Where does this leave us?  I’m not really sure.  I don’t expect this will become de rigueur in the world in which I play – community theater.  It’s really quite beyond most sound designers, and those who can write their own are going places.  Using other people’s music is problematic, since getting the rights to incorporate their work into your own (“Grand Rights”) is difficult to impossible.  I expect we will see a rise in the illegal use of others’ music under the guise of “fair use” (wrong!) or the ever popular but fictional “if you only use x seconds of it, that’s allowed, right?” (No, it isn’t) as Directors run into the concept and want to do it themselves.