Stuff That I Have Noticed #54 – Meshuga Movie Music Mess

Elizabeth and I recently became immersed in the series Reign on Netflix. In case you don’t know about it the subject is Mary Queen of Scots. The show is historical drama “light” or as I dubbed it, the dinner theatre version of Mary’s difficult life. And we loved it.

But that’s not what this is about. This is about music in movies. I’ll get back to Reign in a minute.

As a former musician – maybe if one was ever a musician one always is – I’m very aware of music in movies. When used artistically, either original scoring or source music, it greatly enhances not simply the tone or mood of a scene. The music can also lend a sense of time and place.

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta in The Shining and the most iconically profound mood setters in history. Johann Strauss II’s Blue Danube Waltz and Ligeti’s Requiem and Lux Aeterna are perfectly placed but it’s Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra that defines 2001, a Space Odyssey. All were evocative of a mood or a period or a place; the sounds related to and enhanced what the eyes were taking in.

British period pieces with source music by Handel or a clever composer who evokes him, the Wagnerian sounds in Germanic films (and Apocalypse Now!)… I could go on but I’m confident that you’ve got my drift by now.

The first time I experienced such a sonic dislocation (the first one that sticks in my mind anyhow) was Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! which I love. This movie really gave me a jolt. My first thought after it started was: “Nature Boy was written long before I thought it was.”

It soon became obvious that it wasn’t because much of the movie was underscored with music that was created many decades after the period depicted therein. But this picture was so fanciful and sort of abstract that the temporal musical dislocation didn’t bother me.

Reign on the other hand – while it could be called “history lite” – comprises stories of real people in a real time period who did real things and affected real world events. And as much as I appreciate the creative skills in every category of film making which in this movie are all excellent, suddenly hearing a song (with lyrics!) from the twentieth or twenty-first century takes my mind right out of the sixteenth.

I do not want to denigrate the work of the fine artists who have created this series, I’m simply using it as a current example of this trend. But there’s an ancient expression that applies when there is a glaring flaw in a thing that is otherwise worthwhile: “A fly in the ointment.”

According to phrases.org “a fly in the ointment” is a small but irritating flaw that spoils the whole. This sort of musical interference in an otherwise first rate piece of creative work certainly doesn’t spoil the whole but it does weaken it for me. Living in the Past by Jethro Tull doesn’t work when I’m seeing the past.

However* since I’m watching the movie – whatever it happens to be – and I can’t re-edit the sound track, I endeavor to put these reservations out of my mind and enjoy the show.

* Every time I see or use that word I think of Professor Irwin Corey.