The Library Music Familiarity Curse

A quick clarification before we begin. While talking about library music here, we’re including classical tunes and rock music that has been reworked and sampled for the opening titles of films and television shows. While not library music as such, these types of music are used in much the same way, to the same effect.

Film and television music operate in a curious space. On TV, a familiar theme tune can bring people running into the room, a signal that the programme is beginning. The music that plays over the opening titles of a movie can be more memorable than the film itself, or else a totem for a franchise. Music can provide emotive high points, a signal to the audience that the tables have turned, that the hero is about to gain the upper hand or that the action is turning up a notch. Look at how the James Bond theme is scattered across the movies in the series or how a film’s opening theme will suddenly blast out in the middle of the film to announce that shit is about to get real. Sometimes, in the hands of awful hacks and bad filmmakers, it’s all too much, part of a general overkill of sound and fury. But at its best, the film theme can boost emotional high points and act as a signifier of continuation through a franchise. But not everyone can afford an original score. That’s where library music comes in.

Library music provides an off-the-shelf option at a lower cost than hiring a composer and musicians. There’s an endless supply of original compositions that exist solely to provide soundtracks to anything and everything, from lightweight pap to heavy drama. Some tracks work as main themes, and others provide background atmosphere. Unlike the iconic themes of major movies, the job of library music is to be anonymous while doing the job at hand. At best, the library music track should sound as though it was made for the film or TV show in question without really drawing too much attention to itself. That doesn’t always work.

If you are a TV broadcaster that has a blanket agreement with the PRS, ASCAP or similar – which most mainstream broadcasters will have – it is far more attractive to use a piece of existing music as the theme tune to your show than it is to pay someone to compose something original. This is especially true for non-fiction programming – documentary and news shows, game shows and the like where the theme tune might not be as big a consideration as it is for a fictional series. Even those drama and comedy shows with original theme tunes will probably use library music or instrumental rock music as the incidental soundtrack because there is little point in paying someone to compose an entire series score. During the 1980s, you could probably play Pink Floyd Bingo, ticking off whenever tracks from their albums were used as the backing music for everything from documentaries to travel shows.

But if a show is successful and long-running, then whatever piece of library music you use during the opening titles will become forever connected to that programme. Play it to anyone and they will immediately know what show it is from – it becomes an indelible part of that series, the original identity of the music lost forever. Back when record labels issued budget compilations of film and TV themes by assorted orchestras, these supposedly generic pieces of music often appeared as ‘the theme from…’. Unless it is a particularly well-known piece of classical music or a pop hit that is known in its own right, the music will forever be ‘the theme from…’ for generations of people in the country where the show in question was shown.

So it is always startling to hear one of these pieces of music appearing out of context. Often, it comes as a revelation, especially if the music in question has been lifted from a rock classic that the listener was unfamiliar with. As a young kid, I assumed that the music played at the start of Top of the Pops was an original piece. It was only years later that I discovered that it was a cover version of Led Zeppelin‘s Whole Lotta Love. But that can be put down to the ignorance of youth – they didn’t play much Zep on daytime radio when I was seven. More fascinating was the discovery that the frantic theme music to Sunday afternoon current affairs show Weekend World was a sampling of Mountain’s Nantucket Sleigh Ride – a much more succinct rendering than the live version that sprawled over two sides of the band’s Twin Peaks LP. Upon discovering this fact, I sought out the original track, only to find that this brief musical phrase was the only exciting bit of an otherwise ponderous slice of heavy rock.

The familiar connection of a piece of orchestral library music to a particular show can be especially problematic when it turns up in a movie. Plenty of low-budget movies have saved on the expense of an original soundtrack by licencing library music, and this can sometimes have unexpected results. The 1979 slasher/vigilante/Vietnam oddity Delirium briefly made its way onto the Video Nasties list, but for many viewers in the UK, the drama of the film’s major plot twist – the revelation that the psycho killer is a rogue member of a star chamber-style extra-judiciary organisation – was diminished by the fact that the ominous music chosen was the appropriately titled Approaching Menace by Neil Richardson. A fine choice, except that it is also the theme tune to the long-running quiz show Mastermind, a show that everyone who saw the film would be familiar with. Inevitably, the incongruous appearance of a familiar piece of music resulted in guffaws rather than chills.

This is unfortunate, to say the least. The filmmakers were unlikely to be aware of the tune’s British TV connections and it’s a great, appropriate piece for the scenes in question. But there you have it – it’s the risk you take when using library music. Not only might your music choices be well known in a different context in some countries but the tune in question might well pop up in other films. Even classical works are not immune from unfortunate connections. British audiences watching Caligula were surprised to hear the theme tune from the historical soap opera The Onedin Line accompanying the love scenes between Caligula and his sister Drusilla. In fact, this was Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia by Aram Khachaturian, part of the ballet Spartacus. While fans of Russian ballet might have been aghast at either use, the music was considered to be obscure enough for general audiences to be repurposed. To add to the hilarity, the music was then adapted into a vocal performance – complete with a disco remix – for the Caligula soundtrack LP.

While some of the use of library music has been inspired (Night of the Living Dead springs to mind; Dawn of the Dead less so), a lot of it has been lazy, with jobbing researchers grabbing whatever will do from the first selection that comes along and vaguely fits whatever their project is. Even TV shows in the same country that were being broadcast around the same time can end up using identical pieces – children’s TV soap Grange Hill and celebrity game show Give Us a Clue shared the same theme tune – Chicken Man by Alan Hawkshaw – at the end of the 1970s. Presumably, the producers of the latter show – which was first broadcast a year after the former – decided that no one would notice. To be fair, I’m not sure anyone did. To be fair, with so much to choose from, it’s probably unfair to expect anyone to spend hours and hours looking for just the right piece – so when someone puts the effort in, it is very much appreciated.

Of course, some pieces turn up again and again. There’s a lot of fun to be had in recognising familiar bits of background music in TV shows and movies – as well as seeking these tunes out on library music collections and putting a name to both music and composer. Composers like Brian Bennett, Alan Hawkshaw, Ron Geesin and others show that while this is work created for solely commercial reasons, with no control over where it ends up (I wonder if these composers are surprised to discover that their work has appeared on several porn movies, for instance), it is far from substandard. The fact that out of the endless hours of music out there, the same pieces turn up again and again might be a sign of laziness by film and TV producers or a tribute to the quality of those pieces – or simply down to one track purchase being retooled again and again.

These days, a lot of low-budget films are soundtracked by jobbing bands or generic synth scores put together through software like Garageband. Producers have learned that if they are going to use library music, it’s best to avoid the overly strident – unless you are making a point of using the classic tracks featured on older movies in a moment of cultural referencing. Newer library music has yet to reach the point of ubiquity where it becomes immediately recognisable – though that may yet happen, the more the same pieces are used.

DAVID FLINT

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