After sitting on my frustration long enough, I finally decided to put some sense into the madness, and came up with a bit of meta on the concept of music as an emotional manipulator in the medium of television.


If there's one thing I don't like in life, it's being told what to do. Call me stubborn, but it is what it is. I started to notice myself being musically manipulated for the first time many years ago. I was in a movie theater watching 'Titanic' when the ever-eery first notes of "My Heart Will Go on" danced across the pan flute and into my senses. From that moment on, I was a goner. I still don't think I've ever cried as much during any one entertainment experience. It was almost painful how the music was so obviously chosen to heighten my feelings of sadness and loss. I had been beautifully, artfully, and totally musically manipulated, and I fell for it hook, line, and singer.

To be sure, being musically manipulated may suggest something that is unpleasant or unwelcome in nature, but on the contrary, this may be the one case in which being told what to do or how to feel, is actually something we can welcome with open ears. I mean, can you really picture watching television with no score underwriting the impressions and moments that you've come to love? I know I can't, nor do I want to. So to clarify, musical manipulation is not necessarily a bad thing at all. I like to pose the idea that TV musical coordinators know exactly what they are doing in selecting scores for their shows, and may be just as important as the writers who pen the dialogue for our favorite shows each week. Yes, I said just as important.

This first installment of my study on musical manipulation will focus on an introductory session into identifying the musical cues that you may have been unintentionally following during the viewing of your most beloved television programs for years. After reading this, my hope is that perhaps you can more knowingly recognize these musical cues and enjoy identifying them as I do.

Did you know that music at it's very base level is already telling us something just through it's definitive nature? To even get to our ears, the performer is following a set of markings known as dynamics. Dynamics are simply musical cues that tell the performer how the notes are to be performed. For example, here are a few such dynamics that might grace a standard musical score. In many instances with music used for TV, these terms are not just referring to the activity of the music, but the action of the characters in a particular scene, if musical manipulation is in use:

Television producers long ago discovered that the addition of music into pivotal scenes can not only enhance a moment, but actually move the audience to feel in a certain direction. Two characters you may never have considered as a viable romantic pair suddenly become a lot more likely candidates, as the swell of violins surrounds deep eye contact, and BOOM! A new couple is born. I'll admit that this is the part of musical manipulation that I bristle at. When watching a TV show, if I hear what I have come to know as "ship-making music" (pious instrumental movement or obvious romantic tonality) during a scene between two people that I'd rather not ever see as a couple? I'm worried and alarmed and, often, annoyed. The music serves as a red flag, of sorts, for me, to tell me "Hey! Look out! Something is about to happen with these two!" Sure enough, I find the music to be incredibly reliable in cases like these. If I hear the opening stirrings of a sympathetic or moving piece of music, I can tell we're in for a "moment." Depending on what's playing upon my screen, I am either excited or filled with dread, however, when I hear these musical cues. I've even been known to shout at my TV screen "No! Not the mood music! Not now! Not these two!" at various moments in my TV-viewing history.


What would an informed observation on this topic be without a few tangible examples to illustrate my point? Here are three that I think capture the idea of "musical manipulation" fairly well:


• This scene from 'Grey's Anatomy' is fairly iconic by now. To set the scene, medical intern Izzie (Katherine Heigl) got involved in a forbidden love affair with heart patient Denny (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). He has had disappointment after disappointment in his search for a desperately needed heart to fulfill his necessary transplant. But now, he has gotten the heart, and the couple are off on the road to happily ever after, complete with a dream prom setting that puts Izzie in a fairytale evening gown. Except for the small detail that Denny has died of a blood clot while Izzie was on her way to meet him, which sets in motion this scene. A piece of perfectly selected music ("Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol) takes us from heartbroken to downright depressed, as we watch Izzie cling to Denny's dead body.




• Oddly enough, this scene from this past week's episode of 'The Vampire Diaries' is what made me finally want to put my thoughts down on the subject of musical manipulation. This piece is without lyrics of any kind, and yet the swelling of the music to me was one of the most interesting cases of musical manipulation that I've seen in a while. For one thing, this duo of Klaus (Joseph Morgan) and Caroline (Candice Accola) had, up to the present moment, been purely adversarial. Caroline lies in her bed suffering from a fatal wound that only Klaus has the power to heal, and we can get immediate cues from the music, that this scene is meant to mark a change. Not only a change in the relationship between these two vampires, but also, a change in the characters themselves. While Klaus delivers his dialogue about life's beauty, we see Caroline finally accepting her fate as a newly made vampire, even as we hear the music come to a place of opening up and also finding it's tonal resolution. The same goes for Klaus, as we hear more of his empathetic nature and thought processes than we have in episodes past with this bad boy villainous vampire. The music meanders through places of no resolve, until it, like the characters sharing the scene, finally finds it's healing.




• Something big is coming! Warning: kissing ahead! Just listen to the music! This scene from 'Gossip Girl' is a classic example of using music to punctuate a scene and even pace out the events that are about to occur. We hear a smooth musical exchange throughout the opening lines, and then, after an initial kiss, a pause in both the music and the movement of the scene. Chuck (Ed Westwick) asks Blair (Leighton Meester) if she's sure, and the music, like the audience, waits for her response. When Blair answers by crashing her lips against his once more, the music (Sum 41's "With Me") crashes back in, as well. The dynamics have now changed, as have the atmosphere and mood in the limo. The music is now harder, louder, and it escalates along with the building passion between the couple in perfect idiosyncrasy.




In closing this first installment of musical manipulation meta, I'd like to address a question posed to me bymyfriendamy, who asked: