Crackpots #26: Hooked (Patreon)

Hello everyone,

Today I'm going to talk about music.

TV theme music, to be specific.

TV themes constitute an interesting subgenre, situated somewhere in between film scores and commercial jingles. All of these formats come with restrictions, as compared to more “pure” forms of art music — most significantly in terms of length, but also in tone — but such boundaries are often precisely what allows creativity to flourish. I think often of Brian Eno’s comments regarding his composition of the Windows 95 startup sound:

The thing from the agency said, ‘We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,’ this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said ‘and it must be 3.25 seconds long.

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.

I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.

Pop songwriter Barry Manilow cut his teeth writing jingles — he wrote the famous tunes for State Farm and Band-Aid, among many others. 

Any TV theme, like a commercial jingle or a pop song, needs a “hook.” This is the melody that gets stuck in your head. The hook will be repeated at least a couple of times, which helps it stick. But the composition can’t just be the hook. Once we’ve heard the main melody a couple of times, we want to hear something else. This is where variation and contrast come into play. There isn’t enough runtime, though, to introduce too many ideas without the piece ending up overly busy, or diluting the impact of the primary hook. This is where the composer needs to be clever: How can they effectively utilize the space allotted to impart the appropriate feeling, present a catchy hook, repeat it enough for it to be memorable, but keep it from becoming monotonous?

A good composition in this form will tend to be economical — that is, it will get a lot of mileage out of a small amount of musical material. One famous example of highly economical composition is the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th symphony. That simple three-note motif, evoking “fate knocking at the door,” is repeated, varied, and developed over the course of the movement.

I first discovered Alan W. Pollack’s Notes On The Beatles when I was in college studying music composition. If you’ve never read these before, and you have any interest in pop songwriting, I can’t recommend them highly enough. In his analysis of "All My Loving", Pollack sets out definitions of two common pop structures: verse-bridge and verse-refrain (aka verse-chorus):

If the hook is found in the verse section — typically in the first or last phrase of the verse — then the middle section of the song is a "bridge", by which I mean to describe a section whose primary purpose is to provide contrast or respite from the music of the verse section, typically implemented in part by harmonic movement away from or back towards the home key.

Otherwise, the hook will be found in a "refrain" section, and even though such refrains are typically to be found in the same formal location as the bridges referred to above, they differ in feel from bridges in that they are much the focal point of the song, the fulfillment of the verses, rather than a momentary interlude away from them. As such, refrains tend to showcase a catchy tune and are built from harmony, which helps establish a sense of key.

He points out that The Beatles tended to favor the former structure, particularly in their early work. For example, “We Can Work It Out” is verse-bridge, whereas “With A Little Help From My Friends” is verse-refrain. In either case, you have one section that presents the hook, and then another section that provides contrast with the first. The contrasting section uses a different harmonic progression to lead away from the hook before leading back to it again.

There are of course many variations on these two forms, but there’s another broadly different one that’s worth mentioning here — what I think of as a “wedge” structure. This one is very common in electronic and dance music. In this form, the entire composition may consist of the same harmony, lacking any distinct contrasting section at all. Instead, variation is provided by changing textures, particularly by adding or removing elements over time. The wedge gets wider (<) as elements are added, or narrower (>) as they’re taken away. LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” is one example of this form that I love.

Back to TV: Let’s start with the theme from Severance, which grabbed me on the first listen. There’s a lot to love here, but the backbone of the piece is a really juicy chord progression which carries through the entire 1:20 length. It’s a 4-bar progression, with each chord lasting one bar:

|| Cm | Gb/C | Fm | Abm/C ||

The C is used as a pedal tone — the chords change, but the bass note stays the same. If we were trying to analyze this in functional terms, we could say we’re in Cm, call the Gb a tritone substitution for the V/IV chord, and look at the F and Abm as modal borrowing:

But I think it makes a lot more sense to think of the whole thing in modal, rather than functional terms; C is established as the tonal center due to the repetition, and everything else revolves around it with more or less dissonance. What makes this progression so fitting is the alternation between consonances (Cm and F/C) with dissonances (Gb/C and Abm/C), while the bass note stays constant. This is a great musical metaphor for the show’s plot, with its shifts between innie and outtie versions of the same person.

Since the harmony never changes, but the arrangement expands and contracts, Severance most closely matches the wedge structure. However, it has a bit of a verse-bridge feel as well, since there are two distinct melodies that alternate throughout the piece. The first one we hear goes like this:

This melody is very minimal, only entering in the 4th bar and carrying over into the first bar of the next loop, giving us space to focus on the chords. The first B natural, placed on a strong beat, briefly adds even more dissonance to the Abm chord before slinking back to the more expected Bb.

We hear this melody twice, in a sparse solo piano arrangement. On the third loop of the progression, a synth picks up the chords, too, with a slight pitch modulation providing a little extra spookiness, as the melody rests. On the 4th loop, we get the second melody:

This one is much more active, with a slinky syncopation that shifts emphasis over a 2-bar pattern. The first two notes stay the same, in an inverted echo of the pedal tone in the bass, while the third note slides downward through G, Gb, F, and Eb. As this melody enters, so does a gentle percussive element which sounds a lot like a ticking clock. We only hear this melody once at first; on the next loop, there’s a string section picking up the chords, a tentative kick drum, and a rising woosh on the 4th bar as the texture builds into the next loop.

Now the first melody returns, acting as a transition into a tutti section, with full percussion, strings, and a return to the first melody, this time with an extra flourish on the pickup. The added flourish takes us back into a repeat of melody 2, this time repeated twice. A filter gets applied on the second repeat, making everything gradually sound farther away, until in the next loop all of the additions get swept away, leaving us with one last repeat of melody 2 on solo piano, as the tempo gradually slows to the end.

All in all, we get the same 4-measure progression repeated 10 times over, but to my ears it doesn’t get monotonous thanks to the alternating melodic themes, the textures that build up and pull back, and the regular introduction of small variations on the same material. This is a fantastic example of compositional economy.

Now let’s look at another famous theme which I admire but find in some ways disappointing: Succession. We’re in the key of C minor again, although the harmony here is much more traditional. The structure is essentially verse-bridge; we get the hook immediately, a sinewy, syncopated, chromatic melody broken into three phrases, each longer than the previous:

The melody makes full use of the various flavors of minor scale, as well as some extra passing tones. The harmony is squarely functional here:

So we’ve got a nice, if standard, chord progression with a unique and lovely melody, and it’s all tied together with some juicy arrangement and production. A distorted, rickety piano, lo-fi drums, and a booming bass, soon joined by a stately string section.

We hear the melody twice on the piano, then on the third progression the piano drops out and the strings enter, playing accented chords on the third beat of each bar, before the strings restate the melody on the fourth loop.

Now we’re 30 seconds and four loops in, and we’ve heard the main theme three times. Something has to change at this point, so the composer gives us a contrasting section. This, in my opinion, is the weakness of the piece. The B section consists of two twelve-bar phrases, and it looks like this:

As you can see, the harmony is much more static, and the melody more conventional and less busy, staying firmly within C natural minor. The melody line is also much less prominent in the arrangement, blending in with the rest of the string section. None of that is wrong or bad — in fact, all of that is precisely what makes this provide contrast with the first section. But to my ears, this section is simply too long for what it contains. By the beginning of the second 12-bar phrase, it sounds to me like it’s just passing time or treading water. 24 measures is quite a long diversion from the main theme when there just isn’t much going on. After this, we get two more repeats of the main theme, and we’re done.

I think an interesting foil for this one is the Mad Men theme. They share some DNA: the minor key, the refined strings against the clamorous drum kit. But the Mad Men intro is over in just 30 seconds. We get the string hook once alone, then once with the drums, then we get half a repeat worth of contrast from some pizzicato strings before the latter part of the main hook returns again, and we’re out.

Next up: The White Lotus Season 2. This is another one that I think is fantastic. We’re in Bbm now, using another “wedge” structure. The same harmony repeats throughout the piece, with various elements being added and removed. This one has a slightly more extended chord progression than the first two themes we looked at, though:

So we’ve got an 8-bar loop in Bbm. Notice that the first three chords take up 2 bars each, with the last 2 getting just 1 — this change in the harmonic rhythm is a nice way to build excitement from the end of one loop into the beginning of the next. Holding the first three chords for two bars each is also a nice way to create a sort of tempo fake-out — the tempo here is a brisk 130 BPM, but in the early sections we're liable to perceive it as half as fast. It’s also notable that the progression stays entirely in the natural minor, avoiding the more classically expected major form of the dominant chord, and approaching the tonic instead from the VII.

The arrangement begins very sparsely; nothing but arpeggios on something that sounds like a harp. A melodic element — a wordless (but “normal” sounding) female vocal — is added partway through the first loop, and carries through to the second loop. The arrangement subtly builds; deep bass notes on a piano, a glockenspiel emphasizing the chord changes, some faint electronic whooshes on the offbeats. Then there’s a sudden shift as we get to the third loop; the texture thins out again, just the harp arpeggio and some skittish percussion, and the real hook is introduced:

I’ve notated these “ooh loo loos” as 8th-note triplets, but they could be heard as sustained notes with a sort of triplet tremolo effect. They sound like voices, but clearly aren’t natural, giving a striking sort of uncanny valley effect. The next few loops build up the hook in a natural, satisfying way as the “ooh loo loo” is repeated in two-part, then three-part harmony. When the three-part harmony enters we get a four-on-the-floor kick, finally bringing to fruition the head-fake of the languid opening measures. There’s a final repeat with full percussion; the “yelping” glissandi punctuating the melodic phrases grow more frenzied; then the percussion drops out again for the last half of the last phrase, providing some falling action as we reach the conclusion.

I think the White Lotus Season 3 theme is much weaker. It’s not just the missing “ooh loo loos,” which seemed to take the focus in discussions I saw about the new theme. It’s also the longest of the themes I’ve discussed here, clocking at about 1:40. To my ears, the hook just doesn’t get enough variation (like the stacking harmonies of Season 2’s theme) or enough contrast (like the two alternating melodies in the Severance theme) to keep it interesting for that long a runtime. There is a sort of contrasting section at about 58 seconds into the recording, but I think it suffers from an even worse version of the problem with the Succession theme’s B section — nothing much happens in it. The texture changes as the piece progresses, but it doesn’t feel as organic or inevitable as the builds and breakdowns in the previous season’s take.

Of course, this is all subjective at the end of the day. It’s not as though anyone can scientifically prove that one piece of music is good, or another bad. But as a musician, I find this kind of analysis fun and edifying, and here’s hoping that you do, too. Until next time,

YC