Music

• Theatre music refers to a wide range of music composed or adapted for performance in theatres.
• There are two forms of music used in theatre:
  1. Musical theatre and
  2. Incidental music
• Musical theatre is different to dramatic theatre in that it combines songs, spoken dialogue, and dance to tell a story. Musical theatre is also different to a play with music, in that it gives as much importance to the songs and music as other elements of the production. Musical theatre include opera, ballet, pantomime, operetta and modern stage musicals and revues.
• Another form of theatre music is incidental music, which, as in radio, film and television, is used to accompany the action or to separate the scenes of a play.

• The physical embodiment of the music is called a score, which includes the music and, if there are lyrics, it also shows the lyrics

• Since the earliest days of the theatre, music has played an important part in stage drama. In Greek drama in the fifth century BC, choric odes were written to be chanted and danced between the spoken sections of both tragedies and comedies. Only fragments of the music have survived.
• Attempts to recreate the form for revivals from the Renaissance to modern times have branched in several directions. Composers from Andrea Gabrieli to Mendelssohn to Vaughan Williams have composed chorus music for productions of plays by Sophocles, Aristophanes and others.
• Playwrights including Racine, Yeats and Brecht wrote original plays in styles derived from ancient drama, with sung commentaries by a chorus or narrator.
• In late 16th century Florence, attempts to revive ancient Greek drama, with sung vocal contributions, developed into the modern genre of opera.
• Folk theatre has always deployed dance music and song.
• In the 16th and 17th centuries, theatre music was performed during the action of plays and as afterpieces.
• Christopher R. Wilson discusses Shakespeare's use of music in his plays. He lists the different types of music used by Shakespeare:
  1. "stage music" (fanfares to introduce important characters or accompany battle scenes),
  2. "magic music" (as in the lullaby in A Midsummer Night's Dream),
  3. "character music" (as in Twelfth Night, illustrating the high, low, sad or merry natures of the characters) and
  4. "atmospheric music" (such as Ariel's "Where the bee sucks", in The Tempest).
• By the early 18th century, music was firmly established as part of practically all theatrical performances in Europe, whether of opera, dance, or spoken drama. Theatres were built with orchestra pits, and music was either specially composed for the production or appropriated and arranged from existing material.
• The writer Roger Savage notes in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians: "The classic forms of Asian theatre from India to Japan rely heavily on music, as do the dramatic rituals of sub-Saharan Africa and of the indigenous peoples of the Americas."
• In Western theatre genres, Savage writes that music features importantly in medieval liturgical drama, ballet de cour, ballet d'action, classical ballet, modern dance, comédie-ballet, semi-opera, 18th-century pantomime, ballad opera, Singspiel, opéra comique, Victorian burlesque, music hall, vaudeville, variety show, operetta, Edwardian musical comedy, the modern musical including rock musicals, and other forms of musical theatre
• In common with radio, cinema and television, the theatre has long made use of incidental music to accompany spoken drama.

• Incidental music in the theatre justifies itself through its exclusive concern with a specific play or theatrical presentation. Its three main uses involve songs, intensified dramatic effect, and interlude filling, and these have been clearly defined in Western theatre since Renaissance drama freed itself from the church in the 16th century.
• The use of incidental music dates back at least as far as Greek drama. A number of classical composers have written incidental music for various plays, with the more famous examples including Ludwig van Beethoven's Egmont music, Franz Schubert's Rosamunde music, Felix Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream music, Georges Bizet's L'Arlésienne music, and Edvard Grieg's music for Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. Parts of all of these are often performed in concerts outside the context of the play.
• Vocal incidental music, which is included in the classical scores mentioned above, should never be confused with the score of a Broadway or film musical, in which the songs often reveal character and further the storyline. Since the score of a Broadway or film musical is what actually makes the work a musical, it is far more essential to the work than mere incidental music, which nearly always amounts to little more than a background score; indeed, many plays have no incidental music whatsoever.
• Some early examples of what were later called incidental music are also described as semi-operas, quasi-operas, masques, vaudevilles and melodramas.
• The genre of incidental music does not extend to pieces designed for concert performance, such as overtures named after a play, for example, Beethoven's Coriolan Overture (written for Heinrich Joseph von Collin's tragedy), or Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet fantasy-overture.

Types of Incidental Music

1. Overture:
   • An overture is incidental music that is played usually at the beginning of a film, play, opera, etc., before the action begins. It may be a complete work of music in itself or just a simple tune. In some cases it incorporates musical themes that are later repeated in other incidental music used during the performance.
2. Theme song:
   • A theme song is a work that represents the performance and is often played at the beginning or end of the performance. Elements of the theme may be incorporated into other incidental music used during the performance. In films, theme songs are often played during credit rolls. A love theme is a special theme song (often in various modified forms) that accompanies romantic scenes involving the protagonists of a performance.
   • Theme songs are among the works of incidental music that are most commonly released independently of the performance for which they were written, and occasionally become major successes in their own right.
3. Underscore:
   • An underscore is a soft, noiseless soundtrack theme which accompanies the action in a performance. It is usually designed so that spectators are only indirectly aware of its presence. It may help to set or indicate the mood of a scene.
4. Stinger:
   • A stinger is a very brief instant of music that accompanies a scene transition in a performance. Often the stinger marks the passage of time or a change in location. Stingers were used frequently in the American television series Friends (as one example) to mark scene transitions involving the passage of time or a change of location. Similar techniques are commonly used in many American sitcoms.
5. Loop:
   • Short sequences of recorded music called loops are sometimes designed so that they can be repeated indefinitely and seamlessly as required to accompany visuals. These are often used as background music in documentary and trade films.