Background music is an essential element of film and television - indeed, it has been since its earliest days, when an underpaid pianist would be expected to elucidate the film with variously a) ascending diminished seventh chords; b) ominous chromatic rumblings in the bowels of the instrument; or c) a jaunty rag-time tune, as a) Harold Lloyd, aided and abetted by the Marx brothers, hung perilously from some lofty pinnacle ill-conceived for such a purpose; b) an implausible stop-motion prehistoric monster emerges from a styrofoam crevice and c) after a
Deus ex machina frees them from the hanging clock scene, Lloyd, Marx et al saunter off to find a whisky joint. The prevalence of this proto-
Gesumkunstwerk combination has not been diminished by the passing of time nor technological improvement; indeed music as a method of making very clear what our reaction to a visual cue should be is as important as ever.
Nowhere is this less prevalent than in giving audiences an instant heads-up as to
where the action is taking place. From the earliest days 'eezee-locate' clichés were speedily developed and further honed by successive travel programmes and documentaries until quite a sophisticated repertory of aural manipulation emerged - none of it necessarily accurate in any respect, you understand. Anyway, in keeping with my penchant for lists, a geographically comprehensive survey of 'location-sounds' is as follows:
Most of
Europe can be provided for by the squeezy-box family of instruments, coupled with ostentatious renditions of the more recognisable national anthems.
England is obviously morris-dancing music (accordion and shaky-bell things), or else Arne's
Rule Britannia! France, however, has no national music (
La Marseillaise aside) other than a Parisian-cafe waltz for accordion. In
Germany the same instrument will require the accompaniment of a tuba played by a comically overweight
Herr in leiderhosen, providing a ceaseless oom-pah-om-pah accompaniment.
Switzerland is basically indistinguishable from Germany - indeed additional cowbells, alphorns and comedy yodelling are interchangeable between the two.
Russia,
Hungary and the rest of the former Warsaw Pact are lumped into a sprawling concertina and-slightly-out-of-tune-violin musical culture (one synthesizer I played was possessed of a gloriously tongue-in-cheek patch entitled 'vodkaccordian') with optional national colour from the
plucky-twang-strummy family of stringed instruments (cymbalom, balalaika, Lada handbrake mechanism).
Italy alternates yet more free reed instruments with
bel canto opera in roughly equal measure.
A few exceptions are
Greece/
Cyprus (bazooki music or other guitar-like instruments);
Spain (guitars/castanets/melismatic wailing in the Lydian mode - unless it's for the Hogarthian binge-disco hell of
Ibiza);
Ireland (pipes, tin whistle and fiddle combo, which can also do for
Scotland at a pinch); and
Scandinavia/Holland/Belgium, which are represented variously by more accordions, folky-violin, or tinny drum-machine pop.
Nobody has any idea what
Portuguese music sounds like, so it's either the same as Spain or the safe option of a slightly different squeezy-box.
On to Asia, and the musical stereotypes show no sign of letting up. The
Middle East (
Palestine/Iran/Iraq/Saudi Arabia/Egypt) introduces a stalwart of 'I don't really know what to do' soundtracking, namely the (catchily titled) 'female wailing over ominous-sounding bass pedal' music. This sees use in all kinds of scene-setting devices in documentaries, from the splendors of ancient Babylon to terrorists holding aloft bazookas from the back of an ancient Toyota. Medieval Europe even gets a go if the bass pedal is sung by very deep and sufficiently monastic-sounding voices. To my knowledge no actual music from the region sounds like this. Moving eastwards,
India (and neighbouring
Sri Lanka) can be conjured up by sitar-and-tabla combo or by Bollywood rock-bhangra hybrids.
China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea and all other Far Eastern lands share an identical heritage of pentatonic reed-flute and plucky-thing music, a cultural appendage not helped by the catchy hook in disco classic
Kung-Fu Fighting.
The whole of Spanish-speaking
South America uses pan-pipes. By contrast
Brazil, which speaks Portuguese, is better evoked by samba music or jungly-drum things. The
Caribbean contains so many countless islands that it's easier to just assume everyone enjoys steel drums - apart from
Jamaica (reggae) and
Cuba (manic trumpet and conga playing).
It may be due to its dominant position in the global film and television industry, but the
United States has managed to retain a surprisingly diverse selection of typecast musics. From East to West we have big band jazz (
New York); banjo-and-harmonica-blues (
The South); more banjos, with the addition of guitars, autoharps and warbling singers (
Appalachians and the
Midwest); Motown (
Detroit, particularly over footage of 1960s civil rights protests); stadium-rock electric guitars (anywhere, really) or chilled-out bass-and-synth cruisin' music (somewhere with a beach, roller skaters and mass-produced convertibles, viz.
Florida/California).
Canada generally gets by on rock tunes or 'ethnic' drumming. Funnily enough, the hillbilly folk harmonica-blues can also be transplanted to
Australia - throw in a didgeridoo if your viewers really struggle with geography (another variant of the 'ominous-pedal' genre). Oh, and
Hawaii is the only place on earth the steel guitar has ever caught on.
Finally,
Africa. The Islamic part of the continent is covered by the aforementioned 'wailing over pedal' style, occasionally augmented by one-string-bowey-instruments either tuned or de-tuned to Western equal temperament.
Egypt often gets its own
sub-genre of harmonic-minor oboe-y things (again with obligatory synth pedal note - Korg must have made a fortune from Tutankhamen) although many of these lands have as their introduction the dawn muezzin crying aloft from a teeteringly high minaret.
Central Africa (
Nigeria/Kenya/unspecified jungle kingdom) is as often as not drums and 'tribal' grunts, shoehorned into a 4/4 meter Westerners can understand (real African drumming exhibits strikingly complex rhythmic patterns and metric modulation) with occasional outings for mbira thumb-harps and xylophones (the above disclaimer also applies) or West African guitar-based pop (ditto). The southern part of the continent (
South Africa/Botswana/Tanzania) is blessed with a rare accuracy in background music, being accompanied by African choral singing (not that in real life this is absent from more northerly lands, nor is drumming from here).
Like all stereotypes, most of these cliches of scene-setting have some basis in reality. More interestingly, they can actually become 'authentic' to a place simply by continued exposition. I remember reading of a 'folk dancing' performance in Hungary which had almost entirely been invented for tourists and was largely contrived to fulfill their expectations of what Hungarian peasant culture was like. Amazingly, this dance had been performed so many times and was so well-known that it had actually become an important part of the town's culture, despite being completely invented and having little basis in tradition.
As an afterthought, the possible Gilbertian conclusions of this scenario are fascinating to behold, with significant potential for hilarity into the bargain. An enterprising producer could in theory fabricate a complete culture for some uninhabited island, or else deliberately assosciate it with some cultural artifact from an utterly different (but equally unfamiliar) location. Entire tourist industries could spring up based on visitors flocking to see and hear total nonsense.
Possibly, there's a film to be made in that last paragraph. If so I claim copyright.
