meTunes – November 29-December 2, 2010

Welcome to the No Fact Zone’s new column on musical performances on the Colbert report. Stephen is quite the entertainer, and also has fantastic musical guests from a variety of genres and backgrounds on the Report. Check back at the end of each week for a round-up of music in the show!

While there was not a great deal of musical performance (well any, really) last week, there were a few tasty bits of music with callbacks to other tv shows and forms of entertainment that you may have missed. So sit back, enjoy some Cheerios, and be wary of any evil twins that may be waiting in the kitchen …

Tuesday:

Oh Cheerios!

As Stavros and Pavros fought a melodramatic battle involving kitty litter, toaster strudels, and Cheerios they were underscored by a synthesizer sound borrowed directly from soaps and radio. That sustained, organy sound dates way, way, way back, when soap operas started out as radio programs. In order to underscore and create suspense without stepping on dialogue, composers created amelodic sounds that could create tension and fill the background of the sound while not detracting from the dialogue or making it hard to hear or understand. We still associate this sound with soap operas because they still use it! Some habits are just too hard to break (like saxophones being sexy and clarinets being sad).

Tom Vilsack

While introducing Tom Vilsack, a vignette appeared accompanied by a very lovely, pastoral tune. While we often think of that tune being associate with things like Merry Melodies and the sunrise in practical any cartoon, the tune itself was written back in 1975 as incidental music for a play. The tune is a movement from Edvard Grieg’s incidental music for Peer Grynt, a play written by Norwegian playright Henrik Ibsen. This particular melody comes from the movement “Morning Mood,” which functions as the prelude to the fourth act of the play.

Today, this melody carries association of the rising sun, open pastures, and the countryside. Fitting, then, for the visual of Tom Vilsack’s head surrounded by a yellow halo shaped like Iowa floating over a corn field. We academic musicians refer to music similar to this as “pastoral.” I’ll spare you the details, but if you want to learn more, you can check out Raymond Monelle’s The Musical Topic or any of Robert Hatten‘s texts on music semiotics.

Wednesday:

Cheating Death with Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA

The opening of every “Cheating Death” segment starts with a great little vignette of Stephen in doctor’s garb cheating Death at a chess game. The visual is a direct reference to Ingmar Bergman’s De sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal, 1957). The film takes place during the Black Plague in Europe, and centers around a knight playing a game of chess against a personification of Death that has come to take his life. A visual perfect for a segment where Stephen and Prescott Pharmaceuticals come up with fantastic ways to better our lives and hopefully make us live forever.

(You can see the whole film on Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” feature! With the very helpful subtitles, naturally.)

The music that plays during “Cheating Death” has some minor similarities with the music from The Seventh Seal, mainly the use of choir and a minor mode orchestral sound. The tune The Colbert Report uses, however, is more akin to music you might expect to hear while watching an Epic, like Ben-Hur or The Robe. Why use music like this? Well, the fight against death is one of the most epic battles humanity fights (on a daily basis). Why not play it up? And the use of a choir sound really makes that fight seem grand and important, with human voices representing the struggles of humanity. Music of this magnitude makes it perfect for satire. The more serious it is, the more it begs to be made fun of.

This Week:

Here’s hoping Steve Martin brings his banjo!