Incidental Music

Instrumental numbers written for a spoken play, overture and scene music sharing themes

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Incidental music is instrumental music written for a spoken play, overture, entr'actes and scene music together, entering and leaving as the drama proceeds.

Origins and era

Seventeenth-century English and French theatres put music between scenes and at changes of set, and Purcell wrote a full score for The Fairy Queen. At the end of the eighteenth century Beethoven wrote music for Egmont, its overture and scene numbers sharing themes. In the nineteenth century Mendelssohn added a full set of numbers to A Midsummer Night's Dream and Grieg wrote a complete score for Peer Gynt. In the twentieth century film music took over most of the function and stage scores shrank to small productions.

What you hear

A set of discontinuous numbers, the overture able to stand alone and the rest numbered by their place in the play. Numbers are short, thirty seconds to five minutes, linked by motif and key. Scoring follows stage conditions, with Mendelssohn using paired winds, horns, trumpets, timpani and strings, and Grieg adding Norwegian modal colour. Notice how one motif is transformed between numbers and how the music stops with the dialogue or closes a scene change. Numbers often leave harmony unresolved because the next line must follow. Mendelssohn also wrote a wedding march and a nocturne for the same play, and both were later extracted for concert use, the usual route by which theatre music becomes concert repertory. Grieg's Peer Gynt took the same path, more than twenty numbers reduced in the end to two suites.

Key figures

Beethoven's Egmont and The Ruins of Athens, Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Grieg's Peer Gynt and Debussy's music for the Chansons de Bilitis are the standard samples of the genre.

Lineage

It comes from seventeenth-century entr'acte music and playhouse overtures and leads to the concert suite, film scoring and radio drama music.

Common misunderstandings

Incidental music is not simply background, since it often carries structural weight around key lines and can speak for a character. Nor can it always be performed alone, because most numbers lose their length and order once off the stage.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Incidental Music, 用于核对体裁范围与代表作品
• Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 3, 用于核对十九世纪剧场音乐的功能

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.