Opie the Birdman

"The sound is jaunty but without joy, like whistling in the dark. It sets the tone; the action begins like an undergraduate lark and then reveals vicious undertones."
-Roger Ebert, in his review of The Third Man

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A lot of the music in mainstream television programming is generic or repetitive. But TV music doesn't have to be that way, and it hasn't always been, either. There is a video which I've kept coming back to since childhood that illustrates this perfectly. It is an episode of "The Andy Griffith Show", a sitcom which ran from 1960 to 1968. The episode is titled "Opie the Birdman". The music in this show (written by the late Earle Hagen) was motivic, expressive and meticulously designed to accompany the actions of the show's characters.

In this post, I'd like to walk through the music in one scene from this episode. By doing so I hope to draw attention to a few moments in the score that I think exhibit quality and attention to detail. To fully understand the depth to which Hagen internalizes this narrative, I recommend watching the episode in its entirety.

EDIT 7/13/2013: I've just noticed that this video is no longer freely available on YouTube due to a copyright claim by CBS. This is unfortunate.

I recommend this show to anyone who's interested in Earle Hagen's scoring for television. It is available on DVD: The Andy Griffith Show, "Opie the Birdman", Season 4, Episode 1. Here is a link to the fourth season on Amazon.com.

• 4:20-4:44. After a brief segue from the previous scene, there is a period of fugal interplay between the woodwinds. The flutist is prominent. The music is complex and nontonal. It reflects Opie's playfulness and exuberance. As Opie pretends to shoot his slingshot, the harp mimics his actions with punctuated note clusters. It is appropriate that a plucked string instrument like the harp should accompany the slingshot, because the slingshot is itself constructed much like a string instrument; when a stretched elastic band like the inner tube in Opie's slingshot is drawn and released, it produces the sound of a vibrating string.
• 4:44-4:50. There is a suspenseful pause as Opie puts a real stone into the slingshot and shoots it at a tree.
• 4:50-4:56. The woodwinds resume the playful music. This time it is louder and more intense. More instruments are playing, and some of the lines are doubled.
• 4:56-5:02. The strings enter. They play a premonitory phrase as Opie loads another stone. Much of the material between 4:56 and the end of this scene is modal. Unlike key areas which are firmly major and minor, often interpreted as archetypically happy or sad respectively, modal areas often suggest a range of emotions more bittersweet or complex than pure joy or despondence.
• 5:02-5:10. As Opie fires the stone into the air, there is an ascending motion in the orchestra. When the stone hits the bird, the ascending line stops abruptly. When Opie sees the bird falling to the ground, the premonitory music briefly resumes.
• 5:10-5:15. The oboe arpeggiates a minor chord as Opie approaches the bird. All traces of playfulness in the music have vanished.
• 5:15-5:26. The flute plays a series of slackening trills as Opie guiltily encourages the bird to fly away. These trills sound like the chirping of a bird.
• 5:26-6:13. The score gradually becomes more tragic as Opie processes the situation. A fragment of a motive is played by the violist. This motive is not limited to this episode--Hagen uses leitmotifs like this one to signify different characters in the show. These leitmotifs recur from episode to episode and from season to season. Over the course of the series, this motive gradually becomes associated with Opie's character.
• 6:13-6:31. As Opie cries and runs away, the strings bring the score to its melancholic climax. There is a segue to the next scene.
• 6:48-6:52. As Andy walks up to the house, there is another preminatory phrase.
• 6:52-7:02. When Andy notices the dead bird, there is another series of slackening trills in the flute.
• 7:02-7:19. As Andy's attention is drawn upwards towards the young birds in the nest, another upwards flourish is played by the orchestra. There is a segue to the next scene.

The rest of the score is just as detailed. Hagen is a master craftsman. He carefully balances musical elements to create a commentary which unfolds with the gracefulness and dignity of a well-written ballet.

Clarifornication

"Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing.

"In the book it said: 'Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion.'"

~from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, English translation by Katherine Woods

"As soon as he got home, he went to the larder; and he stood on a chair, and took down a very large jar of honey from the top shelf. It had HUNNY written on it, but, just to make sure, he took off the paper cover and looked at it, and it looked like honey. 'But you can never tell,' said Pooh. 'I remember my uncle saying once that he had seen cheese just this colour.' So he put his tongue in, and took a large lick. 'Yes,' he said, 'it is. No doubt about that. And honey, I should say, right down to the bottom of the jar....'"

~from The World of Pooh, stories by A. A. Milne

["Dear Diary..."]

There are some things I don't miss about elementary school. The daily intonation of the pledge of allegiance. The way everyone in middle school appeared infinitely larger and tougher. The way certain grown-ups sometimes seemed to be addressing you as an infant. "Mrs. So-And-So," one of them might say, referring to herself in the third person, raising up her eyebrows impossibly high on her forehead, "Mrs. So-And-So would be so happy if you could stop playing with those sharp scissors right now, because those are big boy scissors..." Maybe I suspected even then that some of these poor, overworked souls could probably use an all-expenses-paid vacation or at least a couple stiff drinks.

But I do miss the books. Picking up a copy of The World of Pooh, I notice a few oddities that escaped my attention as a Kindergartener--why, for instance, is The Hundred Acre Wood almost exclusively an all-boys club?--but mostly I enjoyed reading it as much today as the first time on my mother's knee.1

Children's books like The World of Pooh and The Little Prince use simple language to convey complex ideas. Consider the quotes at the top of this post. The first scene is brutal and viscerally awesome. It conveys itself in a few words--a snake devouring an animal whole--while leaving some details for the imagination to "chew on", like whether the animal is killed instantly or what it would be like to be inside a boa constrictor. The second is full of subtlety; the reader knows almost from the beginning that Pooh's tongue-in-cheek aside, "but you can never tell..." probably functions as a justification for mischief. Both of these scenes demand intelligence; the reader must "get" that the snake is without conscience while Pooh is possibly acting against his own.

Obviously, complex or sophisticated language is not a bad thing. It is sometimes extremely beautiful and sometimes extremely necessary. We would be much poorer if English literature was subjected to the rules of the Simple English Wikipedia. But I do wish public speakers and writers--especially people in the political sphere--were sometimes required to speak and write more simply. Truthful statements and good arguments would be better understood. Dishonest statements and bad arguments would be more easily disproved or disregarded.

See also:

1. Although I did find one jarring moment in the first chapter: in light of the recent shooting of a 2-year-old girl by her 5-year-old brother, Milne's depiction of Christopher Robin traipsing around with a gun "just in case" doesn't have quite the same charm as it used to.