downton and lydian
Catherine and I enjoyed a special holiday treat while waiting for our new little daughter to come: we watched season three of Downton Abbey. It's now airing in the US, but we watched it from a British website, and so we got to see the whole thing nice and early. Satisfyingly soapy, with beautiful men and women, superb period fashions, great interiors and exteriors, and lots of zingers from Maggie Smith.
One thing that gives the show its character is the music. It's instantly recognizable, and reminds us of the show itself, with its upscale sheen and urgent drama and slightly piquant taste and luxurious feel. The main theme is in A-minor, with a piano hammering out a high simple melody against a lush string texture. The sound, though, that I most associate with the series is when the music shifts down to an F-major chord, with a prominent G-major triad shimmering high in the strings. The conductor and performers always lean into this chord whenever it appears in the score, and the result is both sweet and bracing.
That's partially because it offers a glancing reference to the Lydian mode, a scale whose raised fourth degree always gives it a fresh kick, from the Norwegian Peasant Dances of Edvard Grieg to the latest John Williams movie score. As I've noted before, the Lydian mode has, by now, a shorthand "movie-magic" sound. And, at least for now, it doesn't seem to get stale in people's ears.
Downton's composer, John Lunn, doesn't really use it in an extremely Lydianish way, though: we still hear the context of the A-minor that we've left, and to which we'll be returning shortly. It's a nice way of symbolizing the back-and-forth of joy and sorrow, contentment and drama, in the show itself; and that hovering bitonality, the G over F, seems to fit the overall theme in the series of modernity intruding on the traditional.
One thing that gives the show its character is the music. It's instantly recognizable, and reminds us of the show itself, with its upscale sheen and urgent drama and slightly piquant taste and luxurious feel. The main theme is in A-minor, with a piano hammering out a high simple melody against a lush string texture. The sound, though, that I most associate with the series is when the music shifts down to an F-major chord, with a prominent G-major triad shimmering high in the strings. The conductor and performers always lean into this chord whenever it appears in the score, and the result is both sweet and bracing.
That's partially because it offers a glancing reference to the Lydian mode, a scale whose raised fourth degree always gives it a fresh kick, from the Norwegian Peasant Dances of Edvard Grieg to the latest John Williams movie score. As I've noted before, the Lydian mode has, by now, a shorthand "movie-magic" sound. And, at least for now, it doesn't seem to get stale in people's ears.
Downton's composer, John Lunn, doesn't really use it in an extremely Lydianish way, though: we still hear the context of the A-minor that we've left, and to which we'll be returning shortly. It's a nice way of symbolizing the back-and-forth of joy and sorrow, contentment and drama, in the show itself; and that hovering bitonality, the G over F, seems to fit the overall theme in the series of modernity intruding on the traditional.
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