Mysterioso Pizzicato

Common version of the motif from Mysterioso Pizzicato  Play 

Mysterioso Pizzicato, also known as The Villain or The Villain's Theme, is a piece of music whose earliest known publication was in 1914, when it appeared in an early collection of incidental photoplay music aimed at accompanists for silent movies. The main motif, with minor variations, has become a well-known and widely used device, incorporated into various other musical works and the scores of films, TV programmes and video games. As the 'traditional "bad-guy" cue',[1] it is used to represent villainy, sneakiness and stealth.

History

The tune appeared as no. 89 in The Remick Folio of Moving Picture Music, vol. I, compiled and edited by the Danish-American composer J. Bodewalt Lampe and published on March 24, 1914 by Jerome H. Remick & Co., New York and Detroit.[2][3] It is unclear whether Lampe himself was also the composer of the piece. It also bears a resemblance to part of John Stepan Zamecnik's 1913 composition Mysterioso - Burglar Music 1, which appeared in Sam Fox Moving Picture Music volume 1, a widely distributed collection of silent film music. It has been described as reflecting "the tradition of stealthy tremolos that marked the entrance of villains in 19th century stage melodrama".[3]

Uses

Mysterioso Pizzicato has seen "hundreds of tongue-in-cheek uses" in features and cartoons.[4] Irving Berlin used a version of it in his 1921 Music Box Revue show to accompany the entrance of a band of burglars.[5] In the 1931 Van Beuren Studios animated short Making 'Em Move it is first used to produce a 'false sense of foreboding' as a curious visitor enters the animation factory, and then again to accompany the villain in a cartoon-within-a-cartoon, at which point the animation is Mickey Moused to synchronise the character's movements with the music.[1] The motif is referenced in a number of Max Steiner's film scores,[4] including The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944) in which it forms part of "the low instrumental buffoonery illustrating an afternoon of frog-catching".[6] One use in popular music was by Frank Zappa, who incorporated the riff into live performances of his song "Zomby Woof".[7]

In the graphic adventure game King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow, the tune is used as the background music for one area of the Isle of Wonder, specifically the tune to the character Bookworm.[8]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Goldmark, D. (2011) Sounds Funny/Funny Sounds in D. Goldmark and C. Keil (eds). "Funny Pictures: Animation and comedy in studio-era Hollywood" pp 260-261.Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California
  2. ↑ Fuld, James J. (2000) The Book Of World-Famous Music, 5th ed. Dover Publications. p. 385
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Program notes, From Nineteenth-Century Stage Drama to Twenty-First-Century Film Scoring: Musicodramatic Practice and Knowledge Organization (2012) Society for American Music and the California State University, Long Beach, College of the Arts
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Rosar, William H. (Fall 1983). "Music for the Monsters". The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress: 402. Retrieved 31 December 2013.
  5. ↑ Magee, Jeffrey (2012). Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 108–109. ISBN 978-0-19539826-7.
  6. ↑ Whitaker, Bill. "Max Steiner (1888-1971) The Adventures of Mark Twain Musical Americana to the Max". www.naxos.com. Retrieved 1 January 2014.
  7. ↑ Hand, Richard J. (2013) "Zappa and Horror: Screamin' at the monster" in Paul Carr (ed), Frank Zappa and the And. Farmham, Ashgate
  8. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx6RLIty-s0

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