Spy music
I was listening to a breakdown of the Spy x Family theme song. It’s bombastic and then thoughtful, bouncy and then tense, as befits a spy show where the spy must, as part of his job, assemble a family and commit to them for the length of his current mission, months in execution. The commentator discussed in detail the jazz chords, the big band sound, and the fact that this style is associated in Americans’ minds with spies specifically. A bunch of facts in my mind fell together in a new way:
Spy themes are what they are because of James Bond and the Pink Panther, popular band music from the mid-20th century, based in the Cold War, of course, but also Henry Mancini and Arthur Fiedler, Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin.
They in turn got their music roots from a combination of formal music education and listening to popular music: Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag, piano sheet music with catchy lyrics, vaudeville and jazz, Glenn Miller and dance bands.
If you back up some more, the American scene exploded with new music and old as immigrants brought over the music they knew, Bach and Beethoven, but also folk songs and laments. The descendants of slaves, limited for so long to what music they could squeeze in, hymns, work songs, Gullah and ancestral tunes, still didn’t have access to elite music schools unless they could somehow get to Europe. So they taught themselves, they taught each other; they listened and they noodled around, trying different things and keeping what they liked.
In the second half of the 1800s American elite society, the people funding orchestras and opera houses, were in love with British, French, German, northern European music, “the greats”: Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Strauss. They willingly went there to learn from elite music teachers and schools; they soaked themselves in how to properly write a fugue and use the circle of fifths. They were horrified to hear their children noodling around with popular, low-brow music, no matter how catchy.
Those directions for fugues and other “proper” musical forms came from elites in Europe, people with musical ability enough to get paid for making music full time. They had to make their patrons happy to survive. There was experimentation, but only enough to keep their patrons interested. Mozart’s success spurred a hundred would-be successors. Step too far out of line and you’d be out on the street.
Before them were the people who set the rules in the first place: followers of Bach, Handel, Haydn. Bach played and wrote what worked for him, within the constraints of his position. Haydn and Handel played and wrote what earned them food and clothes. The rules came from people who studied their success: teachers who wanted their students to sound like Bach. No one imitates more faithfully than the second runner-up.
The result of teachers trying to quantify what makes a good composition, what makes a good performance, was a rigid set of rules. Jazz chords didn’t fit anywhere in those rules. Neither did Stravinsky’s dissonance. Bela Bartok got away with outrageous discords by calling them “folk music”, inspired by his roots. Jazz got a reluctant pass, because at least it wasn’t as out-there as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. And jazz was popular with the young people. It bounced. It was something black people could play really well and still fit into the box white elites wanted them in.
Nobody stays in a box forever. By the mid-20th century, jazz was out, accepted—even embraced—in concert halls and that new medium, movies. At the same time Asian society met and absorbed western music styles, all of them, and soaked them in their values. Now, in the 21st century, many Asian performers have learned both the strict rules of western concert performance and the noodling around of jazz. They’ve even absorbed the convention that this specific musical style fits this sort of media: Spy x Family, made in Japan, with Japanese language, set in a mythical Cold War Eastern European nation, with Cold War technology and morés. It’s so cool, and also so… inevitable.
