incidental music

n.
Music composed to accompany the action or dialogue of a drama or to fill intervals between scenes or acts.

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Music composed for, or used in, a dramatic production, film or radio or television programme. In ancient Greek drama, music intervened at significant points, and in medieval miracle and mystery plays it accompanied entrances and exits, imitated real-life effects and enhanced symbolism. The earliest surviving secular play with significant music is Adam de la Halle's Le jeu de Robin et Marion (c 1283), but it was the Renaissance that saw the first play with incidental music in the modern sense. In the 16th century and the early 17th, music was considered more appropriate for comedies and pastorals than for tragedies. Shakespeare's example led to an increased use of music in plays in England, and the tradition increased at the Restoration, when composers included, John Eccles and Henry Purcell, in whose works a distinction is not always possible between plays with music and ‘semi-operas’. The same is true of the comédies-ballets of Molière and Lully.

In the 18th century, Goethe and Schiller wrote plays with provision for incidental music, Beethoven and Weber being among the composers who provided it. Schubert's score for Chézy's Rosamunde von Cypern and Mendelssohn's for A Midsummer Night's Dream are among the most notable examples of 19th-century incidental music, the latter belonging to a tradition of supplying music for Shakespeare's plays to which Spohr, Humperdinck, Tchaikovsky, Balakirev and others also contributed.

The composition of substantial orchestral scores for dramatic productions continued to the end of the 19th century and beyond; outstanding are those by Fauré and Sibelius for Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande. After World War I Stravinsky's music for Ramuz's Soldier's Tale set a precedent for more modest forces, and also for a close collaboration between writer and composer, both features of Brecht's work with Weill, Eisler and Dessau. Since the 1930s composers have found a demand for incidental music in the cinema (see Film music) and to some extent in broadcasting, although radio and television programmes often draw on recorded music originally written for the concert hall.

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Short musical segments that accompany, or highlight dramatic moments in, a play, or other stage work.

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