More Movie Music Cliches

What sounds like human voices singing “Aaaaaaah!” = giant crystal, beam of light

Camera pans round room, fade down people chatting, keyboards clacking, fade up melancholy music playing - CUT to view of cemetery, or aged-up character on verandah of old people’s home, or black screen with white message in courier type:

The Westchester Globe and Echo closed six months later.

Or camera pans round room as office workers grin and raise champagne glasses, visuals go blurry, fade down chatting, fade up fairground carousel music.

Near the end of film/documentary: foreign train comes towards us in slow motion through forest of wires to doomy music. Sometimes overlaid with blur, as in heat-induced mirage.

Discordant, modern harpsichord noodling = quirky character burgles a house for altruistic reasons.

Suspicious characters play Bartok's Mikrokosmos on the piano.

Flute plays pentatonic tune, drum joins in = Native American takes gun out of suitcase and starts to polish it. He will turn out to be a policeman.

Pachelbel’s Canon (17th century) = We’re at Lindisfarne, talking about the Ven. Bede (8th century) 

Urgent drumming = cheetah chases antelopes, gibbons swing through forest canopy, herds of wildebeest gallop to waterhole where one of them will be killed by an alligator in slow motion.

Pianist starts playing sentimental tune on honky tonk piano, electronic swirls introduced underneath, swirls crescendo, piano becomes increasingly discordant: generalised menace.

Upward appoggiatura on bamboo flute, long-held overblown note: we are in the Amazonian rainforest.

Three random Swanee whistle notes, in descending series: we are in the Amazonian rainforest – 400,000 million years ago.

Harp: water weeds wave.


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More movie music clichés here. 

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