Art by George Butler.
This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling.
For hundreds of years, composers have been using a specific four-note melody to evoke death. It's appeared in dozens of famous movies, and you probably never even realized it. But once you hear it, you'll start noticing it everywhere. Featuring musicologist Alex Ludwig and Strong Songs Host Kirk Hamilton.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Dolly Pop by Piano Mover
Dead Hour by Alistair Sung
We Rise by Generdyn
Falling (Instrumental) by Asher
Suite from Quarantine by Davis Harwell
Trois Gnossiennes 3 by The Nocturne
The Wraith by Tokyo Rose
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound and hosted by Dallas Taylor.
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Check out The Graduale Project’s Youtube page for more Latin chants.
View Transcript ▶︎
You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.
[music in]
If you look up the top charting songs from a random year, maybe from 10-15 years ago… there’s a good chance that you’ll recognize a few of them. But you’ll probably be surprised at how many songs don’t even ring a bell. Because times change. Styles come and go, and the vast majority of music becomes a relic of its time. But once and awhile, the stars align so that a single piece of music takes hold and will not let go.
[music out]
This is especially true when the music becomes associated with important life events, like birthdays.
[Music clip: Happy Birthday]
Despite the Happy Birthday Song being written over a hundred years ago, it’s still being sung countless times a day, all over the world.
[music out]
Here’s another one:
[Music clip: Wedding March]
Felix Mendelssohn's “Wedding March” was written in the eighteen forties, but we still think of it as the wedding song.
[music out]
*So for birthdays, we’ve got “Happy Birthday.” For weddings, we’ve got the “Wedding March,” And when life ends, well, we have music for that, too. Another classic song you probably recognise is Chopin's “Funeral March”. *
[Music clip: Funeral March]
That song is famous, but there’s actually another song—or at least, a melody—that has an even deeper connection with death.
[music in]
For hundreds of years, composers and songwriters have been using this melody to evoke feelings of dread and despair. You’ve probably heard it dozens of times and never even realized it. But it’s one of those things where, once you know about it, you’ll start noticing it everywhere. It’s called the Dies Irae.
[Music clip: Dies Irae]
At this point, the Dies Irae has been used by so many composers that it’s basically a meme.
Alex: A meme is this thing that grows and changes as it happens. And that's what the Dies Irae really is.
Alex: This meme that these composers can draw on over and over and over again.
That’s Alex Ludwig, a musicologist and assistant professor at the Berklee College of Music. Alex keeps a list of every instance of the Dies Irae in a movie or TV soundtrack that he can find. One of his favorite examples is from the first Star Wars movie.
Alex: I'm a huge Star Wars fan. And in the very first Star Wars film, there's a very prominent example of the Dies Irae.
Alex: The cue is called the Burning Homestead cue. This is the moment in the film where Luke Skywalker returns back to his home and the Stormtroopers have just burned it to the ground, killing his aunt and uncle.
Alex: And at that moment… the camera pans over to this burning skeleton, we hear this musical cue that we've heard a few times already in the film. But what John Williams does is he adds on these first four notes of the Dies irae.
[Music clip: Star Wars music up]
By quoting the Dies Irae in the score of Star Wars, composer John Williams was drawing on a tradition that goes back all the way to the middle ages.
Alex: To go back to the beginning, we have to go back to the 13th century.
[Music clip: Dies Irae Chant]
This is a modern recording of the original Dies Irae chant.
Alex: So we're talking monks singing Latin chants at a requiem mass, the sort of mass for the dead.
“Dies Irae” is Latin for “Day of Wrath.” It began as a medieval Catholic poem describing the Last Judgement—the end times when the righteous ascend to heaven, and the wicked are banished to hell. No one is totally sure who wrote that poem, when they wrote it, or when it was set to music.
Alex: And this would have been a common performance for funerals, any sort of Catholic Church in 1200, 1300, etc, would have played this and this would have been part of the sort of religious vernacular. So for about 500 years, this piece of Gregorian chant would have been common. Everyone who would have gone to a Catholic mass would have heard this at a funeral.
Alex: So, from the very beginning, there is this connotation of this chant, this text with death.
[music out]
The entire piece is about four minutes long. But the most famous part of Dies Irae—the part that gets reused over and over—is the first four notes.
[Music clip: Dies Irae Chant]
Kirk: The four notes in question are the flat third and then the second. Then, the flat third and then the root, which sounds like this [SFX: Melodica example].
That’s Kirk Hamilton. He’s the host of Strong Songs, a podcast that breaks down iconic songs to figure out what makes them work. He’s also a lifelong musician and a fan of the melodica.
Kirk: I think it's a good phrase because it resolves to the one, which is where a lot of musical phrases want to resolve. That final note is the root. It's the tonic note… If I'm playing in C, it sounds like this [SFX: Melodica example].
The thing that makes this musical phrase so powerful is that it includes both dissonance and resolution.
Kirk: The first two notes, there's a half step between them, which is… the kind of tightest interval you can have. And that's very dissonant. [SFX: Melodica example] If you play them at the same time, [SFX: Melodica example] it's very dissonant, especially on my slightly out of tune melodica. When you, then, resolve it, the second two notes are just a minor third. They're further apart. They resolve really nicely. [SFX: Melodica example] When you play those at the same time, it sounds like this. [SFX: Melodica example]
This minor third is key to the melody’s dark, foreboding feel.
Kirk: Half of the notes are the minor third, so it's very minor-third-heavy.
Kirk: Not everyone hears a minor key and feels sad, but it is definitely something in America and in Europe and where a lot of movies are made, that when you hear a minor scale, it just sounds sad.
The downward movement of the melody also adds to its sense of heaviness.
Kirk: Which I think is part of the reason that people really like it in movies. When you want something to sound hopeful, typically, the melody will move upwards. [SFX: Uplifting melody] It'll be kind of this feeling of flight of lifting up. When things are kind of coming crashing down, music tends to move downward. A lot of times, you'll hear those like [SFX: Singing “bum, bum, bum, bum”], in a big dramatic scene. That final note [SFX: Root note], that big tonic resolution, just feels like this avalanche kind of landing on top of you.
For hundreds of years, the Dies Irae was an essential piece of Catholic music. Eventually, composers started to incorporate it into their own religious pieces.
Unlike the film composers that came later, most of these early composers used the exact words of the original Dies Irae poem, but set them to different melodies. For instance, the Dies Irae appeared in a mass written by the French composer Antoine Brumel:
[Music clip: Brumel Dies Irae]
During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Dies Irae text was also used in symphonic compositions. Joseph Haydn’s younger brother, Michael Haydn also used the Dies Irae:
[Music clip: Haydn Dies Irae]
Here it is in a requiem by the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi.
[Music clip: Verdi Dies Irae]
Even Mozart got in on the action.
[Music clip: Mozart Dies Irae]
In all of these cases, the use of the Dies Irae is explicitly religious. But in the eighteen hundreds, it started to lose its religious connotation.
Alex: In 1830, we have a piece of classical music called the Symphonie Fantastique written by a French composer named Hector Berlioz. This symphony is important because in the 19th century, composers started to write what was called programm music, music that was based on something else, music that was telling a story.
*In the story of Symphonie Fantastique, the main character dreams that he has killed his lover, and that she’s been reincarnated as a witch.
Alex: So, the fifth movement, the last movement is called the Dream of a Witch's Sabbath, and the main character's beloved has come back to life as a witch. And the movement is set at midnight in a graveyard. So we've got all of these spooky sounds that the composer is incorporating. We've got bells tolling, [Music clip: Dream of a Witch's Sabbath] 12 bells for midnight. We've got these creepy crawly sounds like skeletons dancing or spiders crawling around. And then on top of that the final layer is we hear low in the orchestra, the tubas and the brass playing the Dies irae [Music clip].
Audiences at the time would have recognized the Dies Irae from hearing it at funerals, the same way we know the Wedding March from hearing it at weddings.
Alex: They would have heard it at funeral mass after funeral mass. And so they would have known that, okay, this is what this composer is trying to create. He's using the Dies irae because it was so richly symbolic of funerals and death.
“Symphonie Fantastique” really marked a turning point for the Dies Irae.
Alex: This is that moment where the Dies irae moves from a sacred connotation. We always thought of it in the church. Now it has jumped out of the sacred into the secular realm.
Rather than setting the words of the Dies Irae to a new melody, Berlioz put the original melody into a new context. As program music became more and more popular, other composers started doing the same thing: using the melody of the Dies Irae to evoke death.
Alex: And so, we see piece after piece that incorporate the Dies irae melody, in other programmatic pieces. And I'll read you some of these names:
<span data-preserve-html-node="true" style=“color:rgb(127,44,202)"> Alex: The Dance of Death
...by Liszt
[Music clip: Liszt “Totentanz”]
Alex: The Isle of the Dead.
...by Rachmaninov
[Music clip: Rachmaninov “Isle of the Dead”]
Alex: Songs and Dances of Death
...by Mussorgsky
[Music clip: Mussorgsky “Trepak”]
In case you missed that one, the Dies Irae was in the piano part. Here it is again:
[Music clip: Rewind effect + “Trepak”]
Alex: These are all 19th century classical compositions, all of which have death in the title and all of which have Dies Irae in their musical materials.
[music in]
Over the span of 500 years, the Dies Irae had transformed from a Latin funeral chant to a kind of musical meme signifying death. But it still had one more transformation to make.
As the nineteenth century came to a close, a new artform called the “motion picture” was beginning to take off. The time had finally come for this little melody to become a moviestar. That’s coming up, with a TON of examples, after the break.
[music out]
MIDROLL [music in]
For hundreds of years, the Dies Irae was performed at Catholic funerals. Eventually though, composers began using it as kind of a musical shorthand for death.
Kirk: Composers have just equated that sound with the sound of death for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's never shaken that association.
[music out]
In the late eighteen hundreds, it became possible to make narrative stories out of so-called “moving pictures,” or films.
Alex: At the end of the 19th century is when we start to have silent films. So 1890s or so.
When you saw a movie in the silent film era, there was usually a pianist in the theater, improvising music to what was happening on screen.
[SFX: Dramatic silent film music]
Alex: And so these mostly pianists would have been pulling little snippets of music out and playing them for what were appropriate scenes in a film.
We don’t have any recordings of film music from this era, but there’s a good chance that these pianists brought in the Dies Irae when a scene called for it.
Alex: I think it's pretty safe to assume that any sort of funeral scene or scary scene or scene about death probably would have had a Dies irae sort of reference in it. [SFX: Music leads into Dies Irae melody]
As the film industry grew and budgets increased, filmmakers started hiring composers to write specific music for their movies. In bigger theaters, these scores would have been performed live by a small orchestra. And as far as we can tell, the first time the Dies Irae was referenced in a film score was in 1927, in the silent sci fi classic, Metropolis.
[Music clip: Metropolis]
[music in]
Of course, movies didn’t stay silent for long. By 1930, movies with sound, called “Talkies” were all the rage,1 and the age of the soundtrack had begun. Once movies got synced sound, film composers started using the Dies Irae in the same way that classical composers had: to conjure images of death and despair.
In the 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey almost takes his own life, but an angel named Clarence gives him a terrifying glimpse of what the world would be like without him.
[music out]
[SFX: Wonderful Life - George Bailey: Clarence! Help me, Clarence! Get me back!]
Did you catch the Dies Irae in the music? In this case, they actually used the first seven notes. Here it is without the dialogue.
[Music clip: "Wrong Mary Hatch / The Prayer"]
But for about twenty five years after It’s a Wonderful Life, there are very few examples of the Dies Irae in movies. This is because orchestral soundtracks became less popular.
Alex: As we move into the 40s and 50s, Hollywood moves towards film noir, sort of after World War II, and it sort of mirrors what's going on in popular music. So you start to see more jazz influences in film scores, less big orchestral stuff and more smaller intimate ensembles.
For example, here’s a clip from the soundtrack of the 50s film noir, Touch of Evil.
[Music clip: “The Boss”]
In the 60s, filmmakers started to put more radio hits into soundtracks. The movie Easy Rider featured bands like Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds and The Who.
[Music clip: The Who - “I Can See For Miles”]
But in the 70s, classically-inspired soundtracks made a comeback, and so did our favorite funeral tune. Here’s a clip from the opening of A Clockwork Orange. Again, in this example, they used the first seven notes of the Dies Irae.
[Music clip: A Clockwork Orange]
Alex: Once we get into the 1970s, that's where this idea of the Wilhelm Scream Dies Irae really takes off.
The Wilhelm Scream is a classic movie sound effect that’s been reused over and over, just like the Dies Irae [SFX clip: Charge at Feather River Wilhelm scream].
It was George Lucas and Ben Burt who popularized the Wilhelm Scream by putting it in Star Wars [SFX clip: Star Wars Wilhelm Scream]. It was John Williams, the composer of Star Wars, who helped popularize the Dies Irae by using it in the Burning Homestead scene [Music clip: Star Wars Dies Irae]. After the massive success of Star Wars, the dramatic orchestral soundtrack became cool again.
Alex: John Williams has this sort of interest in that old school style. So there is a renaissance in the sort of traditional symphonic style.
After Star Wars, the Dies Irae really took off. It would take way too long to play them all, so we’ll stick to the highlights. Here it is in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as the townspeople watch the strange alien lights in the sky...
[Music clip: Close Encounters]
It plays in The Lion King, just after Mufasa dies, when Scar sends the hyenas chasing after Simba.
[Music clip: The Lion King - “Scar: Kill him”.]
You can hear it in Poltergeist, just after the mom crawls out of the muddy skeleton pit.
[Music clip: Poltergeist]
You can hear it in the opening credits of Mars Attacks, as the martian ships surround Earth.
[Music clip: Mars Attacks]
Here it is in Game of Thrones:
[Music clip: GoT “The Wars to Come”]
In Frozen 2, Elsa hears this mysterious melody throughout the movie.
[Music clip: Frozen 2 montage]
Kirk: “Into the Unknown” from Frozen II has this beautiful ah ah ah ah. It's like the recurring motif of the whole movie is sung as Elsa hears the sound over and over again. That's the Dies Irae. The composers of that piece said, specifically, "We went to this Latin death chant."
[SFX: Frozen 2, Elsa - “You hear it too”]
Here’s one of the composers, Bobby Lopez, in an interview with the AV Club.
[SFX clip: Bobby Lopez: The actual tune is the Dies Irae, which is a musical reference that goes way back to early times in the church, and it’s like the Day of Wrath. It’s all about death. It’s like a musical signal for death.]
Alex: And then probably the most iconic is The Shining.
Kirk: Yeah, The Shining. The movie starts with the Dies Irae. It's very clear about it.
Alex: The opening sequence, that sort of floating camera going up the mountain side...
[Music clip: The Shining]
Alex: As the Torrance family drives up to the Overlook Hotel is scored by a full statement of the Dies irae. So not just the first four notes, but a full statement of the Latin chant.
Home Alone uses the Dies Irae as a kind of theme song for the creepy old man that lives near the McCallisters.
Alex: Every time Kevin McCallister sees his neighbor outside, they play these four notes, bah bah bah bah because the cousins tell this story of the neighbor and accuse him of being the Salt Slayer.
[SFX clip: Home Alone - Buzz: “The salt turns the bodies into mummies.”]
Alex: And so, every time Kevin sees this neighbor, John Williams gives us those four notes [Music clip: Home Alone] as a musical stinger to sort of underline the point that he is supposed to be scary.
Later in the movie, Kevin meets the old man in a church, and learns he isn’t the bad guy, after all. In the background, we hear a children’s choir singing Carol of the Bells.
[Music clip: Home Alone, Carol of the Bells]
Kirk: Then, he realizes that he needs to get home and protect his house. It's the most dramatic part of the movie. As he runs home, this John Williams' version of the Carol of the Bells begins to play that's really dramatic, [Music clip: Home Alone, Carol of the Bells]. But that's also cited as quoting the Dies Irae. The two melodies are using the same four notes.
Kirk: The Dies Irae is these four notes [SFX: Melodica]. The only difference between the Dies Irae and the Carol of the Bells is rhythm and tempo. You play the Dies Irae, typically, very slowly. If you play them a lot faster in a different rhythm, it sounds like [SFX: Melodica]. It's the same four notes. They're just played in a different rhythm, and kind of with a different energy.
The version of Carol the Bells that we’re familiar with, the one in Home Alone, was arranged around 1914.2 But the melody is based on a traditional Ukrainian folk song that was written before Christianity came to Ukraine. As far as anyone can tell, there’s no direct connection between the two pieces.
Kirk: It's actually a rite of spring song. It's a song about the coming of spring and how you will have a bountiful harvest this year, which is kind of the opposite of the Dies Irae. It's not about death at all.
Besides Home Alone, there’s another movie that seems to play with the similarities between these two melodies. This was actually the movie that made Kirk aware of the Dies Irae.
Kirk: It was when I was learning about The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack. It wound up causing this sort of crossed musical wire in my brain, where I heard The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack is being based on one thing when, in fact, I think there's a pretty strong argument that it's based on another.
In The Nightmare Before Christmas, the spooky citizens of Halloweentown decide to take over Christmas from Santa Claus. As they prepare their twisted version of the holiday, they sing a song called “Making Christmas.” [Music Clip: Nightmare Before Christmas - Making Christmas] The entire song is built around the melody of the Dies Irae or is it Carol of the Bells?
[Music Clip: Nightmare Before Christmas - Making Christmas]
Kirk: To me, because it's about someone stealing Christmas, I always equated it with Carol of the Bells, [SFX: Singing “bum ba ba bum”]. But, because Jack is from Halloweentown, and is a skull and is a dead guy, it actually makes more sense that it would be the Dies Irae.
[Music Clip: Nightmare Before Christmas - Making Christmas Big Chorus]
So are all of these composers doing this intentionally?
[music in: The Nocturne - “Trois Gnossiennes 3”]
Kirk: I think about that a lot. I think some composers certainly do, but I do think there are composers who will use those four notes just thinking, "That just sounds dark and cool. It goes downward and it resolves really well," and they won't do it consciously. I think that other composers will.
Alex: I think it's definitely a full blown trope at this point. And I think that composers have to be knowingly using it at this point.
Alex: My next question is, how much do you think these composers are listening to each other's cues? Composers will often use temp tracks of other films. And so, they will put in a cue from a different film just as a temporary score, and then the director will say, "Oh, I like that, can you write me something like that?" And so now we've got a “snake eating its tail” situation where other composers are trying to replicate what's already been there.
[music out]
For the many composers who do use it intentionally, the deep history of the Dies Irae is a huge part of its appeal.
Alex: I think it's a vital tool in the tool belt of these composers. I think that having this connotation built in with the Dies Irae, it's like a footnote that adds another layer of meaning into what the film is trying to do.
[Music clip: Dies Irae]
Kirk: I think that we, humans, naturally congregate around musical ideas. Music has been part of our culture for as long as human beings have existed right? You sing music for different rituals and have musical associations with different parts of life. Death is such a huge part of life, that there would be some kind of music that we would associate with death.
For better or for worse, death isn’t going anywhere, so more than likely, neither is the Dies Irae.
Kirk: When there's music that's used and associated very strongly with huge events like death or marriage or birth they, then, become the memetic, in this way, over generations.
Kirk: These little musical bits of information make their way into our culture and kind of, then, transcend their origins and just become things that get echoed over and over and over again.
[music out]
[music in: Tokyo Rose - “The Wraith”]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Hear more at defactosound.com.
This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling, and me Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound edited by Soren Begin. It was sound designed and mixed by Nick Spradlin.
Thanks to our guests, Alex Ludwig and Kirk Hamilton. To see Alex’s list of Dies Irae examples, visit alexludwig.net. To hear Kirk’s awesome podcast about music, subscribe to Strong Songs right here in your podcast player.
Special thanks to Marek Klein of the Graduale Project for letting us use his rendition of the Dies Irae chant. Check out their Youtube channel to hear other Latin chants Marek has performed. You can find all of these links, along with artwork, music and more, at our website, 20K dot org.
Thanks for listening.
[music out]
