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Description
Incidental music is music written to accompany and underscore a dramatic work that is not primarily musical—such as a play, radio or television program, or video game—shaping mood, pace, and transitions without drawing primary attention to itself. In film contexts the analogous practice is more often called a film score or soundtrack rather than “incidental music.”
Typical functions include overtures and entr’actes, cues under dialogue (underscoring), scene‑change music, stingers, and on‑stage (diegetic) pieces for actors or onstage musicians. These cues may range from a few measures to full movements and are designed around the needs of the dramatic structure.
Sources: Spotify, Wikipedia, Discogs, Rate Your Music, MusicBrainz, and other online sources
History
By the late Renaissance and Baroque periods, European theatre routinely used music to connect acts, color scenes, and support dance interludes. English drama incorporated songs and connective music in the 1500s; the Restoration era (e.g., Purcell) and French comédies‑ballets (e.g., Lully) further normalized purpose‑written stage cues that we now group under “incidental music.”
The genre crystallized in the 19th century with large orchestral resources and memorable standalone numbers. Canonical examples include Beethoven’s music for Goethe’s Egmont (1810), Schubert’s Rosamunde (1823), Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (completed as incidental music in 1842), Bizet’s L’Arlésienne (1872), and Grieg’s Peer Gynt (1875). These scores provided overtures, entr’actes, melodramas (music under spoken text), and dances, many later arranged as popular concert suites.
With film and later television, the practice of fragmentary, mood‑shaping cues migrated to screen media, though the terminology shifted toward “film score/soundtrack.” Radio drama also adopted continuous or punctuating music for scene painting and transitions.
Today, the same functions persist in theatre and extend to games and other multimedia, often using loops and modular cues that can repeat or re‑sequence as needed while maintaining atmosphere.
