In this video I'm going to show you three things you can learn from Wanda's Theme
from Christophe Beck's score to WandaVision.
We'll take a look at how he uses harmony to get that superhero sound,
the simplicity of his main motive, and a moment in the B theme where
he's able to pull off the expected and the unexpected at the same time.
Whether you're composing your own superhero theme or just looking for inspiration,
you should find something here that can make your own writing better.
So let's go!
Hey guys, welcome to my channel.
I'm Ryan. I'm a composer for film, TV and video games but I also love
figuring out and talking about the way that writing music works.
So the first thing I want to talk about is harmony,
and really the trick to getting that superhero sound with harmony
is to juxtapose diatonic chords with non-diatonic chords, which means using
chords from within your key and contrasting them with chords from outside your key.
But you don't just pick any two random chords.
There's actually a good way to decide what to use and that's to use a pivot note,
which is a common tone between both the chord from your key and from the chord outside the key.
So let's start by looking at the very opening of Wanda's theme.
So you can see in the beginning here we start on that G pedal.
That tells us that G is home and it makes G feel like a very safe ground.
We're taking that G pitch as kind of our
reference point for everything that's going to come after it.
When he comes in with that F# major chord on bar three it sounds really surprising and unexpected,
because we were just set up to believe that we're in G.
All of a sudden we're getting this F# major chord which is not from G
major or G minor and doesn't really fit our expectations.
But part of how he's able to make that work is because of that melody tone.
Now here it looks like an A# because that's the third of
the F# chord but really in this context it's a Bb.
So he uses that A# or Bb as a pivot note between the F# major chord
and the G minor chord and he's able to flip-flop back between the two of them.
And it feels very smooth because of that one common tone.
You can just go in between them/
This is a very common technique for superhero harmony.
I did the very same thing in the Interns of F.I.E.L.D. theme that I wrote a few years ago.
So by using that A# or Bb as a pivot point we're able to have some common ground
but play with other dimensions around it.
But notice that even when he brings in that F# chord he has that G pedal tone going the
whole time, which tells you where home really is and where that steady ground still stays.
So you can use this common pitch technique in a lot of different ways.
The G minor triad also has a D in it, so maybe we could use that D from another chord.
That could be a B minor chord
or we could use the G pitch as a common tone and we could go G minor to E minor.
Now if we continue, when we look at the next part of the theme the next chord we come to is this Ab.
And if you're familiar with the diatonic chords of G minor you might be thinking
"Where is this Ab coming from? How did he know to choose this chord?"
So I think it's helpful to zoom out a little
bit and look at the context of what's coming afterwards.
You see that the Ab leads to a D, which will bring us to another section on the G.
So really we have a cadence coming up, and you might expect a ii-V-I
cadence and that is actually what we have.
It's just the Ab is a ii chord from a different mode,
it's the ii chord being borrowed from Phrygian.
So even though our tonic is still G, instead of the usual
expected G natural minor we're actually using G phrygian to come up with this chord here.
So then if you think of it as a ii chord and you zoom out you have this ii-V-I progression.
It actually makes perfect sense.
Part of what's great about the Ab is that it's a major chord though,
so in this superhero context it feels very bright and strong.
Major chords that come from outside your key have this kind of weird thing where they feel
more major, and that's what this Ab is doing for us here.
So the next thing I want to talk about is the main motive, the main lick that drives the theme.
What I find really fascinating about this motive is we have three pitches, G D Bb.
We essentially have a G minor triad arpeggio.
And this is a Disney Marvel film, millions of dollars, who knows how much the music budget was,
and he's able to use a G minor arpeggio as his main theme.
So I really think this shows that there is no excuse when people are
saying "I can't come up with ideas. I don't have a good enough lick."
He's using a G minor arpeggio, so I think whatever you're using is also going to be fine.
But what he is doing really well is he has the two things that make a good motive work.
He has a unique rhythm and a unique interval, or an interval shape.
So the rhythm is that dotted pattern which is super simple.
And it doesn't seem like much but it's enough for our ear to recognize it.
So anytime that comes back later in the theme we're gonna connect it,
we're gonna know "Oh, I've heard this rhythm before."
It really takes just one dotted note or one little shift of a beat to make
a rhythm identifiable, make us be able to hear it and recognize it when it comes back later.
The other thing he has is this interesting shape.
So he manages to leap an entire tenth in just three notes,
which is a pretty wide gap for a melody.
But it's distinct and that means it's reusable,
there's so much potential in just that simple idea.
You could use that same G minor chord and just shift everything up a tone,
shift everything up a tone again, and even do that on different chords.
So even if you just think of the 12
major triads and the 12 minor triads there are 72 ways you could play that one lick.
So by having that distinct rhythm and that distinct interval shape
he's able to have a strong motive, even if it is just a G minor arpeggio.
So this last thing I want to talk about is this section near the end
that I'm calling the B theme where he has this very unexpected harmony.
We start on the G minor, which has been the key of the entire piece and it makes perfect sense.
But then we get this Em7b5, which is very unexpected and very rich sounding.
So the two questions are "Where did you come up with this chord?" and "Why does it sound so good?"
So to the first question, "Where does this chord come from?".
I once read in a harmony book, I think by Schoenberg,
that says that you should think of a m7b5 or a half diminished chord
as actually a dominant seventh chord that's just missing its root.
And if you actually just drop down another third you would get that chord.
So if we have that Em7b5 and we put a C below it we get a C9 chord, which sounds super jazzy.
So you can go back and forth between that G minor
and the C7, it's actually a pretty standard kind of bluesy progression.
It's the same chord progression in The Great Gig in the Sky from Dark Side of the Moon.
So just like before we borrowed that Ab from G
phrygian, now we're borrowing the C7 chord from G Mixolydian which is a parallel mode.
They both have that G as their home base but have different natural chord constructions over top.
So I think that explains a little bit of why that chord is unusual sounding,
but we can still kind of music theory worm our way into explaining why it makes sense.
But the real question is why does it sound so good?
Now if we look at the main melody on its own it's actually pretty safe sounding.
It would have been perfectly fine to just use the G minor the whole time, or even the D chord.
So the melody is very safe and the melody is giving us something very expected,
and that's actually where the room comes in to do something unusual with the harmony.
By keeping that D in the melody, which feels very safe, and then putting an unexpected chord
against it we're getting this perfect unison of what I call "the expected in an unexpected way."
So we do kind of expect that D
note in the melody but we were not expecting it with this Em7b5 chord.
So we have that expected D with the unexpected chord underneath it.
So we're setting up people's expectations, leading them to expect that D,
giving them what they want which is that D in the melody, but not how they wanted it.
It's with a weird chord, it's with this Em7b5 chord, and that's why it's very satisfying.
We get that expected unexpected moment.
Another reason the chord sounds so good in this context is that the E natural creates a tritone
with that Bb, and for hundreds of years the tritone has been that sound of "the other".
And here we are in this superhero alternate dimension other universe world, so it makes
sense that we'd be using tritones to kind of establish that spooky space.
So of course there are a lot of other interesting things that do happen in
this theme but those are the main three that I wanted to point out to you today.
Please let me know in the comments what you think, how you might be able to use these ideas,
or maybe other superhero themes that do these exact same things.
And please comment with the name of another score you'd like me to do a video on in the future.