‘Romantic Piano’ and ‘Sleazy Saxophone’

Abstract

Library music is currently used in countless audio-visual contexts, from documentaries to YouTube videos. It has become an essential resource for video editors and a relevant source of revenue for composers. Although this pre-existing music is rapidly gaining significance and more varied uses, it still has a reputation in musicological scholarship of being uninteresting and stereotyped. By organising their music in neatly labelled drawers, library music catalogues appear to present a vision of sonorities closely aligned with narratives and images. However, the very same piece may sometimes be heard in widely different contexts. Drawing from an examination of the catalogues of two European library music companies, Audio Network and Cézame, as well as from interviews with composers and music consultants, I focus on how the categories, titles, and descriptions of library music tracks play a relevant role, even a decisive element, in their composition and subsequent use. Taking as examples such categories as ‘romantic’ and ‘erotic’, it is possible to show that these texts reflect and, simultaneously, reinforce widespread narrative and musical conventions in cinema and television. Such classifications potentially contribute to negative views about library music, by making apparent its fundamental organisation around standardised categories and recurrent musical clichés.

Library music as a matter of time

“…For this reason, it is touted as a useful asset in ‘imminent production deadlines’ (Alten, 2013: 360) and for audiovisual creators who consider time to be ‘their most important commodity’ (Graham, 2017). However, library music – due in part to a persistent and overly reductive reputation of being clichéd and uninteresting (Durand, 2020) – is often a reluctant second-choice for audiovisual creators, who resort to it only because they are pressed for time. We find an example of this in a guide for music supervisors which claims that, even though library music can be ‘generic’ and ‘boring’, ‘in a time crunch, [it] can be your best friend’ (Adams et al, 2017: 114).…”

“…Library music (also known as stock or production music) refers to pre-existing pieces composed for future use in all kinds of audiovisual content, from reality television and advertising to trailers and online videos (Deaville, 2006; Durand, 2020; Huelin, 2022). Today, it is mostly accessed online, in websites where library tracks are categorised by mood, emotion, instrumentation and genre, among other possibilities.…”