#library music

Someone who’s name you might not know, but who’s work you’re probably intimately familiar with if you’re a geeky pop culture fan: Keith Mansfield, a giant in the field of library music. 

He wrote incidental music that was designed to be put into “libraries,” where anyone could pay royalties from rights clearing houses to use his often synth heavy music for their b-movie, instructional training video, documentary, corporate video, commercial, television series, and so on, music that is “sonic wallpaper” that is meant to heighten the scene but also be invisible and not call attention to itself. If you’re a producer or editor (and by odds, a few people who follow me must be), you’re no doubt intimately familiar with some pieces of his music. As near as can be told, he released music entirely for either music libraries for scoring. It’s fascinating to me that a musician can work that way, just releasing music that people use to punch up an otherwise too-quiet cheapie documentary about Ancient Egypt, or before a VHS of the highlights of the 1987 World Hopscotch Championship in Calgary.

I salute library musicians and incidental composers, who set the scene so well (and usually, for cheap), yet they mostly remain anonymous.

In my experience, it’s mostly geeks who can rattle off incidental or library music, mostly because it is present before something they remember clearly. Here’s what I mean: right now, see if you can hum the theme Looney Tunes would have whenever they had a factory or conveyor belt scene, the Star Trek fight music, or the theme for whenever the GI Joe cartoon had a sad moment, or the theme whenever Snarf was doing something funny, or the fanfare that played to introduce the Power Rangers’ Bulk and Skull.

The music that Keith Mansfield is best known for making is the “Our Feature Presentation” music (the actual name for it is “Funky Fanfare”) which they used to play in sleazeball 70s dive theaters, but which most people associate with Quentin Tarantino movies. In fact, this is probably the music that plays every time Quentin Tarantino walks into a room. 

Likewise, his album “Video Connection” from 1984 is what you’d come up with if you’re trying to make fun of the entire decade of the 1980s: 

Another album of Keith Mansfield’s musical cues I strongly recommend, Survival from 1991. But…if you ever watched an action-adventure show made in the 1990s, you probably recognize some of the non-distracting music cues here, which would play just before a teenager on a skateboard sucked into the Jungle World discovered the Lost City or whatever: 

Searching Keith Mansfield’s name on Spotify is really a revelation. Divorced of any visual content, it’s entirely possible to listen to his music and appreciate it by itself, as the weird synth-pop from the 70s-90s, instead of just having it be in a scene where your mental energy is entirely on the fact that MacGyver just got an idea to save the village (”Don’t thank me, chief, thank the gravitational pull of the moon.”)

Though Keith Mansfield did not write it, here is the most famous piece of incidental music of all time, Raymond Scott’s Powerhouse.