The Open Letter Series is a collection of open letters written to other people, ideas or activities that have taken place over the course of the last few days of uploading in both the public realm and in my personal life. What exactly is an open letter? An open letter is a letter which is often critical in nature that is addressed to a particular person or group of people but intended for publication or to be read by a large group of people. In this case, that is you, the reader.

Each open letter will discuss a different topic, in varying degrees of depth. From politics to personal issues, the Open Letter series aims to provide clarity on issues, create ideas or inspiration, or, in my case, to become a place of stress and thought relief. Nothing is safe from receiving an open letter, not shows or book characters, a class lesson or a provoking idea.

This time, we’ll be continuing our The Open Letter Series by still focusing on the film The Grand Budapest Hotel © 2014.

Music in film, or a film’s score, is often set to the visuals to provide an intense experience for the watcher, or convey tones and ideas that have to be helped along by music.

Other times, music can be iconic, the movie and the music are made for each other, specifically in the cases of big mainstream movie series like Harry Potter or Star Wars. Without a doubt, if you’re filmatically (we’re inventing words here, people) cultured, and have seen the Grand Budapest Hotel could easily identify the track Mr. Moustafa because of how unique of a sound it is.

Grand Budapest uses its score for both aesthetic and (this is the real kicker) musical purposes. Let me explain.

In score and movie music composing, there’s this thing called temp music, which basically when there’s a movie that exists that has a song that worked really well with the audience, so when another director comes along with a movie with a very similar scene, the director tells the music producer or film’s composer “hey, we filmed this scene, could you make music that fits this scene and make it sound like this song from this movie from this scene.” Suddenly, the music director or composer’s job is gone: the head director is doing the job for them.

Temp music is basically a fancy way to say original work or a work that has been copied and modified to fit the needs of the movie. It’s basically this meme:

Got me?

If you don’t believe that this is actually a thing, here’s the soundtrack from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ©2009 “Einstein’s Wrong”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIw_YcLnsew and compare it to Thor © 2011 “Hammer Found”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOXGunV_orE

Same song? Pretty much, yeah.

A lot of mainstream directors do this, they take a song that is ‘safe’ with the audience, and allows you to focus on what’s happening on screen, versus what’s happening with the rest of the movie.

This is one of many reasons why Wes Anderson did so well with this movie: he made the music such a priority that it became something that someone wants to listen to, on its own.

The soundtrack (The Grand Budapest Hotel: Original Soundtrack) was written and directed by one of the greats, Alexandre Displat, and it sounds like something you’d hear if you were walking into a little shop in a small European country. It’s got yodelling (because you can’t set a movie in a place called Nebelsbad in the Republic of Zubrowka without there being yodelling) and cello and balalaikas (think Russian triangle acoustic guitars) and violin plucking and the whole shebang. The organ in Last Will and Testament makes you feel fear. The pops of the triangle in Night Train To Nebelsbad make you physically laugh, the light piano keys at the start of Up The Stairs / Down The Hall provide actual confusion

The movie, like a lot of what Wes Anderson does, was directed and spaced out so that the music fits seamlessly into the movie. It fits together so well, Wes probably wrote the script with Alexandre in the room and they would throw ideas back and forth to each other; the music was not a ‘cute additive’ in this case.

It has come to the point that I time how long it takes me to do homework based on what song I’m on in the Hotel soundtrack. It’s 32 tracks long, I can name them all in order and I could probably attempt-sing them all if I was forced to.

Tune in next week, where we discuss the uniqueness in the Narration and why the film’s novel-like format works wonders for this movie.