The Music of the People: Orientalism in TMWKTM

One of the most striking musical aspects of this film is Bernard Herrmann’s uncanny ability to place us in a specific location and mood.  First off, his scoring for the sequences in Morocco illustrates a compositional tactic known as “Orientalism,” or rather, the borrowing of certain “Eastern” musical tropes and inserting them into otherwise Western music.  Both the first hotel scene and the dinner sequence utilize “Orientalist” scoring and both their melodies, in the flute and violin, respectively, follow a certain “Arabic” trope.  The use of an augmented second, such as the leap from C to D#, serves as the defining characteristic of the harmonic scale—a pattern often associated with Middle Eastern music.