We’re doing new stuff in music today: looking at those songs or riffs that everybody knows by ear, but nobody knows the name of. Now it’s time to learn the name, history, and more.
And what better place to start than Mysterioso Pizzicato, aka: “The silent movie villain song”.
From Wikipedia:
Mysterioso Pizzicato, also known as The Villain or The Villain’s Theme, is a piece of music whose earliest known publication was in 1914, when it appeared in an early collection of incidental photoplay music aimed at accompanists for silent films. The main motif, with minor variations, has become a well-known and widely used device (or “cliche”),[1] incorporated into various other musical works, and the scores of films, TV programmes and video games, as well as unnotated indications in film scripts.
Both a character theme (the “traditional ‘bad-guy’ cue“[2]) and situation theme,[3] it is used to herald foreboding or disaster and to represent villainy, sneakiness, or stealth. A version of this theme is contrasted with themes such as the hero’s…
The tune appeared as no. 89 in The Remick Folio of Moving Picture Music, vol. I, compiled and edited by the Danish-American composer J. Bodewalt Lampe and published on March 24, 1914 by Jerome H. Remick & Co., New York and Detroit.[7][8][9] It is unclear whether Lampe himself was the composer or transcriber of the piece. It also bears a resemblance to part of John Stepan Zamecnik‘s 1913 composition Mysterious – Burglar Music 1, which appeared in Sam Fox Moving Picture Music volume 1,[10] a widely distributed collection of silent film music. It has been described as reflecting “the tradition of stealthy tremolos that marked the entrance of villains in 19th century stage melodrama”.[8] By 1917 the idea of villain’s motifs in general, or variants of the specific motif, was established well enough for an author to warn against the, “monotonous and wearisome,” overuse of the motif, “whenever [the villain] is seen.[11] Other motifs used to indicate villainy or danger include the second section of “Hearts and Flowers” (1893)
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