Cue of the Week: The Interrogation

The next cue in the Anthem series. This cue features the music for the story's bad guys, the members of a despotic authoritarian conuncil. In the story, the council imposes a code of societal stagnation and emotional denial. Correspondingly, I gave them a theme with very little motion - a chromatic ascending line which creeps upwards in tiny increments, only to eventually descend. This kind of intellectual relationship between music and story is a technique that can be abused, but in this case I thought it worked artistically as well as symbolically.

Generally I wanted the music to be muted and disquieting. Exotic percussion was employed to give the council a kind of alien quality, and the male voices are meant to give a sense of monastic austerity. The persistent cello intervals are played without vibrato, so they sound static and expressionless.

The Interrogation