This week’s music selection from Secrets Beneath the Floorboards accompanies a moment near the start of the film, where our heroine is attending the funeral of her abusive husband. Though her mental state is fairly dark, she’s surrounded by supportive people. (Well, supportive people and a nosy cop; this is a thriller, after all.) I thus made the score lean towards being empathetic, as if it were also a loved one providing comfort.

As you probably figured out from the title, this week’s music selection has something of a romantic tone. In the accompanying scene in Lifetime’s “Secrets Beneath the Floorboards”, a dinner for two takes a turn for the amorous.

In this blog I like to reference how composers recycle ideas. Here, the repeating four-note piano motive is just the film’s main theme wearing nice evening clothes.

A relatively subtle suspense cue, this week’s selection shows my belief that tense music ought to feature more kalimba.

An interlude of romance in a rustic setting inspires this week’s music selection from Lifetime’s Secrets Beneath the Floorboards. I particularly love scoring these kinds of moments, which provide rich opportunities for musical themes to breathe and develop.

Here I introduce a four-note theme that’s a leitmotif for romance in the film. Drawn from the pentatonic scale (a.k.a. the “all white notes on the piano” scale) it has a peaceful and faintly folksy sound. As the conversation turns to the protagonist’s troubled Oma (grandmother), that character’s theme briefly emerges on cello before the romantic mood returns. Props to Tom Strahle for the lovely acoustic guitar accompaniment.

A question we film composers often face is how to musically support small, incidental moments — those connective mini-scenes that give us vital information at a glance. These moments need to be emotionally connected to the overall tone of the film, but are often too fleeting to warrant a big musical theme.

A handy technique for these situations is to repurpose an earlier melodic idea into a more subtle, supporting form. In this selection from the score of Secrets Beneath the Floorboards I compressed the film’s main theme into a repeating accompaniment for chimes. Set it against some moody ambience, and voila: the perfect accompaniment for the heroine peering at a mysterious drive she’s unearthed from the (titular) floorboards.