Implausible Music

As much as I love the grand old movie musical Singin’ in the Rain, one moment never fails to elicit a cringe. It’s during the last scene, when Lina Lamont has been put on the spot to sing before an enthusiastic movie-premiere crowd. We all know that she can’t sing, act, or talk worth a tinker’s damn, but the public still thinks she’s genuine. They’ve got a fake all cobbled up: Lina’s microphone is dead, while just behind her, hidden by a curtain, Debbie Reynolds is perched before a live mic. Lina will be lip-synching while Debbie sings, just as Debbie has done throughout the movie just premiered. When the theater conductor asks Lina what she’s going to sing, Debbie whispers “Singing in the Rain” to Lina, who conveys same to the conductor.

Singing in the Rain, announces the conductor magisterially to the orchestra. Not one of them go shuffling through the parts on their music stands. In what key? inquires the conductor. That’s more or less like asking Lina to recite the Twelve Ages of Man speech from As You Like It. She sidles back towards the curtain where Debbie coaches: “in B-flat.” Lina says to the conductor: “Bee flat.” Again the magisterial conductor instructs the orchestra: In B-flat.

And I’ll be gosh-darned if they don’t just launch into a wowza Hollywood orchestration of Singing in the Rain, no doubt courtesy of ace MGM arranger Conrad Salinger. Without parts. And in B-flat. Of course, in real life they’d just all sit there gaping like a row of monkeys on Percocet, but this is the movies. At MGM, magical orchestras can improvise perfectly polished arrangements of absolutely anything, and in any key.

Surrealism knows no boundaries, so yet more musical Dadaism awaits. The denouement is rapidly approaching, and once Debbie Reynolds is dramatically revealed as the bonafide voice of bimbo Lina Lamont, Gene Kelley strides onstage and starts crooning “You Are My Lucky Star” to lure her back after she has bolted up the aisle in panic. Donald O’Connor, playing the role of Kelley’s music-director sidekick, clambers down into the orchestra pit, picks up the conductor’s baton, and starts conducting the orchestra.

Which starts playing You Are My Lucky Star in a lush and stringy arrangement, precisely in the correct key and in perfect intonation with Kelley, which I should imagine took some doing even under the best of circumstances. Miracle upon miracle: not only can they improvise perfect arrangements in any key, but they can do it even without being told what to play! Hooray for Hollywood.

That stunningly psychic orchestra is my hands-down favorite example of Implausible Music in the movies or TV, but it isn’t the only one by a long shot. An episode of The Closer is less fantastical but no less confounding in its cheerful dismissal of reality. A supposedly world-famous concert pianist is peripherally (so we think) involved in a grisly murder. Brenda Leigh & Co. visit his home where we all discover that this renowned artist uses a Yamaha Disklavier as his piano. That’s funny enough, but our introduction to said Disklavier is downright delectable. One of the great pianist’s students is discovered practicing on said Disklavier. His piece, as might be expected, is the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata—one of the few pieces likely to be recognized by your average Closer viewer. His performance, as might be expected, is lifeless and wooden, sounding for all the world like something played off a MIDI file, which it almost certainly is. As Brenda Leigh & Co., approach, he holds up one finger in admonishment. Wait, he says. Quickly he reaches over and presses a button on the Disklavier’s console. His performance begins playing back. Oh, yes, he sagely observes, that part isn’t quite right. Actually there’s not a thing wrong with it. Well, at least not in the context of a chap so profoundly ungifted as to require a built-in MIDI sequencer to hear his own playing.

We’ll allow that the purpose of the scene is not to comment on worthless practice strategies but to establish the Disklavier’s ability to play the piano in absentia. Which means that from another room nobody knows if it’s live or it’s Memorex, so to speak. Which means that you can change channels now. The world-class concert pianist did it. The family thought he was in his studio practicing, but that was actually the Disklavier. Vladimir was across town slitting a few throats. Another case in the annals of implausible music closed. Ciao, Brenda.

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