Before Danny Elfman was the famous film music composer we know today, he was the lead songwriter of the successful rock band Oingo Boingo, known for their eclectic, theatrical and experimental sound. Filmmaker Tim Burton was intrigued with Elfman’s music and approached him on what became their first collaboration, the soundtrack to Pee-Wee Herman’s Big Adventure. Since then the duo has worked on several more film projects.
Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas was the first animated film Elfman ever scored. The music is full of leitmotifs, memorable themes tied to meaningful characters. Those themes are enriched with whimsical, fantastical orchestrations that are full of imagination and theatrics. Through this technique and the use of unique instrumentation and musical forms, Elfman created a wide-range of emotions, and brought the characters that those themes represent to life.
The music influenced how the film script evolved. As Elfman explained, “The funny thing about Tim and I starting The Nightmare Before Christmas is that neither of us had any idea how to do a musical animated film. When Tim brought me in there was no script, so we started telling the story with songs and the script came afterwards — we did it all backwards, but it made sense to us.”
The main characters, Jack Skellington and his love-interest, Sally, have a complex relationship with ups and downs. “Sally’s Song,” a beautiful, melancholic tune that an entire scene is built upon, is written in the key of e minor. It also employs the phrygian mode when the second scale degree lowers from F-sharp to F-natural. Later in the song, the harmonic minor form appears when D is raised to D-sharp. Weaving together the various modes creates a fabric of elation and love-induced energy, intermingled with a somber tone of unrequited love conveyed through the minor key.
“Sally’s Song” works well as a piano solo allowing the beautiful melody to soar above a dancing rhythmic meter. The lush orchestrations nicely condense into a four-part harmony of a piano arrangement. The meandering melodic theme waltzes up when the lyrics sing of love and hope, and then delicately descends when doubt creeps in, giving the thematic contour a wide range of both notes and emotion. It is a lovely song to play on piano.