Reboot?: Crowning Music

Recent discussion concluded that Crowning Music Of Awesome was broken beyond all redemption and had to be kicked down to Sugar Wiki. The article is now appropriately named Awesome Music and unashamedly covers what the original page devolved to - a list of good music across various media.

If I remember correctly though, the page began with a purpose. It was supposed to be the musical analog of the original Crowning Moment Of Awesome. It sought to list instances of the trope whereby a single piece of music characterizes a work's climax. Some examples could be debatable, but it wasn't YMMV or the random gushing that the page became. Since this, unlike "Awesome Music of Cool Sauce," actually is a trope, we could restart in under the name "Crowning Music", though "Crowning Music Of Awesome" can remain a redirect to Awesome Music.

Some instances of Crowning Music:

• Each of the Saw movies ended with a rendition of the series's theme, "Hello Zepp." The variations formed each installment's crowning music.
• Black Swan had a soundtrack with lots of good music, mostly based on Swan Lake. But the track "Perfection," which plays during the film's closing moments, is the objective crowning music. An earlier track, "A Swan is Born," appears to be an instance of crowning music, but then "Perfection" crowns it.
• Another Natalie Portman film, V For Vendetta, also ends with Tchaikovsky. That too has the closing music as the crowning music.
• Almost every episode of Glee has an example of crowning music. The most recent episode offered the climactic song "Loser Like Me." The Awesome Music page, for comparison, also lists songs like "Trouty Mouth" that people might have preferred but that didn't characterize the climax. Notably, "Loser Like Me" doesn't play during the absolute final moments - crowning music doesn't always have to.
• Inceptions crowning music would be the end of "Waiting for a Train."
• The Buffy musical did not have crowning music. It had an Epic Song leading up to the climax, but the climax itself lacked climactic music.
• A number of Lost finales had crowning music. In the series finale, it would be fair to say that "The Hole Shabang" was the the crowning music for the on-island action, and "Moving On" was the crowning music for the flash sideways and perhaps for the whole series.

I'm posting this here instead of YKTTW because of its connection with the original page and because of the sort of work that making the page would involve. We wouldn't just be polling for examples and posting. We'd also have to skim through the existing Awesome Music pages and wicks to see which examples were in line with the trope's original meaning.

edited 3rd Apr '11 12:39:43 AM by Routerie

AFAIK, the "Crowning" pages were not about climaxes. The intent was "The one super mega awesome instance".

All of them except Crowning Music, so it's been said.

Now, if we could just get into what the issue is with Crowing Music.

Any new thoughts on this?

I think what you're going for is Climactic Music, not Crowning Music.

I thought that's what Crowning Music was, initially. If not, I'll have to just send this to YKTTW.

Sent there. We can lock this.