Awesome Music / The West Wing

• The theme music. Performed live for your listening pleasure.
• In "The Two Cathedrals", the ending montage is set to "Brothers in Arms" by Dire Straits, which plays at the President and his entourage travel in a thunderstorm to the site of a press conference where the major issue is whether he will continue running for reelection in the wake of his hidden diagnosis of multiple sclerosis being made public. The guitars rise just as Charlie tries to run and put a coat on Bartlett as he stands in the rain, and everything else, the rain, the thunder, even the snaps of the press corps' cameras are all timed to play off it. Quite possibly the best three minutes in the entire series with the perfect score over the top of it.
• Josh, Sam, CJ, and Toby welcoming Ainsley to the team with Gilbert and Sullivan posters and a rendition of "He is an Englishman".
• The military funeral of a homeless vet juxtaposed with The Little Drummer Boy. The West Wing was always fabulous with song juxtaposition.
• The lead-in to the theme tune in the episode "25", which was helped by brilliant cinematography. Bartlet finds out that Zoey has been kidnapped and he immediately drops the photos of her he's been sorting and his glass of scotch. He then glances at Abbey, and as the background music crescendos, the camera zooms in on one of the pictures. The entire sequence takes twenty seconds, but it's a brilliant 20 seconds.
• The Jackal as performed by C.J.
• The bit towards the end of "20 Hours in America, Part II", where the staff find out that a pipe bomb has been set off in a university sports facility and Bartlet gives a beautiful and moving speech written on the fly by Sam, and all accompanied by the Tori Amos cover of "I Don't Like Mondays".
• The use of Massive Attack's "Angel" at the end of "Commencement". It's the perfect balance of creepy, tense and trippy as Zoey realises she's been drugged and then her Secret Service detail realise she's missing, and the repetition of "Love you, love you, love you" as Amy questions Donna's feelings for Josh.
• The scene in "Noel" where Stanley pushes Josh to tell him how he really cut his hand and it's shown that music is making him relive the shooting. It's an amazing scene, if more than a little heartbreaking, and the music that helps make it so great?
  Josh: It was the Bach G Major.
  Stanley: Did he play it well?
  Josh: It was Yo-Yo Ma.
  • Not to mention that Yo-Yo Ma insisted on playing the music live for every take rather than use a recording.
• Also in "Noel": when Donna and Josh walk out of the White House past a group of carolers performing "The Carol of the Bells" at the end of the episode, the sound of sirens begins to rise as they finish the song... calling back to Josh's diagnosis and the manifestation of his PTSD.
• In season 2, "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail" unsurprisingly greets us in the Cold Open with Don Henley's hauntingly beautiful "New York Minute." Aaron Sorkin confirmed that one of his ways to deal with writer's block is to get in the car and turn on the radio. For whatever reason, that song in particular stood out to him one morning, and he realized he wanted to tell a story with the same mood as the song. And he had a title, which is better than nothing in his line of work. This means the song scores some stunning sunrise-pink aerial shots of an eerily empty Washington, DC before cutting inside the usually chaotic West Wing, which is abandoned but for Leo and Sam. Then we get a Diegetic Switch that makes it clear that Sam fell asleep to the kind of radio station that'd play "New York Minute." The oddly empty office and the string-and-bell-heavy intro to the song sets the tone for an unusually emotional, heartfelt episode about Sam's Broken Pedestal about both his father and Daniel Gault. Snuffy even incorporates the notes from the intro's bells as piano in the score for the sugar-tossing scene.
• Two amazingly fabulous pieces, set back-to-back and interlaced with scenes from a play the President is attending, in "Posse Comitatus" (season 3 finale):
  • "Hallelujah", sung by the late great Jeff Buckley over the death of Secret Service Agent Simon Donovan.
  • "England Arise", by the play's actors intercut with the assassination of the terrorist (but Defense Minister of Qumar) Shareef by British forces.
• The montage in "The Mommy Problem" set to "Jet Airliner" by the Steve Miller Band perfectly captures the hectic nature of a presidential campaign.
• From the Season 5 episode "7A WF 83429": The One-Woman Wail begins as Donna tells Josh "They've put up a memorial to Zoey on the Lawn. I want to go see it before I leave. Wanna come?" As they walk through the building, we are treated to scenes of the motorcade pulling up to a church, cops and Secret Service pounding the street, Leo alone in the Situation Room, and finally, Donna's quiet "Oh my God" as she and Josh come down the steps and we finally see the memorial: rows and rows of candles, flames as far as the eye can see down Pennsylvania Avenue, teddy bears, pictures of Zoey, flags, flowers. From the Trope Codifer of the One-Woman Wail, Lisa Gerard.

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