A Musical Conspiracy Theory: The Finale to The Nightmare Before Christmas

0:00 I love this movie so fun fact about me my birthday is the day before Halloween so every year for my entire life it's been people giving me cake on one day and then people giving me candy on the next cake candy presents costumes I'm not gonna lie it's kind of awesome but as a celebration of my fortuitous day of birth being so close to the greatest holiday ever conceived by a mortal race I watched The Nightmare Before Christmas every year at least once sometime around the end of October I just loved this movie it really isn't something that I can like academically defend it is just one of my childhood loves no matter how much I watch it it never gets old and with that love comes all the musical trivia of the films so we could talk about how the head and the base is actually modeled after Danny Elfman or how Elfman is actually the voice behind Jack whenever he's singing or we could talk about how the song making Christmas has the melody that's actually modeled

0:45 after the DSE ray which is a piece of music that a lot of composers have used to symbolically and thematically represent death so when you hear that Deus eerie melody while the citizens of Halloweentown are creating their own Christmas the music is actually telling us that they're killing Christmas or we can talk about how this film is scored more like an opera or an operetta as opposed to a straight musical because a lot of the music seems to be more or less diegetic like how we see the mayor humming this is Halloween and the music tends to organically evolve from the dialogue taking place in the scene which is more in the lines of an operetta we could talk about all that but after being out for over 20 years I figured we could talk about a conspiracy theory that I've had for the last half decade regarding the finale of this masterpiece now I warn you the music theory you're about to witness is tenuous at best so make sure there aren't any professors around grab an aluminum foil hat and

1:31 follow me through this tree okay so just to recap Jack just saved Sally and Santa Santa's flown around and saved Christmas and Jack is returning to Halloweentown and the finale begins with this [Music] so this is the same piece of music we hear at the beginning of the film except it's in a major key signature so just a refresher course for any newbies in here there are different combinations of notes that we call scales we use the notes in these scales to write melodies and harmonies and there are literally hundreds of scales out there so we categorize them in broader terms to make it easier to keep track of them all and the two most popular scales out there are major and minor major looks like this and minor looks like this you'll see that the only difference between major and minor are these three notes here notes number three six and seven it's okay if you can't read music just know that these two scales are different because of these three notes so when I

2:17 say that something is in a major or minor key signature what I mean is that they're written using a major or minor scale so in the very beginning of the film we hear this is Halloween and it's in a minor key but when we hear it start up at the finale it starts in a major key before it goes back into a minor cue and everybody starts singing along now this is really important because most of the film takes place in Halloweentown and is written in a minor key the only part that's really written in a major key signature is the song what's this when jack is in christmas town that's because culturally we've always associated major keys with sounding happy and minor keys was sounding sad so overall by scoring most of Halloweentown in a minor key and christmas town in a major key it reflects how Jack feels about these two places the story explores Jack's boredom and sudden inability to enjoy his life in Halloweentown where everything's written in Minor but when he discovers Christmas town he gets a sudden bolt of energy and enthusiasm

3:03 to discover this new world and all of the music we hear is in major but when he returns to Halloweentown we go back to hearing a lot of minor key signatures reflecting his perception of home so when Jack returns to Halloweentown having saved Christmas and his newly invigorated as the pumpkin king the music briefly opens in a major key which kinda reflects his newfound joy for his position in Halloweentown but when the citizen starts singing it goes back to the standard minor key until Santa makes it snow and everyone starts singing what's this and its major key just like it was in Christmas Town but then we get the most important part jack joining Sally in a duet of Sally's song now buckle in because this is where my conspiracy theory goes off the rails Sally song is minor specifically a minor which means it's a minor scale that begins on the note E but at a few key points in the song Elfman decided to use the Phrygian scale now the Phrygian scale is less common than the major or minor scales by far so we know the

3:49 difference between major and minor are these three notes well check out the difference between minor and Phrygian Phrygian is one note away but that one note is very important because out it it's just minor not Phrygian and you can hear that really clearly in Sally's song she lands on that one note that makes Phrygian sound Phrygian it's like the one note that gives Phrygian its stank it's the stank note like the Phrygian stank note [Music] my dear

4:36 but check it out what's really important and critical to my disorganized ravings is that you only ever really hear it with this much emphasis at one other point in the film during the town meeting if I'm not completely crazy you can hear a lot of phrases resolving to that Phrygian stank note or at least harmonized with that Phrygian sound object so peculiar they would not to be believed as I tried to describe the whole thing [Music]

5:23 furthermore I was only able to hear it when Jack was trying to describe things to the town spoke but never when they were interrupting him which is interesting because it creates a contrast between the towns folk who typically sing in miner and Jack who is now using Phrygian harmonies it musically expresses his inability to relate to the towns folk and completely communicate his ideas all of the towns folk that is to say except for one because that passage that you hear from Sally song that's used as her light motif is also Phrygian also and I'll admit that this next part is stretching it even for my frantic ravings Sally song has written an E minor and aside from Sally song there are only a few other instances of this film that were also written in E minor as far as I could tell there was this portion of Jack's lament the end of Jack's obsession and the very end of poor Jack for like maybe a measure but like I said I think it's stretching it even for me nevertheless when you look at that

6:09 Phrygian sound that saturates Jack's phrases during the town meeting which you can also find a little bit here and there in Jack's lament and I think shows up once or twice and Jack's obsession and you can even consider the fact that jack is the only other person who really sings in E minor Wally's by himself when we hear Sally say I know how you feel there's actually kind of a musical precedent for it her song is in E minor and uses those Phrygian sounds and as far as I can tell she's the only other person in the film who does both of those things aside from Jack so in the finale when Jack is singing with Sally it's Sally song using those Phrygian sounds and even though it might not be an E minor he's still musically acknowledging that she really understands him my dearest [Music] but what I think might be my favorite

6:55 part is that they end on something called a picker tee third okay so bob was a guy who lived a long time ago and he used to write a lot of cantatas which required pieces for four parts and some of these pieces would be a major in some and minor but no matter whether he wrote them in major or minor he almost always finished the piece in major so when there was a cantata and a minor key he would still probably finish it with a major chord and when Jack and Sally finished their duet they finished on a major chord [Music] which is significant Jack's use of these Phrygian harmonies reflects his alienated feeling when the town's people don't really understand him and arguably this is something that he's felt since the beginning of the film because there are some of those free Jean harmonies during Jack's lament but when he travels to Christmas town we suddenly hear him singing in a major key and he sounds happy and throughout the film it almost

7:40 seems like his new discovery of Christmas has made him happy except that it doesn't work out for him the town's folk still don't understand him and he isn't able to pull off Christmas and it leaves him depressed but his failure leads him to rediscover his passion for Halloween and that only ends up putting him back where he began reflected in a citizens of Halloweentown singing this is Halloween the tune from the beginning of the film in a standard minor key even after Jack saves the day and the orchestra has introduced that piece of music in a major key because what Jack really needed was to find someone who understood him for who he is in order for him to actually be happy so the finale is a perfect conclusion to Jack's journey of self-discovery it wasn't Christmas that would make him happy nor accepting his position as the pumpkin king it was finding someone who understood him but a son music theory is reading in between the lines then this

8:27 is me writing my own book because using major and minor key signatures to make something sound happy or sad is something people have been doing for literally hundreds of years and the Town Meeting and Sally song aren't the only two instances of Phrygian passages or chords in this film I was able to see some trace of those Phrygian sounds and a majority of the songs in this film the town meeting and Sally song are just the most prominent and noticeable examples of the Phrygian sounds that I could find chances are that Elfman wanted to create a contrast between the dark Halloween Town and the brighter Christmas town so he wrote Halloween town in a minor key and Christmas town in a major key but then when he wanted to create some contrast with Halloween town without using the major sound that he used for Christmas town he'd add some of that Phrygian stank in order to create some contrast with the citizens of Halloweentown who were in minor and as far as the whole a minor thing goes from what I've seen of Danny Elfman's work he tends to write very chromatic music

9:12 which means that he tends to modulate a lot which means that he changes key signatures in the middle of a piece most of the time which is what made Sally song stick out to me so much because it's the only song in the whole work that doesn't ever change key signatures and even though jack is the only other individual character that goes to E minor from what I was able to find I'm pretty sure there's a short part of this is Halloween that goes to E minor as well which also happens to play while Sally's on screen so maybe Elfman did this on purpose maybe not maybe I was accurate in mine maybe not but remember and this is always a possibility maybe Elfman just made all these decisions for no reason other than he just thought it sounded good so does that invalidate all these connections I don't think so if it sounds like and is written to fit the story then there's probably an analytical musical explanation for it and if Jack tried to be happy by adopting Christmas but could

9:58 only ever actually be happy when he found someone who understood him and Elfman wanted to represent that feeling in the music then we should be able to cut the music open analyze it and see why it felt like it fit but fair warning if you show this to anyone who knows a single thing about music theory they will most likely just laugh at you I just thought that these musical consistencies were really interesting whether they were done on purpose and meant something or not I've probably just spent way too much time in the town of Halloween man I just love this movie well that's gonna be it for me for now thanks for watching I really appreciate it a special thanks to my patreon for helping this channel stay afloat if you want to see what I'm up to be sure to follow me on Twitter and if you really like what I'm doing consider supporting me on patreon but that's it for me for now thanks for watching