A Sweet Little Cue - Amit Trivedi - English Vinglish

Using the main melody or fragments of phrases and riffs from the ludes of the already composed songs of the film, as background music in the scenes of the film, is one of the most commonly used scoring techniques by the composer. When you already have the melody that fits the situation, you don’t have to break your head to come up with a new theme, but instead of just copying that layer or riff of the melody from the song and pasting it exactly on the scene, there is so much that a composer, who is not lazy and who considers composing background score as important a job of a composer as composing songs for the film, can and would do. Amit Trivedi is surely one such composer.

Amit Trivedi’s score in English Vinglish is proof enough. I already posted Sashi’s Theme and its variations as a Suite here. I want to point out a short and sweet little background score cue (just 12 seconds long) in the film, which may sound almost insignificant and may not even or have to be noticed, but is a sample of Amit Trivedi’s acumen in scoring a movie scene.

Composers sometime have to fill in the scenes with music to avoid long stretches of silence, to keep a specific mood alive. Sashi in New York is still in the mood of exploring, she is happy, trying something new, going out of her comfort zone.

She joins NYLC to learn to speak English. She comes back home happy after attending her first English Class at NYLC. In this scene, the Violin phrase from the beginning of the English Vinglish Title song is played in a slower tempo, but only one half of the phrase is played in Solo violin. There is also the accompanying pizzicato playing to Sashi’s sneaky entry (Sashi wants to keep her English Class a secret). The scene doesn't stay longer in the house, it immediately cuts to the shot of New York’s Sky line under setting Sun, implying that it is already Evening, and precisely when it cuts to outdoors to show us the setting Sun, Amit picks a soothing string section to play the second half of the Violin phrase that adds subtly and yet exquisitely to the relaxed mood of the Evening.

The shift to string section here is so critical in evoking and enhancing the mood of the scene. Amit Trivedi could have easily allowed the theme to continue on Solo violin and no one would have noticed or complained, but he didn't.

Listen to the cue