The iconic ‘Mission: Impossible’ theme song only took 3 minutes to write. Now, that’s talent.
According to the NY Post, it only took Lalo three minutes to write his most famous theme songs for the TV series “Mission: Impossible”.
“Orchestration’s not the problem for me,” he says. “It’s like writing a letter. When you write a letter, you don’t have to think what grammar or what syntaxes you’re going to use, you just write a letter. And that’s the way it came.”
What makes ‘Mission: Impossible’ so special is that the song is written in a signature 5/4 time. Which is an odd time beat. Check out this video to explain what I mean:
When asked why he did a 5/4 beat this is what he had to say:
“I was in Vienna and at a press conference and one lady asked me why I wrote ‘Mission: Impossible’ in 5/4 . . . I said, ‘Everybody knows that there have been beams from outer space coming because of interplanetary flights. The people in outer space have five legs and couldn’t dance to our music, so I wrote this for them.’ ”
“The lady believed it,” says Schifrin with a laugh, “and all the magazines in Vienna published it . . . my European agent called me and said, ‘What are you trying to do?!’ ”
‘Mission: Impossible 5’ is currently in theaters and Schifrin’s theme song is just as important as Tom Cruise’s infamous running scenes.
