That is, a piece of classical music or an old popular song, its context grown hazy in the public mind, is harnessed to promote a product or prominently used as theme music for some movie or show, and gets associated with that, rather than its initial context.
The classic case for this (no doubt dying away, now that the generations move on) is the way the “William Tell Overture” was irrevocably tied to The Lone Ranger. That may be evaporating, but as long as old Warner Brothers cartoons are popular, other portions of the overture will be associate with Bugs Bunny.
Another older example – I didn’t realize until several years ago that the theme Alfred Hitchcock used for his 1950s TV show (and which then became associated with he himself) was a pre-existing piece of music, Funeral March for a marionette by Gounod
A more recent example (but still pretty old) is the overture from Carmen, better known, I suspect, as the Bad News Bears theme. I was spared this association, because I didn’t care for the movie, and I grew up listening to Carmen (My mom’s favorite “cleaning house” music)
Or the Steak – It’s What’s for Dinner music, better known as “Hoedown” from Aaron Copland’s Rodeo
I swear, when I first thought of this thread I had some very recent use in mind, but I can’t think of it now. Maybe Dopers can suggest some very recent examples.
This sort of thing isn’t forever – once the generation that had the association in mind starts to die off, or simply forgets the association, it dies. One of the Big Three networks in New York used to use music from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to close the local Evening News, but that’s gone now. Back in the 1930s Universal Studio somehow decided that the music from “Swan Lake” was somehow “creepy”. They used it as the opening music for the 1931 Dracula (practically the only music in the movie), then used it for [The Mummy, for which it was spectacularly inappropriate. I don’t think anyone even suspects that “Swan Lake” is creepy these days.
I had known that the William Tell Overture was the theme from The Lone Ranger. But I hadn’t realized for years that the morning theme and the storm theme were used all the time in Warner Brothers cartoons and are still occasionally used today.
Entrance of the Gladiators is probably irrevocably tied to the circus.
For a certain segment of the population, hearing “Ecstacy of Gold” (from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly soundtrack) means Metallica is about to take the stage.
After the Smurfs were invented as comic book characters by Peyo, and after they were little figurines available at BP Service Stations, but before they were a regular TV series, there was a movie called The Smurfs And The Magic Flute, which was essentially a pilot for the series. And they borrowed a lot from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” for their incidental soundtrack, along with other recognisable classical pieces that, whenever I hear them, I associate with the animated show.
When the Smurfs and the Magic Flute came out in the US in 1983, after the play Amadeus had been a hit (but a year before the Forman film version), My mind instantly joined the two:
“Dear God, why must these Little Blue Men be the Instruments of Your Glory, and not Me???”
“American Girl” by Tom Petty and “Goodbye Horses” from Q Lazzarus are forever associated with Silence of the Lambs for me, especially “Goodbye Horses” associated with Ted Levine dancing with his junk tucked between his legs.
Bittersweet Symphony will always evoke the image of a young Sarah Michelle Gellar getting caught with her cocaine cross and crying as Reese Witherspoon drives off in a cool car. I love the song, I love Cruel Intentions, but they will always and forever be linked in my head.
Also, EMF’s Unbelievable still sounds like “Crumbelieveable” from that stupid Kraft commercial a few years back.
There are a couple of pieces of classical music that are stuck indelibly in the minds of a lot of people over here because of an advertising association:
The other day I was driving a junior colleague to a business meeting and “My Life” came on the radio and I spent 5 minutes explaining Tom Hanks early career choices to the younger guy.
