Sonata form and IE10 advertisement

Timothy Chenette

If anyone else is teaching a form class, you may enjoy this video from Microsoft's several-years-old attempt to rehabilitate Internet Explorer's reputation. It uses the exposition of Rossini's famous Barber of Seville overture, and overlays the form rather nicely on the story it's trying to tell. Briefly, it tells the story of an internet commenter who lives to trash Internet Explorer, but who gradually realizes that Microsoft is making the product better. The important aspects of the music and story are something like this:

-It skips the intro, presumably to leap right into the more recognizable first theme, and skips the antecedent of the first theme, presumably to get more quickly into the stormy transition (portraying the comment war?)

-Around 0:35, as the music first arrives at the relative major, the commenter is hitting a roll and the montage is going faster

-Around 0:52, the sudden minor inflection ("flat six") and change to monophony suggests a moment of doubt as the commenter reads Gizomodo's positive review of IE10

-At 1:13, the arrival of the second theme is timed with the somewhat hyperbolic claim that Internet Explorer is donating kittens to children

-At 1:21, the music cuts to halfway through the closing theme, as the commenter reads about a new "Karaoke web standard"

-1:30: a nice instrumentation touch, as climactic/triumphal use of brass here correlates nicely with the commenter's pride in seeing his karaoke award

-My favorite aspect: at the end, the music is allowed to transition back to the tonic E minor (there's no development in the overture). My favorite interpretation of this is that the person who was making the ad knew that the campaign to rehabilitate IE's reputation would be unsuccessful, though that seems unlikely to be what Microsoft intended...

Anyway, a nice use of the different themes and their characters to tell a story.

Carson Farley

Interesting analysis Timothy.  Do you think the editor of that piece intended or understood what you posit?  It would certainly suggest that Microsoft is hiring music editors with musical knowledge or theory!  

Timothy Chenette

It's possible the ad people knew sonata theory--but I think more likely they relied on their instincts with a familiar song!