The song we know as the “Mission: Impossible Theme” was written by a guy named Lalo Schifrin. Interestingly, he studied composition with Olivier Messiaen in Paris before becoming Dizzy Gillespie‘s pianist, and you can hear both in the “Mission: Impossible Theme”. The Messiaen part is in how seriously he takes meter as a structural element. The Dizzy part is in the way it swings anyway.
Your Mission… Should You Choose To Accept It…
When CBS handed him the assignment in late 1966 to write a brief cue to open Bruce Geller’s new spy show, Schifrin came back with around thirty seconds of music in 5/4, and somehow nobody at the network asked him to fix it.
We’re talking about American network television in 1966. Producers were not exactly encouraging composers to write asymmetric meters for prime-time slots. Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” had been out since ’59, and the listening public had been exposed to the idea that you could swing in fives, but a TV theme is a different beast from a jazz LP. A television theme has to grab the casual viewer in the time it takes them to put down a Salisbury steak and look up at the screen. You’d think 4/4 would be the only option on the table – or at least the most obvious option. Schifrin handed in a tune in five, and the show ran for seven seasons.
5/4 Bar Grouping Makes It Possible
The neat trick he used is how he grouped the bar. Five beats can be split two ways, 3+2 or 2+3. Schifrin picked 3+2 and committed to it. The bass figure does most of the work. Three quarter notes that lean and sustain, then two that jab. Dum, dum, da-DUM, da-da. Every bar lands the same way, in the same place, with the same internal accent pattern. After a couple of repetitions, it’s in your head.
That’s the issue with any odd meter, but it matters more in 5 than in 7 or 9, because 5 is so close to a familiar grouping that the brain keeps trying to round up to 6 or down to 4. The grouping has to be aggressive enough to shut that down. The bass line is aggressive. It refuses to be reinterpreted. This is owed, in large part, to Carol Kaye and Ray Brown, who actually played bass on the theme.
There’s almost no harmonic motion under it, which helps. The ostinato hangs around the tonic with a little chromatic flickering, but that’s about it. When you remove harmonic complexity from the equation, the listener has more attention to spend on rhythm, and that’s what the “Mission: Impossible Theme” is built upon – although the melody does come in later.
Melody Comes Later
The melody itself is built to reinforce the meter rather than fight it. Phrases land on the downbeat, hold through the long part of the cell, breathe over the short part, and roll into the next bar. No syncopation pulling against the bass. No displaced accent trying to be clever. Schifrin had every opportunity to write a tune that ran counter to the 5/4 and created additional tension, and he didn’t take any of them.
I should mention the Morse code thing because, well, everyone does, so leaving it out would somehow make me look like an idiot. Schifrin has talked, in interviews going back decades, about the letters M and I influencing the figure. M is dash-dash, I is dot-dot. You can map the rhythm onto that if you squint, although it’s loose. The more useful version of the idea is that he wasn’t writing a melody so much as a transmission. A five-beat cell works as a transmission because it’s recognizable from the first bar and the brain wants to hear what comes next. A 4/4 cell of similar length would feel resolved too quickly. The 5/4 makes the listener wait one extra beat before the loop closes, and that beat of waiting is what the whole franchise turned out to be built on.
There’s also the matter of what 5/4 connotes, culturally, by the time Schifrin got to it. Holst had used it for “Mars” in The Planets. Tchaikovsky used it for the second movement of the Pathétique. Brubeck and Desmond used it for jazz. By the mid-sixties, 5/4 was familiar enough to working composers that Schifrin could deploy it without having to explain himself. It just hadn’t really shown up yet on a network television lead-in. Whatever else the meter meant, it didn’t mean ordinary, and for a show about agents operating outside official channels, that subtext worked seamlessly.
New Composers Accept The Mission
Schifrin only wrote the original. The films have used a parade of composers since the franchise rebooted in 1996. Danny Elfman kept it in 5/4, as opposed to the straight 4/4 version that Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. of U2 arranged as the film’s tie-in single in 1996. According to MuseScore’s sheet music, Hans Zimmer kept it in 5/4 on the second one, even though he reorchestrated almost everything else. Michael Giacchino, who scored two of the Tom Cruise-era films, treated the theme like a relic he had to handle with gloves on. Joe Kraemer on Rogue Nation and Lorne Balfe on the McQuarrie films from Fallout onward did the same. The audience will recognize the theme through almost any other change you can throw at it: different key, different tempo, different orchestration, different harmonic backdrop.
Mission: Impossible is more impressive when you think about how Schifrin solved the problem of writing in an odd meter without sounding like he was doing it. The grouping had to be aggressive. The harmony stayed out of the way until the meter has settled into the listener’s brain. The melodic phrasing honored the internal accents instead of fighting them. None of that is rocket science, but a lot of odd-meter writing fails because the composer treats the meter as a feature to show off rather than a structural given to work with. Schifrin treated 5/4 the way most of his peers treated 4/4. He just wrote music in it.
The last time I heard the theme in a movie theater, three rows of teenagers were nodding their heads like they were listening to Tool (yeah, I shoehorned that in there… sorry, I couldn’t write a piece on odd time signatures without mentioning Tool…). But the song has real staying power and it’s a testament to how great composers can break out of the 4/4 box and still do something that everyone connects with.
