How to Use incidental music in a Sentence

incidental music

noun
  • Felix Mendelssohn’s overture and incidental music—that seemed to follow him through life.
    — Jennifer Homans, The New York Review of Books, 17 Jan. 2019
  • Another rule is that there should be no incidental music or traditional score.
    — Jamie Lang, Variety, 7 Sep. 2021
  • While performances of the complete play with the incidental music are rare, a half-hour concert version, also rare but less so, proves effective.
    — Classical Music Critic, Los Angeles Times, 19 Feb. 2026
  • Sound mixing is the art of adjusting various tracks — the score, the dialogue, the incidental music, the sound effects, etc.
    — Eliza Thompson, Cosmopolitan, 22 Feb. 2018
  • Soon, Bob Mothersbaugh was enlisted to compose the show’s incidental music and score.
    — Jon Blistein, Rolling Stone, 17 May 2021
  • The incidental music, by local band the North Country, reinstates some of the emotion that the arch directing strips away.
    — Celia Wren, Washington Post, 11 Nov. 2019
  • The mature Mendelssohn 16 years later added about 45 minutes of incidental music to go with Shakespeare’s play.
    — Mark Swed, latimes.com, 3 Nov. 2017
  • Ibsen's play premiered in 1876 in Norway, with incidental music by Grieg.
    — Elaine Schmidt, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 26 Mar. 2022
  • In recent decades, the laugh track has become unfashionable, while incidental music remains essential to TV and film.
    — Marc Myers, WSJ, 19 Aug. 2021
  • Allen is a theater composer, a guy who writes everything from incidental music for dramatic presentations to full-fledged musicals.
    — David Lyman, Cincinnati.com, 6 June 2019
  • The cast is mostly young, and the actors themselves perform Palmer Hefferan’s incidental music in a cheerfully rough-and-ready manner.
    — Terry Teachout, WSJ, 20 July 2017
  • The incidental music, though, offers needed theatrical context.
    — Classical Music Critic, Los Angeles Times, 19 Feb. 2026
  • This brief and somewhat more brooding work, conceived as incidental music for a play, again sees Smith in prime lyrical mode, masterfully articulating a poignant mythical scene.
    — Zachary Lewis, cleveland, 9 Apr. 2021
  • In his growing spate of work in Safdie films and Weeknd albums, producer Daniel Lopatin has developed an aptitude for all sorts of heady interstitial and incidental music.
    — Craig Jenkins, Vulture, 2 Dec. 2025
  • That country singer, for instance, is not a Kacey Musgraves-level name, but someone whom Marcloid discovered via YouTube video’s incidental music.
    — Reed Jackson, SPIN, 8 May 2026
  • Grieg wrote them as incidental music for Ibsen’s epic about a gloomy globetrotter, for a major revival of the play in Norway (where both the playwright and the composer hailed from) in 1876.
    — Christopher Arnott, courant.com, 4 Dec. 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'incidental music.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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