The Musical Conventions of Star Trek: A Search for Musical Syntax in Science Fiction
Carl-Henrik Buschmann · NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives · 2015
RebootNow my quest was crystalizing, I wanted to study the musical conventions of Star Trek.How to go about it?My formal training is for the most part traditional so the analytical tools I already knew was not ideal to handle the diverse tonality of movie scores.I knew ''Hollywoodian'' movie scores since Erich Wolfgang Korngold and John Williams had their roots in nineteen century classical music, also know as the romantic period of classical music.Romantic music is mostly tonal, meaning it uses major and minor chords and scales to build the tonality, but it is not necessarily functional.By that I mean progressions build upon the circle of fifths and the famous I -I V -V 7 -I.This brings us to the idea of a tonic, a tonal ''home'' where we feel at peace after pursuing the chord furthest away from the tonic, the dominant.It would be wrong to say that romantic music does not utilize the idea of a tonic, but it was not a concept expanded upon as they did in the classical era.Instead they had what I call tonal centers.These are focal point for any given progression and stands as the root of origin.This differentiation is necessary because harmonic progressions can be made with a different logic than that of the circle of fifths.There are plenty of analytic tools to chose from when working with functional music and atonal music introduction 23 but I was having a hard time finding the right tool for non-unified tonal music.After some research I came upon Frank Lehman's dissertation on ''Reading Tonality Through Film: Transformational Hermeneutics and the Music of Hollywood'' (2012).His research was focusing on neo-Riemannian Theory, a theory made to address the analytical challenges nineteen century music presented, applied to film music.I will discuss the application and execution of this theory in chapter 4. To further explain how my analysis is constructed, I will discuss music analysis in general in chapter 3.To aid the reader in analytic process I have chosen to include the transcriptions immediately following the corresponding analysis.The analytic legend will be discussed on page 31 and finally I will present my conclusions in chapter 11.As a final note I want to talk about what I am not covering in this thesis.First of all, I have chosen to use musical terms and notation to explain my findings.This means the reader will have to have a fairly advanced understanding of musical theory to fully appreciate the content of this thesis.I will not talk about film music history in general: How the film music traditions has evolved from live music to Korngold to Steiner to Williams and even Zimmer is extremely interesting, but it is covered to such an extent elsewhere there simply is no point including it and secondly, I do not believe being reminded of this knowledge will have an impact on the understanding of the main topic of this thesis.My goal is that the content of this thesis provides ample understanding of the main analysis and that the reader will come to appreciate the inner workings of the music in question and how it has evolved.