Hollywood Harmony
Frank Lehman · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018
Film music represents one of the few remaining underexplored frontiers for the field of music theory. Discovering its inner workings from a theoretical perspective is imperative if we wish to understand its tremendous effects on the ears (and eyes) of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Hollywood Harmony applies for the first time the tools of contemporary music theory and analysis to this corpus in a thorough and systematic way. In order to help readers appreciate how film music works, this study enlists a number critical apparatuses, ranging from abstract theoretical description to psychological models and sensitive close reading. It argues that matters of musical structure in film are matters of musical meaning, and pitch relations are inherently expressive, always somehow collaborating with visuals and narrative. One harmonic idiom, pantriadic chromaticism, plays an especially important role in the “Hollywood Sound,” and much of this study is dedicated to understanding its aesthetic and expressive content—of which the elicitation of a feeling of wonder is paramount. For better understanding of this tonal practice on a rigorous level, the transformational tools of neo-Riemannian theory are introduced and applied in an accessible and novel way. Neo-Riemannian theory emphasizes musical change and gesture over fixed objects or structures, and by recognizing the innate spatiality of musical experience in extended-tonal settings, it serves as an excellent lens through which to inspect film music. The works of a diverse assortment of composers are examined, with particular attention given to recent “New Hollywood” scoring practices.