Harmony, associativity, and metaphor in the film scores of Alexandre Desplat

<p>The objective of this doctoral study is to develop and demonstrate a theoretical framework to guide both the analysis and composition of twenty-first-century film music. The compositional portfolio submitted as part of this thesis includes scores for nine short films and for a feature-length docudrama. The thesis is based on analysis of twenty feature film scores by Alexandre Desplat (b. 1961), with particular attention to two: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2009) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Studying one composer’s output enables the observation of a compositional voice articulated across multiple film genres. Desplat’s work has proven a relevant and worthy subject, because the films he has scored exemplify a wide variety of styles and approaches, including skilful integration of past styles and current trends. The theoretical framework I use to discuss both Desplat’s film music and my own, draws together selected concepts from semiotics, metaphor theory, narratology, and harmonic analysis, especially transformational theory. I use the framework to explore how musical objects – such as modes, chords, and their transformations through time – might act as symbols, icons, or metaphors for one or more elements of the narrative – such as a setting, character, characters’ emotions, events, or the attitude of the cinematic narrator. It is argued that this combination of ideas provides a suitable framework – useful in both composition and analysis – for understanding how music might expressively contribute to filmic narratives. It is argued that Neo-Riemannian triadic transformations – in Desplat’s work and mine, at least – are often most usefully considered in relation to the scales and modes that they articulate, transform, and/or subvert. This is a point of difference from other recent transformational analysis of film music. Although my analyses focus primarily on pitchbased features, I also consider how these elements accrue meaning in their interactions with other musical features, such as tempo and orchestration.</p>

Harmony, associativity, and metaphor in the film scores of Alexandre Desplat

<p>The objective of this doctoral study is to develop and demonstrate a theoretical framework to guide both the analysis and composition of twenty-first-century film music. The compositional portfolio submitted as part of this thesis includes scores for nine short films and for a feature-length docudrama. The thesis is based on analysis of twenty feature film scores by Alexandre Desplat (b. 1961), with particular attention to two: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2009) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Studying one composer’s output enables the observation of a compositional voice articulated across multiple film genres. Desplat’s work has proven a relevant and worthy subject, because the films he has scored exemplify a wide variety of styles and approaches, including skilful integration of past styles and current trends. The theoretical framework I use to discuss both Desplat’s film music and my own, draws together selected concepts from semiotics, metaphor theory, narratology, and harmonic analysis, especially transformational theory. I use the framework to explore how musical objects – such as modes, chords, and their transformations through time – might act as symbols, icons, or metaphors for one or more elements of the narrative – such as a setting, character, characters’ emotions, events, or the attitude of the cinematic narrator. It is argued that this combination of ideas provides a suitable framework – useful in both composition and analysis – for understanding how music might expressively contribute to filmic narratives. It is argued that Neo-Riemannian triadic transformations – in Desplat’s work and mine, at least – are often most usefully considered in relation to the scales and modes that they articulate, transform, and/or subvert. This is a point of difference from other recent transformational analysis of film music. Although my analyses focus primarily on pitchbased features, I also consider how these elements accrue meaning in their interactions with other musical features, such as tempo and orchestration.</p>

Disaster Theory

The online community of vaporwave music is a cultural development that emerged in the 2010s and therefore fully within the ideological sphere of postindustrialism. Consisting of slowed-down samples from pop songs and advertising jingles from the 1980s and 1990s stitched together with original synthesizer pieces that resemble those used in horror-film scores, vaporwave is an undead, artificial soundscape that floats somewhere between music and sound. Its fake nostalgia for an alternative yet ossified past aims to confront our contemporary social paralysis in the face of postmillennial economic failure and political crisis. This article examines gothic elements of the vaporwave music phenomenon to analyze how vaporwave expresses sociopolitical traumas of late capitalism. Derridean notions of hauntology articulate the individual’s self-isolation and objectification under the neoliberal homogenization of culture in vaporwave artist Begotten’s contributions to the hushwave subgenre of the scene (2018–19). Vaporwave’s cyclical and uncanny sounds embody the spectral haunting of Marx in capitalism’s repetitive pronunciation of victory over its vanquished, communist foe in Sunsetcorp’s 2009 single “nobody here” and the manifestations of American political trauma after 9/11 in Cat System Corporation’s signalwave album, News at 11 (2016).

Queers of Steel: Camp in John Williams's Superman (1978) and Jerry Goldsmith's Supergirl (1984)

When Richard Donner's blockbuster Superman arrived in theaters in 1978, critics praised the filmmakers for avoiding camp in their adaptation of the comic book, comparing the film positively to the Batman television series (1966–68) of the previous decade. Several sequels later, critics attributed the series’ diminishing financial returns to its growing investment in camp, an investment that peaked in Jeannot Szwarc's Supergirl spinoff (1984), a critical and commercial misfire. Drawing on the work of camp theorists Susan Sontag, Moe Meyer, and Andrew Ross, I argue that critics have misrepresented the place of camp within the franchise, a misunderstanding stemming from their neglect of the film scores. There are two different yet overlapping forms of camp operating within these films. In their reviews, critics expressed disdain for pop camp, a highly legible form of camp, characterized by overblown performances, that the Batman show popularized in the 1960s. My analyses of Superman and Supergirl center on a subtler camp aesthetic present from the very start that critics celebrated: a playful mismatching of gender signifiers and an undercutting of heteronormative romantic relationships that I refer to as queer camp. I offer queer readings of John Williams's and Jerry Goldsmith's leitmotivic scores for Superman and Supergirl—supposedly the least campy and the campiest films in the franchise—to bring into focus the overlooked political work the series accomplishes. In a bold reclamation of the comic books’ suppressed queer legacy, the films’ queer camp aesthetic subverts the heteronormativity of the protagonists to construct Superman and Supergirl as queers of steel.

Hearing Film Music Topics outside the Movie Theatre

This chapter describes a cognitively informed framework based on analogy for theorizing cinematic listening; in this case, it tests the hypothesis that contemporary listeners might use associations learned from film music topics to make sense of western art music (WAM). Using the pastoral topic as a case study, a corpus of film scores from 1980–2014 determines common associations for this topic based on imagery, emotion, and narrative contexts. Then, the chapter outlines potential narratives a modern moviegoer might make by listening “cinematically” to a Sibelius movement. The hypothesis is empirically tested through an experiment where participants record their imagined narratives and images while listening to WAM and film music. The meaning extraction method, a statistical analysis for identifying associational themes, is used to analyze people’s responses.

Cataloging Max Steiner

The Max Steiner corpus study is a long-term research project, drawing on the Max Steiner Collection at Brigham Young University, to catalog and analyze the music from all of Steiner’s film scores. This paper outlines the goals, processes, and potential future outcomes of this research. One of the main research goals of this project is to discover what kinds of melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and instruments Steiner used to represent different emotions and character types. Because of the amount of data needed to understand each of these elements thoroughly, this type of analysis can best be done through a corpus study. This data will be published as an interactive database that will allow the user to explore themes as they develop throughout a film as well as discover related themes in other film scores by Steiner. Transcriptions of themes will be displayed with Steiner’s annotations, film stills, and analytical data. This paper presents our findings to date and our plan to analyze, transcribe, and catalog the remaining films.

As Heard on…

The musical elements of political advertising change with the times. From songsters, contrafactum songs with lyrics that extoll one candidate or party and denigrate the other, to television and radio jingles and online ads, the aesthetics of the campaign mirror the media diet of the public. Early television ads imitated jingles of the day: They were simple, catchy, and repetitive. Both Eisenhower’s “Ike for President” and Kennedy’s “Kennedy” follow this mold. Johnson’s 1964 campaign breaks this mold with “Daisy,” an anti-Goldwater ad known for deploying the eerie sounds of nuclear war. Successive campaigns sought to use a similar recipe, employing cues from film scores and trailers to dictate the emotional content of the ad. Recently, online advertising has bloomed, including tribute videos and promotional spots made by citizens and submitted to the campaign, adding grassroots allure and authenticity.

Popular Music, the Devil, and Aerobics

This chapter advances the argument of Sonic Overload by turning to the interactions between art and popular music in Schnittke’s Symphony No. 1, Requiem (1975), Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1977), Piano Concerto (1979), Symphony no. 3 (1976–81), and Faust Cantata (Seid nüchtern und wachet, 1983), as well as several of his film scores. It considers for the first time Schnittke’s ongoing negotiations between high and low across his entire career, giving careful scrutiny to his declaration in the late 1980s that “pop culture is a good disguise for any kind of devilry.” Schnittke’s change of heart, from embracing popular music—and specifically jazz and rock—from the late 1960s through the 1970s, to expressing grave concerns about its effects a decade later, mirrored the sentiments of many. In the turbulent final years of the Soviet Union, rock supplanted poetry as the conscience of the nation yet it still inspired deep anxiety among those embracing traditional Soviet conceptions of being “cultured.” Schnittke’s apprehensions about popular music in the 1980s stemmed from its growing presence in the fragmented late-Soviet soundscape and its growing prestige among newly influential tastemakers, chief among them younger intellectuals and other cultural figures. The elevation of pop music in the USSR (as in the West) expanded a growing generational divide. Schnittke’s own rejection of popular music seems to have been instigated in part by his son, Andrey, who in the early 1980s was a member of the noted Moscow rock group Center (Tsentr), a fact overlooked by previous scholars.

Schnittke’s Path to Polystylism

Chapter 3 draws on unpublished correspondence and archival documents to offer a fuller accounting of the sources and development of Alfred Schnittke’s evolving concept of polystylism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It explores the first expressions of polystylism in his film scores for Elem Klimov and Andrey Khrzhanovsky. It also offers a close reading of Schnittke’s seminal 1971 polystylism manifesto, “Polystylistic Tendencies of Modern Music.” This analysis is based on a contextualization and comparison of all known existing sources of the essay. It considers Schnittke’s influences from the contemporary soundscape as well as the essay’s larger implications for understanding his goals for writing music, music that balanced innovation with familiar socialist realist demands for accessibility and “democratization.” It also returns to Schnittke’s Violin Sonata no. 2, “Quasi una Sonata,” further discussing it as an example of his early polystylistic practice.