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Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema

2022; Duke University; Volume: 66; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00222909-9534175

1941-7497

Scott Murphy,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

IN THIS BOOK, Frank Lehman has composed a brilliant, at times coruscating, piece of scholarship. Its pages exhibit two enviably long suits of mastery. First, Lehman leverages a panoply of extensive examples and quick citations—many transcribed, all expertly—of over a hundred years' worth of film music, chronologically ranging from one of the first feature films to include an original film score—Camille Saint-Saëns's music for L'Assassinat du duc de Guise (1908)—to many examples released during the same decade of the book's publication. Second, Lehman uses, and in some cases critiques, a wide array of sophisticated analytical techniques, also developed during the long twentieth century, from linear-reductive graphs infused with Heinrich Schenker's distinctive graphic symbols to several ideas published during the same decade of the book's publication. Lehman freely shares his hand and its two long suits with his readers through patient instruction and well-grounded musicianship. This book well exceeds a mere assemblage and reprinting of Lehman's prior publications; lying in wait is a trove of new analyses and ideas. In fact, some of the book's shrunken examples and even tinier annotations, while not ideal for those like me with presbyopia, symbolize in miniature an apparent desire to give readers their money's worth by filling its pages to the brim and to encourage readers to don metaphorical reading glasses and carefully inspect and consider all the book has to offer.Hollywood Harmony begins with James Horner's ebulliently lydian musical setting of the Universal Pictures logo, situating the book's repertorial purview while broaching in microcosm a variety of analytical perspectives germane to an understanding of Hollywood scoring: harmony, tonality, scale, chromaticism, cadence. The introduction then advances three theses. First, the new medium of film helped foster further innovations in the use of chromatic combinations of consonant triads beyond those achieved across the Atlantic in the prior century. Second, analysts should acknowledge film music's primary role as one of service to its multimedial context, prioritizing its expressivity and associativity over its autonomous structure.1 Third, regardless of how you characterize its corpuscles, the corpus of chromatic triadicism is itself a symbol for and catalyst of the experience of wonder. All three are compelling premises, although the second still feels limiting, especially when I reflect on Richard Cohn's (2012: 112) sympathy with, but also objection to, the claim that when analyzing texted music an understanding of the music's structure requires attention to the words.The first chapter, “Tonal Practices,” primarily tackles the important and challenging question of how Hollywood film music's syntax is similar to and different from Classical and Romantic tonal syntaxes, and how much of this difference owes to its multimedial context. Through helpful taxonomies and reductive graphs, Lehman weaves a story of multiple plot lines for how consonant triads, diatonic scales, progressional and modulatory impulses, fundamental lines, and classical cadences emigrated from their pre-1900 homelands to Hollywood Boulevard. Lehman sensitively articulates this diaspora's exhilaration and Heimweh and channels the latter into calls for a “distinctive analytical perspective” (27) for a distinctive new art form and a “new methodology” (47), motivating the focus of the following chapters on neo-Riemannian theory (NRT), the book's technical centerpiece. Some readers might detect a salvific or “chosen-one” narrative at work here, but explicitly or implicitly, this chapter leaves open a number of other avenues for exploring the intricacies of tonality's resettlements.2 This chapter also has the book's only musical example from a Black composer: “Ground Zero” from Terence Blanchard's score for 25th Hour, a good first step. I recommend listening closely to Michael Abels's scores for director Jordan Peele—the octatonic-ish and triadically chromatic parts of Get Out (2017) and a tight motivic network for Us (2019)—as a good next step in a series of many more steps.In terms of musical materials and methodologies, the second chapter, “Expression and Transformation,” functions as a waystation and pivot from the classically diatonic and entity-based emphases of the previous chapter to the chromatically triadic and relation-based emphases of the next. Parallel to this trajectory, Lehman introduces nondiatonic scales: the whole-tone scale early on as an initial example of chromaticism's wizardry, and the octatonic and hexatonic scales later in the chapter as generated by sequential and cyclical processes.3The chapter's brief focus on block transposition accomplishes five distinct goals at one stroke: (1) It addresses a technique that film composers often use but film scholars often neglect. (2) By bringing together Wagnerian “expressive tonality” (as identified by Robert Bailey) and popular music's “pump-up scheme” under the transposition umbrella, it exemplifies the conglomerative practices of contemporary film music. (3) It provides an occasion to introduce transformational notation, in the specific form of subscripted transpositions (T1, T–2) labeling arrows connecting musical events. (Lehman's boldface sets into relief transformational abbreviations.) (4) In showing how a stepwise modulation shifts mood, it introduces the connection between structure and affect. (5) It demonstrates the transition from entity-based to relation-based structural claims, as noted earlier.The last three points are pedagogically effective, introducing a complex set of terms and concepts in small increments. They also have the rhetorical effectiveness of a Trojan horse. When an object is chromatically transposed, the relative stability of the transformed object and the transformational product is often indeterminate and tonally disorienting. Readers who accept the expressive power and significatory potential of chromatic transposition may be primed by default to ascribe tonal indeterminacy to any transformationally related objects, including those related by the neo-Riemannian transformations that are the principal concern of the subsequent chapters. Lehman suggests as much when he writes that the “innate changeability of chromaticism,” whether realized in a stepwise modulation or non-diatonic triadic succession, “subvert[s] expectations and disrupt[s] hierarchies” (70) and therefore naturally affiliates the music with narratological extremes.NRT, which stands at the core of the author's analytical approach, takes center stage in chapters 3 and 4, “Neo-Riemannian Theory at the Movies” and “Analyzing Chromaticism in Film.” Lehman's introduction to NRT is as good as any I have seen. He withholds any group-theoretical formalities in the body of the text, going mathematically only as far as, for example, sneaking in a little functional notation [f(x)] and honoring David Lewin's (1987) generalized interval systems with a shout-out, although this means that his occasional references to “algebraic” as a qualifier may bemuse the uninitiated. At the least, he well prepares the reader for understanding his own analyses, which collectively use an extensive range of lenses and filters, including composer centered (Elliot Goldenthal and Bernard Herrmann); comparisons of cues across franchises (the Dark Knight trilogy, the three Dan Brown/Robert Langdon adaptations), between films, or within films; and single cues.Similarly extensive, and purposefully eclectic, is his labeling lexicon. On the one hand, Lehman finds value in supplementing the Tn, L, P, and R transformations with five other single-letter transformations. The chosen include D, as well as N, S, and H, which constitute the trio that Cohn unites with the L, P, and R trio in Audacious Euphony. The newest letter of these five is F (e.g., DM → Am, Dm → GM), Lehman's abbreviation for far fifth, since its idealized voice leading moves two of its pitches in parallel by whole step, in contrast to N's near-fifth half step of the same.4 On the other hand, Lehman finds value in composite labels [e.g., PRPRL, LSP, LPL, FP, PLPR•PLP (his newly introduced symbol • essentially represents second-order compositeness)] either as necessarily longer transformational words that describe progressions that a single letter from his chosen set cannot, or as voluntarily longer synonyms of shorter words. The latter, an innovation I have not found pioneered more or better analytically harnessed by another, reflects the Lehman's belief, emanating from a maxim of Milton Babbitt, that “the choice of a transformation . . . should be based on potential musical and perceptual contexts when one is determining whether it is best described as T8, LP, NS, or something more exotic” (130). Lehman also adds the useful ∼ modifier for “near” or “fuzzy” equivalence, accommodating the assignment of more or less the same label to two different progressions, whereas what I call his “contextual principle” accommodates the assignment of two different labels to more or less the same progression. Lastly, Lehman provides the suffixes (M) and (m) to specify NRT-labeled progressions that begin with a major or minor triad, respectively.The composite approach, while facilitating Lehman's contextual principle, also contains drawbacks. One is the imperfect correlation of LPR word length with idealized voice-leading distance noted by Dmitri Tymoczko (2009: 265), which potentially confuses attributions of certain progressions to filmic or narrativized distances. Lehman bypasses this pitfall deftly in his analyses of cues from The Perfect Storm (2000) and Superman (1978); his recognition of large bass intervals in both analyses helps. His occasional reliance on the transposition operator also ingeniously sidesteps some realizations of this problem, especially when he pans out to claim that not just voice-leading distance in particular but “aural complexity” in general corresponds to word length (138). LRLR (e.g., CM → DM, Dm → Cm) may be a longer word but yet, ceteris paribus, may be less aurally complex (i.e., able to fit into a diatonic scale) than LP (e.g., CM → EM, Em → Cm), yet T2 represents LRLR more compactly and is more likely to reflect actual voice leading than LP's T4 or T8.Another drawback of the composite approach pertains to basic literacy. As mentioned above, Lehman well prepares the reader for understanding his analyses: I can scan his annotated transcription of some music from The Perfect Storm and watch the lengths of his transformational words swell and recede. However, I suspect that, among both newcomers to and veterans of LPR labeling, the precise meaning of a composite label like PRP enjoys none of the cognitive immediacy that a singleton like L affords. Furthermore, Lehman clearly wants this book to train the reader to become a skilled and sensitive analyst of this kind of music using NRT; however, his method for labeling a progression that cannot be represented by a single letter within his alphabet, such as CM → E♭m, has some potential shortcomings. Demonstrating this method, Lehman's analysis of some music from Waltz with Bashir (2008) by Max Richter implements a distinction between common and changing tones to form the compound word. For example, although Richter's first progression is from Gm directly to E♭m (LP), Lehman indicates (1) the Gm's D change to E flat, producing E♭M and the L progression and (2) the E♭M's G change to G flat, producing E♭m and the P progression. While this incremental approach works to build LPR-based words from CM to either E♭m or one of thirteen other consonant triads, it fails for nine others.In my teaching, my preferred method to handle LPR-composite labeling is to use the Tonnetz, particularly Cohn's (2012) three-axis version. The student learns L, P, and R as edge flips—and perhaps also N, S, and F as vertex flips—around the minor-third, perfect-fifth, and major-third axes, respectively.5 The student then finds one or more instances of the triad pair on the Tonnetz, connects the triads of each pair with one or more equivalent flip paths, potentially producing multiple composite synonyms for the progression, and then adopts the “contextual principle” to select one or more preferred analyses from among them. Rather than groping through the dark and attempting to use common tones as handholds to get from start to finish, using the Tonnetz turns on the light, revealing from the very beginning the destination and one or more paths to it. Although Lehman introduces the Tonnetz in the book and adroitly implements it in some of his analyses, it comes at the end of the third chapter. Therefore, if I were using Lehman's book in teaching a course on film music analysis, I would ask that students read the entire third chapter before attempting an analytical assignment that required compound transformations.While these suggestions apply to transformational analysis using LPR-compound labeling in particular regardless of the type of music being analyzed, other suggestions apply to transformational analysis of film music in particular regardless of how the transformations are labeled. One such suggestion recognizes that style-specific associational claims involving triadic transformations are often more accurate when the transformations are qualified. The descriptive apparatus in Lehman's book enables some of these qualifications. For one example, Lehman claims that S (or LPR or RPL) “has found a truly welcome home in film music, particularly around the turn of the twenty-first century” (103–4). But in a great majority of these examples, S is S(m) (Murphy 2019), a common-third triadic progression that begins with the minor triad. But even this qualifier falls short in other cases. For instance, Lehman reports than, in film music, L(m) is “frequently tied to a feeling of sadness and loss,” while L(M) is “more often tied to matters of mythic significance” (100). While (M) and (m) distinguish these L associations from each other, they do not distinguish them from many other versions of L in which the first triad is not weighted by primacy, tonality, or other means (hypermeter, duration, texture, etc.) (Murphy 2014a, 2014b).Another type of suggestion recommends differentiating a neo-Riemannian transformation's group-theoretical capacities from its expressive capacities in general. Lehman claims that any neo-Riemannian operation with a suffixed (M) or (m) qualifier is not a “true transformation” (95). When interpreting the word transformation group-theoretically, this is correct. For a reader who is just starting to learn about group-theoretical principles, such a counterexample can help reinforce the important but potentially astonishing fact that a user of NRT's words is not only tonally agnostic but also harmonically agnostic, insofar that the major or minor quality of each of two triads—but considered as a progressional unit—related by an NRT word does not matter. A definition like “P preserves its fifth (ic5) and shifts its third (3^) by semitone” (92), when delimited to act only on [037]s, does not know if the input or the output—the chord before or after the transformation—is a major or minor triad. A “contextual” definition of an NRT word may appear to require knowledge of a triad's mode: if major, this; if minor, that. But these conditionals merely make more accessible the more abstruse idea, well discussed in Klumpenhouwer 2002, that a particular NRT word moves the root of a triad by a particular number of semitones in the same “direction” as the triad “points,” regardless of which direction the triad is “pointing”—that is, the triad's modal orientation. It is therefore ironic that the book title's main noun refers to a musical feature with a fundamental characteristic—major or minor—toward which the book's methodological centerpiece is agnostic. Nonetheless, agnosticism, indifference, ignoring—these are all vital for the formation of equivalence relations and also, as some claim, for interpreting music (Callender, Quinn, and Tymoczko 2008: 346) or for understanding music (Tymoczko 2011: 35). Beyond this important activity, one of Lewin's important achievements was to recognize that, by evacuating all musical objects—by being “object agnostic”—the leftover directed relations between those objects could be organized within the framework of group theory, and this framework enabled new ways of thinking about and formalizing musical dynamism and the experience of musical temporality.This object agnosticism has ramifications for another one of Lehman's claims. Earlier in the book, Lehman says that “transformations serve as the primary bearers of harmonic expressivity in a great deal of film music” (59). When interpreting the word transformation broadly, like I imagine a hypothetical reader ignorant of group theory would, this brings insight. When interpreting it group-theoretically, this is too restrictive for me. I do not intend for this critique to underplay the significance of Lewin's “transformational attitude”; in fact, I think Lewin's innovation and my critique of Lehman's second claim are not mutually exclusive. But, if the transformations that primarily bear harmonic expressivity in a great deal of film music are group-theoretic, object-purging transformations, then that means harmonic expressivity is all energy and no matter, all verb and no noun, all yang and no yin.6 I will concede (for now) that harmonic expressivity may be modeled by this pure dynamism, but I do not believe that it is limited to this form of modeling. Also, of the choice to use pure dynamism as the model, I also admit to wondering, since Lehman leaves the decision underjustified, how much of it was the model's goodness of fit, how much the model's compatibility with group theory, and how much the fact that the model was regarded as the best option currently available.Earlier in the book, Lehman drafts another word replete with significance to describe these “primary bearers”: “When imported to film music analysis, the Lewinian transformational stance ensures that precedence is given to the harmonic gestures that power meaning and the dramatic structure that emerge out of them in time” (11). Indeed, Robert Hatten (2017: 109) defines gesture in general as “communicative, expressive, energetic shaping through time.” Although Hatten acknowledges the great challenge in pinning down a concise working definition of “musical gesture,” it is clear in his endeavors that they are “synthetic gestalts” (94). This resonates well with his broader definition of prototypical gestures (not necessarily just musical), which “have aspects of both object and event and thus integrate two syntheses of perception: the qualitative depth of an imagistic gestalt [object] . . . and the continuity of a temporal gestalt [event]” (109). For the interpretation of a harmonic progression of two chords as a gesture, I propose pairing up Hatten's object with the quality of the triads and his event with the directed, temporal change from one (in)to the other. When it comes to devising a model and a representation for harmonic expressivity, one should be free to focus on the sonorous edge, the energetic arrow, or both at once.Musical expression, but of broader sorts, also preoccupies the fifth chapter, titled “Pantriadic Wonder.” Here, Lehman cannily recruits and synthesizes multiple concepts of varied authorship to build models associating musical structures with extramusical affects. Two of David Huron's (2006) ideas—his ITPRA framework, which applies broadly to human perceptual/cognitive interactions with events, and his specific theories about how music induces awe and frisson—play central roles in this chapter. Supporting ideas published in previous decades, primarily those from theorist Jonathan Kramer (1988) and psychologist Marilyn Boltz (1989, 1991, 1993), inform this chapter's connection between expressivities and temporal twists of either a more global or more local nature, respectively. For Lehman, the general experience of wonder suitably encompasses all of these experiences, and as shown through analytical vignettes, Howard Shore's music from the Lord of the Rings (2001–3) trilogy suitably demonstrates them.I find it noteworthy that the need for specificity in NRT labeling—a need that I personalized a few paragraphs back—drops off considerably from the third and fourth chapters to this fifth chapter. Half of its notated examples have none of NRT's words, but in many ways Lehman's analyses do not require them. The principal action uniting Lehman's approaches to his different species of wonder is violation of expectations. Future events that listeners expect tend to be considerably outnumbered by the number of comparable events that defy such expectations. Here, the pan of pantriadic takes on new meaning: a composer could swap out a consonant triad with one of many others and the experience of awe, frisson, or nonlinear time would probably remain. Indeed, Lehman meticulously identifies such a swap in two different versions of the “Thèoden Rides Forth” cue from The Two Towers (2002); both “texts” equally generate a “fight” response (182). The text's erroneous interchange of R and P (PR instead of RP) in the discussion of “Gandalf's Rescue” (167) does not match the correct annotation in the example. However, if taken literally and performed—whereby in m. 6 a second-inversion minor triad rooted on B instead of F succeeds the preceding D-minor triad, and the rest of the music is transposed by tritone—the music sounds just as wondrous to me as the original. Perhaps all that is required for a series of wondrous triads is a steady flow of accidentals that deprives the music of diatonic footing that a listener expects and hopes for.Or perhaps even this relatively low bar is a bit too high. After his examination of “Gandalf's Rescue,” Lehman puts forth two conversely related claims: “Chromaticism using triads is the primary agent for connoting astonishment in mainstream film scoring,” and “a sense of wonder is the central aesthetic goal of filmic pantriadicism” (167). These are important claims, and they bring us much closer to truths about contemporary film scoring styles in novel and elegant ways. But these claims could be honed further. On the one hand, I think of cinematic moments like the very beginning of The Sun Also Rises (1957), in which Hugo Friedhofer's pantriadic progression—E♭m, Dm, C♭m, A♭M, G♭M, F♭m, D♭M, C♭M, B♭M—accompanies a homorhythmically stepwise rising E-flat minor scale starting on 1^, a static Paris skyline tinted by low sunlight, and a voice-over reading from the first chapter of Ecclesiastes: “One generation passes away, and another generation comes; but the earth abides forever. The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose.” Outside of the music's strange harmonic successions, there is “nothing new under the sun” in this cinematic opening to astonish one here; rather, this music appears to cut into a deep existential dilemma regarding inexorability. On the other hand, I think of hymn-based topoi that film composers use to enshroud in solemnity a wondrous event, such as something astonishing on top of the still-astonishing miracle of man-made flight, connecting moments like the launch of the moon-destined titular rocket in Apollo 13 (1995, music by James Horner) with the in-flight disappearance of the invisible jet in Wonder Woman 1984 (2020, music by Hans Zimmer). Both musical cues unabashedly project common-practice properties in the major mode, only tinging the pure diatonicism with an intermittent subtonic major triad, which finds its way home on the double-plagal route (♭VII–IV–I) (Biamonte 2010).Or perhaps I offer counterexamples prematurely. As the fifth chapter zoomed out to consider the expressive associations of pantriadic chromaticism more broadly, the sixth and last chapter, titled “Harmonious Interactions,” likewise zooms out to put pantriadic chromaticism within a larger domain that includes and imposes a metric upon a variety of harmonic idioms, to one of which the aforementioned hymn topic belongs. Following Tymoczko's (2011) parametric approach to tonality, Lehman chooses three dimensions to frame this larger domain—diatonicity, functionality, and centricity—which he calls “triadic tonality space,” shown in Figure 1. The presence or absence of these three features as discrete binaries gives rise to eight separate idioms. For example, pantriadic chromaticism lacks all three (right-top-back), whereas the purest form of the hymn topic described earlier comprises all three (left-bottom-front) and project common-practice tonality. The gradation of these three features as continua allows for multidimensional nuance. For example, in my interpretation, the aforementioned smattering of double-plagal motions in Horner's and Zimmer's music nudges these common-practice tonal cues' positions in triadic tonality space a bit down the diatonicity axis toward functional chromaticism and perhaps even a little bit more down the functionality axis toward tethered chromaticism, but it does not shift its location along the centricity axis.Complicating Lehman's triadic tonality space are both any dependencies among these three dimensions and any slippage among their definitions. One dependency (among many that can be argued) is ionian tonality (Osborn 2016) or ionian-aeolian tonality (Nobile 2020), whereby the presence or sufficient singling out of a diatonic collection clearly identifies one or two of its harmonic subsets as its center, regardless of whether this or these harmonies are articulated in the music. This reveals a potential ambiguity in Lehman's multifaceted definition of centricity: one facet “pertains to the presence of a stable pitch or chord or reference,” while another facet pertains to music “in which tonal ‘home’ is never in doubt” (204). Experiences such as classical music's “standing on the dominant” (Caplin 1998: 75) or pop music's “absent tonics” (Spicer 2017) make oblique these parallel facets. Any such dependencies worked in Lehman's favor back in the second chapter, because they implicitly supported pantriadicism's definition by negation: an interweaving among these three features strengthened their mutual exclusion of pantriadicism.Lehman also cleverly formulates and depicts how music changes from one of these eight idioms to another within triadic tonality space, both within a phrase and from section to section, and differentiates among ways and degrees to which different idioms in the same cue blend together or stay isolated. He provides several brief and dissimilar analytical demonstrations of these formulations, but a concluding trio of more extended examinations of music for the “beatific sublime” for movies from the 1940s and 1950s puts triadic tonality space on full analytical display. As summative examinations, they also fold in perspectives from Schenkerian theory and NRT, as well as his sensible ideas about cinematic cadences on which he had published more extensively before (Lehman 2013a) and which this final chapter begins mostly by abridging. Lehman commendably does not chart long trips through triadic tonality space uncritically, however. His flight check includes a review of how theorists have conceptualized the transport between passages of common-practice tonality and passages of chromaticism. In particular, he juxtaposes Charles Smith's (1986) argument that the former's regulatory principles subsume those of the latter with Richard Cohn's (2012) argument for distinct principles for each, principles that are conjoined by the consonant triad's double nature. As he does on several other occasions in his book, Lehman proffers a third way here: “There is compositional value in bringing idioms into uncomfortable proximity, letting them bleed into one another” (218).In my opinion, it is this kind of commixture, broadly conceived and liberally applied to its many facets, that offers the most promise for future theories and analyses of music for film and its related media. Any discomforts that might result from letting contrasting viewpoints bleed into one another can be outweighed by the propriety of its inclusivity and the suitability of its diversity to a distinctively eclectic medium. In that spirit, I give to this gifted author the last word, which is the last sentence of his book, and which conveys a sentiment that I also hold: “I am confident that the prospect of delving into such a rewarding repertoire, so deeply meaningful for so many, means that we are witnessing only the beginnings of what film music theory can be” (239).