In the 2002 filmTreasure Planet,composer James Newton Howard accompanies the primary shot of the titular orb with an undulation between two major triads a tritone apart. I offer three approaches to understanding the appropriateness of this image/music pairing. First, I present several scenes from recent Hollywood films that conspicuously combine this triadic progression with settings of, or objects from, outer space. Second, I relay ways in which the intrinsic harmonic and voice-leading characteristics of this triadic progression invoke the concepts of great distance, ambiguity, and unfamiliarity. Third, I conclude with a more thorough study of Howard’s harmonic language in the score forTreasure Planet,suggesting that this progression and the scene it accompanies represents the culmination of musical and visual/narrative processes, respectively.
This chapter shows how the tools of contemporary music theory can provide a context for sound qualities particularly common in film music since the early 1980s. It considers pairs of chords that are related in ways regarded as “distant” in traditional tonal theory. It discusses the forty-eight possible such pairs, called “tonal-triadic progression classes” (TTPC), and shows that the TTPCs can be much more easily explained and grouped using neo-Riemannian theory. This chapter highlights the importance of these groupings in the analysis of film sequences.
Abstract:The metric cube is a kind of graph of meters proposed as a complement to the types of metric spaces that have already been put forth in music-theoretic scholarship, particularly by Richard Cohn. Whereas Cohn's most recent kind of metric space (2001) can compare meters only if they interpret the same time span, metric cubes permit the comparison of meters that interpret different time spans. Furthermore, a metric cube posits a different kind of adjacency relation: while Cohn's most recent metric space connects two meters if their ordered pulse representations differ by only one pulse, a metric cube connects two meters if their ordered factor representations differ by only one factor. Metric cubes, and metric operations that act on the contents of a cube, reveal patterns of metric structure in three works by Brahms: the first movement of the Third Symphony op. 90, the third movement of the Second Symphony op. 73, and the last two movements of the Second String Quartet op. 51/2. These analyses also suggest correspondences in these movements between metric relationships and relationships of key, harmony, and form. Richard Cohn's recent work in the area of meter has, among other accomplishments, brought meters on a more equal ontological footing with pitches, pitch classes, pitch-class collections (chords, melodies, and so forth), and many other musical "objects" that music-theoretical research has-for decades or, in some cases, centuries-compared with various kinds of relations, placed into sets, arranged into geometric spaces, or acted upon with mathematical groups. This reification of a meter as an object or "state"-more precisely, as a set of hierarchically ordered durations or pulses-admittedly belies many of its primary characteristics, particularly the dependence of its actualization upon temporal flow within a significant time span 1 , and the sense that it "is more an aspect of the behaviour of performers and listeners than an aspect of the music itself" (London 2001a).
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