The Major Tritone Progression in Recent Hollywood Science Fiction Films

Abstract

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.

Chromatic Mediants and Narrative Context in Film

“…The main title music (see Ex. ), which Murphy has discussed at length, presents only chromatic mediant motions and tritone root relationships (Murphy ).…”

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

“…In regards to the culturally-established associativity of m4m, I agree with Murphy (2014a) that it has less firm associations than m8m. I would add that m4m can borrow traces of the associativity of its more ubiquitous cousin, m8m, including dark magic, antagonism, and negative otherness more broadly.…”

“…Capuzzo's approach focuses on the purely musical traits of the progressions such as voice-leading parsimony within both pitch space and pitch-class space. Other scholars who have contributed to this emerging field, which I will call Transformational Analysis of Film Music (TAFM), are Scott Murphy (2006, 2014b, 2014a), Matthew Bribitzer-Stull (2007, Jamie Webster (2009Webster ( , 2012, and Tom Schneller (2014).…”

“…The approaches of Murphy, Lehman, Bribitzer-Stull, and Schneller, are all broadly similar in that they are interested in the etymophony of absolute progressions, much like Cohn. The first etymophony-focussed TAFM work is by Murphy (2006), who writes about an association between the "Major Tritone Progression" -MTTP, called M6M in his later work -and outer space. He focuses particularly on its use in James Newton Howard's score for Treasure Planet, pointing to intratextual, intertextual, 3 and intrinsic causes of association of the MTTP with outer space.…”

“…Lydian is very common in Desplat's music, but it very rarely sounds fully tonicised. Most often, vertically explicit instances of Lydian occur on bVI of Aeolian (dia6) or IV of 61 Murphy (2014b) argues that M4m is associated with sentimentality and loss. Lydian's aptness to express physical uplift (or other freedom from gravity) relies on the metaphor VERTICAL SPACE IS PITCH FREQUENCY, and arises because #4 is higher than expected relative to Ionian-centric expectations, and has a strong melodic attraction upwards to resolve to 5.…”