Understanding the Leitmotif

Abstract

The musical leitmotif, having reached a point of particular forcefulness in the music of Richard Wagner, has remained a popular compositional device up to the present day. In this book, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull explores the background and development of the leitmotif, from Wagner to the Hollywood adaptations of The Lord of The Rings and the Harry Potter series. Analyzing both concert music and film music, Bribitzer-Stull explains what the leitmotif is and establishes it as the union of two aspects: the thematic and the associative. He goes on to show that Wagner's Ring cycle provides a leitmotivic paradigm, a model from which we can learn to better understand the leitmotif across style periods. Arguing for a renewed interest in the artistic merit of the leitmotif, Bribitzer-Stull reveals how uniting meaning, memory, and emotion in music can lead to a richer listening experience and a better understanding of dramatic music's enduring appeal.

Scoring Loss in Some Recent Popular Film and Television

“…4 The second part of the present article resembles all three of these preceding studies most closely, in that it lists instances of the purported association that are hopefully numerous enough to convince the reader of the distinctiveness of the association. The third and fourth parts resemble Cohn's and my studies in that they offer some hypotheses for a purported motivation of the association: why this musical idea has assumed this particular association in recent popular film and television, and why the association seems to work so well.…”

“…This alternation, annotated by solid triangles, occurs in Example 1 in mm. [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] and in Example 2 in both mm. 9-16 and mm.…”

“…[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] and before the point in time when Art and Ben, sitting with Joe at the end of the pier, get up in preparation to depart. In the second sequence, accompanied by Example 2, the tonic and mediant alternation first occurs when the aliens-along with the viewer-first painfully behold the effects of the lifeforce drain on the dormant alien whose cocoon has been opened.…”

“…3 This excerpt appears in the first scene of Act IV of Fritz Oeser's 1974 critical edition. 4 From the five-act version. 5 Discussed by Harrison (1994, 62) and Rings (2011, 128-29).…”

“…15 Contrastingly, in recent popular film music, as demonstrated in the examples used by Bribitzer-Stull, the Terzschritt progressions that are most often associated with malevolence, antagonism, or eeriness generally exclude not only those Terzschritte that relate major triads (M4M or M8M, as one would expect with malevolence and its offshoots) but also those Terzschritte that invert the tonicization (m4m, as one might not expect). 16 This suggests that research aspiring to codify the common associations between triadic progression and cinematic narrative should refine the Riemannian point of view with other tonal and harmonic information.…”