Music Theory in Film Music

I've been trepidatiously getting my feet wet with Neo-Riemannian music theory since, for better or worse, it seems to have become a primary method for analysing film music. Unfortunately a straightforward, concise introduction to this subfield of theory doesn't seem to exist, so I've had to piece my understanding of it together from a few different sources. Neo-Riemannian theory, the dominant branch of so-called transformational theory, is named for Hugo Riemann, a late 19th-century German music theorist who came up with a system in which triads can be transformed into other triads by various standardised operations. It is most particularly applicable to late 19th-century music that stretches the boundaries of common-practice harmony (especially Brahms and Wagner, who stretched it in very different ways). Film music of the Korngold-Steiner-Williams-Goldsmith-Horner-Shore lineage has been seen to fit these transformational paradigms very well, which makes sense because these composers were influenced by the very type of music for which Riemann's theory was built.

I got started in this exploration by the use of this method in an article I stumbled upon in the most recent issue of Music Theory Online, Frank Lehman's 'Hollywood Cadences: Music and the Structure of Cinematic Expectation'. Lehman doesn't go too deeply down the transformational rabbit hole in this excellent article, as he focusses mainly on just a few typical cadences that show up frequently in Hollywood scores. He labels these by their Neo-Riemannian names, but a deep understanding of the method isn't required to understand the article. Another article by Lehman, 'Transformational Analysis and the Representation of Genius in Film Music' in Music Theory Spectrum, is another story entirely. This is a very dense analysis of James Horner's score for A Beautiful Mind, and to follow it you have to have substantial grounding in the theory.

This is where the problems start. How does someone, perhaps a Monteverdian who has recently developed an interest in film music, make use of such an analysis? And before one can make use of it, how does one make sense of it? Is it even worth the trouble? The answer to the last question is 'yes': it is indeed worth it. Too much film musicology never actually gets to the music, so any corrective to this lack is worthwhile. The same is true about studies in musical theatre, an issue to which Stephen Banfield devotes much space in a recent mostly damning review of the Oxford Handbook of the American Musical in JRMA. The lack of music in musicology is something that has been bothering me lately, especially as I've been preparing my teaching about musical theatre and film music. The focus is mostly on the words and/or narrative, where we really need to be doing what Banfield calls melopoetic analysis, looking at both words and music at the same time, or Michel Chion's audio-vision, exploring the sound- and image-tracks simultaneously. This also comes out of my music theory teaching, something I at first thought I wouldn't like but which I've actually been rather enjoying (other than dealing with voice leading, which is no fun for anyone).

So, musical analysis matters, but what about the Neo-Riemannian stuff? Lehman's footnotes pointed me towards an article by Richard Cohn in the Journal of Music Theory with the promising title 'Introduction to Neo-Rimannian Theory: A Survey and a Historical Perspective', but it is actually no such thing. It is only an introduction in that it introduces a series of articles in a special issue of the journal, and while it does give a history of how the theory developed it doesn't actually explain what it is. No use at all to the beginner, then. My next step was the Oxford Handbook to Neo-Riemannian Theories, which sounds good but is mostly preaching to the converted. Again, this large edited collection gives historical perspective and offers a few analyses without actually explaining what the theory consists of. You have to know the ins and outs of the theory for the book to be of any use; otherwise it's like reading a book in a foreign language knowing only the present tense.

I then finally found a chapter that might have been just what I was looking for: a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies on 'Transformational Theory and the Analysis of Film Music', by Scott Murphy (author of an interesting study of James Newton Howard's music for Treasure Planet: The Major Tritone Progression in Recent Hollywood Science Fiction Films, which like Lehman's article on cadences uses Neo-Riemannian labels but is limited enough in scope that it doesn't get overwhelming if you're not familiar with the theory). The chapter is a bit more useful because it assumes little prior knowledge of transformational theory, but it stays too much on the surface and is really just a literature review, rather than explaining the theory and showing how it can actually be used. I need something with musical examples: here is what a Leittonwechsel actually looks like in a musical context.

The next step was to look backwards, to what is always cited as the article that introduced Neo-Riemannian theory, David Lewin's 'A Formal Theory of Generalized Tonal Functions.' Like many foundational texts, it doesn't have all that much to do with the subfield it helped create. The Neo-Riemannian side is only one of many possible applications of Lewin's system, which can also be applied to post-tonal pitch-class set analysis. The article is as mathematical as it is musical and is therefore very tough going. Sample sentence: 'To see the salient mathematical aspect of the conjugate relationship, notice that (C,1,4) and (C,1,9) are paired, and that 4+9=1.' (That last bit isn't quite as weird as it sounds, because pitch-class notation only goes up to 11.) So it was an interesting thing to read, but didn't help much with trying to grasp Neo-Riemannian theory.

Oddly enough, though, after having read all of this material that doesn't make much sense on its own it's all starting to come together in my mind. I do have some idea as to what this stuff is about, but I would still find it very useful to have a concise introduction, or at least a book that doesn't already assume familiarity with the system. The lack of such a thing is a general problem in music theory, and perhaps even musicology more generally (though I'm so deep into that by now that it's harder to notice the lack). When applying a theoretical (or historical, political, social) paradigm to music, we really ought to be careful not to alienate too many readers. This is not at all akin to 'dumbing down': theoretical rigour is still necessary and there is no reason not to assume that readers are generally well-educated and capable of understanding complicated things, but some good, clear introductory work is needed. I am constantly reminded of this when teaching; if I want to assign a reading on post colonialism in music I'd better make sure I've told my students what post colonialism is, or I need to be sure that I've assigned something that introduces the field. Susan McClary remains a model that we should all follow in this regard: whether she is writing on gender theory or modal theory she always gives a clear introduction before she undertakes deeper analysis. Likewise Eric Clarke with ecological perception theory in his Ways of Listening, and Peter Franklin with philosophies of Modernism in Seeing Through Music. These introductions are useful refreshers for those of us who already have the theoretical background, and they don't leave newcomers high and dry. With such broad concepts as gender, Modernism, and transformational or Schenkerian theory, each scholar will have his/her own version of what it means, so an introduction is doubly important.

I'm now going to have a look at David Kopp's Chromatic Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Music to see if he sheds any more light on this group of theories. Whether or not I actually use any of this in my own studies of film music (and I suspect I probably won't), I think this exploration into theory-land has been worth the trouble, in spite of the lack of a good map.