action” of a film.19 For Prendergast (and myself), the thing that displaces “line and structure” in film music is “color.” I was surprised to find, then, how much some analyses of film music prioritize the development of theme and its adjacent pitch structures over timbre. Granted, many of these analyses provide fascinating and intriguing insights. The Film Score Handbook collection serves as an excellent example; to name two, Roger Hickman’s handbook for Ben Hur provides an exhaustive list and developmental lineage of Miklós Rózsa’s leitmotifs, and David Cooper’s handbook for Vertigo favors Bernard Herrmann’s motivic and harmonic approach.20 More recently, Frank Lehman has produced an excellent — and gargantuan — catalog of Star Wars leitmotifs.21 But these resources’ concentration on theme necessarily relegates timbre to almost footnote status. My own analyses will flip these priorities. The challenge I set out for myself in this dissertation is: how can I put the emphasis on the soundworld of film scores when I analyze them, like composers do when they compose them? Theoretical Frame I: Musical Gesture Of course, music is not made of timbre alone; even an analysis that prioritizes timbre will have to account for other musical properties. My sun music examples, for instance, still have rhythm, pitch structures, and so on, as shown in the transcriptions above.
Roy M. Prendergast, Film Music - a Neglected Art : A Critical Study of Music in Films. (W W Norton : Co., 1991), 215. 19
Roger Hickman, Miklós Rózsa’s Ben-Hur : a film score guide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2011).; David S.. Cooper, Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo : A Film Score Handbook (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001). 20
Frank Lehman, “The Themes of Star Wars: Catalogue and Commentary,” Emilio Audissino, John Williams : Music for Films, Television, and the Concert Stage, 2018. 21
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