treatises and manuals, Wallmark found that “a small subset of terms accounted for a large percentage of all utterances about timbre” — only “50 words comprised around half of the corpus.” He asks, “considering that English contains tens of thousands of adjectives, moreover, we might conversely ask ourselves why a paltry 800 or so verbal types suffice to comprise the entirety of the timbre lexicon in this corpus?”35 My own timbral analyses will embrace metaphors and combine them with more precise systems where necessary.
Organization My analyses are organized as a double feature, with a short preview beforehand and a “coming attractions” reel immediately following. The preview focuses on the coda from the “Battle on the Ice” cue Sergei Prokofiev composed for Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 epic Alexander Nevsky. It is a brief case study in timbral and gestural analysis. The overall trajectory of the feature sections is (roughly) from historical background to theory to close reading. In both features, I gave myself the challenge of analyzing film scores by two composers whose thematic prowess is celebrated, John Williams and Ennio Morricone. I did this not only for my masochistic tendencies but also to see what analyses of primarily thematic film scores would look like through a timbral lens. The first feature is called The “Farthest From”: Sound, Timbre, Texture, and SpaceForm in John Williams’s Score for Star Wars: A New Hope. Here I argue that the effectiveness of Williams's Star Wars score has as much to do with timbre as it does pitch
Wallmark Z., “A Corpus Analysis of Timbre Semantics in Orchestration Treatises,” Psychol. Music Psychology of Music 47, no. 4 (2019): 586. 35
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