For this reason, any feasible roman numeral routines are left in scare quotes and are assigned more neutral “modal” Tn-type operations. Common-tone retention and parsimony are prime among attributes to which NRT draws attention. This … Melodic and linear forces stitch together the chords between D♯ minor and G major more closely than the book-end transformations, overriding some of the “complexity” of the interior RLRP transformation. (15) Video game music comprises another area with emerging analytical literature that could profit from transformational approaches. Neo-Riemannian theory refers to a loose collection of ideas present in the writings of music theorists such as David Lewin, Bryan Hyer, Richard Cohn, and Henry Klumpenhouwer. But so far it has been largely applied to a very localized repertoire, mostly 19th-century music and 19th-century chromaticism. This is accomplished through a variety of tonal and thematic devices. This stretch contains both the roughest voice-leading and the most thoroughgoing triadic chromaticism, with each root relationship following the mostly third-driven melody in doggedly anti-functional fashion. Film music practice is no more a unified idiom than nineteenth century Romanticism. 2. The second large formal segment of “The Libyans” (shown in the lower system of the reduction, starting with event q.) As with the “reveal progression” of Example 8b, the principal chromatic motion is that of the mode-retaining major third progression. Used very much like an attention-grabbing “stinger” (to borrow film musicological terminology) in Mozart and Beethoven, the diminished seventh-as-shock-chord was already becoming a clichéd resource in the time of Schubert and Berlioz.36 Outworness had little effect in dissuading film composers from its employment, however. The lack of functional progressions also frustrates and ultimately obviates any definitive enharmonic spelling for chords; for example, the move in m. 3 could just as justifiably been spelled D-min⇨C♯-maj with no meaningful change to the analysis, nor the aural impression of the music. The first four harmonies coincide with medium-distance shots of Kent. For a general start on classifying chromatic motion in functional harmony (with a Neo-Riemannian slant), one might start with David Kopp's Chromatic Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Music, which summarizes the history of harmonic models that led up to Neo-Riemannian theory, as well as elements like N and S and his own systems for classifying progressions according to voice-leading. Frete GRÁTIS em milhares de produtos com o Amazon Prime. Visits to non-B/E♭/G-major pegs are elided to provide the clearest picture of how the hexatonic way stations form the basis of the theme’s symmetrical gyrations. During the vocal portion of the passage, starting at m. 11, the melodic line comes to rest on the common-tone A♭/G♯, while inner voices simultaneously alternate B and C (P) and E and E♭/D♯ (L). While I rely on less predetermined grids in this chapter, the Tonnetz can be a powerful tool. Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories: buy this book online. As music theory continues to healthily shed its preoccupation with western art musics in favor of a more ecumenical purview, it is hoped that these sites for further investigation (and many more in the vast universe of music for screen) will garner full treatments warranted by their scope and relevance to contemporary listeners. Dotted nodes, such as surround F♯ and C♯, entail weakly articulated tonal centers, and dotted arrows connect portions of the cue where the relevant transformation is not heard literally (that is, there is intervening material that separates tonics). Much remains to be done before something like “transformational film music theory” can be trumpeted. Best of all for filmgoers, this is done without losing any of the associative “oomph” that attracts so many dramatically minded composers to symmetrical progressions in the first place. Stylistic evolution. Example 11: Reduction of “The Libyans.”. (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000). Such extensions not only provide novel tools for under-inspected musical corpora but also enrich the theory as a whole and clarify its intellectual bases.11 And no repertoire is so primed to offer itself gladly to the mechanisms of triadic transformation theory as film music. The seemingly atonal bass contributes to the impression of a forcible sundering of high and low, base(/bass) and empyrean. Richard Taruskin’s article, “Chernomor to Kashchei: Harmonic Sorcery; Or, Stravinsky’s Angle,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 38.1 (1985), stands as the definitive study of the stylistic and associative aspects of the octatonic scale in the nineteenth century, which he ascribes mostly to the music and theories of Russian nationalist composers, of which (early) Stravinsky was a member. Where one progression falls out of favor and another takes its place, when certain linear routines become a norm rather than a special effect—these are stylistic questions that transformational theory is primed to answer. THE HEXATONIC SYSTEMS UNDER NEO-RIEMANNIAN THEORY: AN EXPLORATION OF THE MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS OF MUSIC KENNETH OSHITA Abstract. Indeed, i t is the very flexibility of the approach that gives neo­ Bernadette is a religious drama chronicling the visions of the Virgin Mary allegedly witnessed by a French teenager, Bernadette Soubirous, in the mid-nineteenth century. Two triads related by L are therefore “closer” than two related by LPL, and even closer than LPLPLPL (despite the fact that they produce exactly the same pair of chords). New to these diagrams is the addition of small triadic nodes that house chords not strictly within the governing space of the network; these account for the occasional dominants and predominants that secure various pegs along the hexatonic cycle but do not draw their pitches from it. University of Tennessee, Knoxville. With a little additional diatonic meandering around E, Korngold wraps up his theme and prepares for the resumption of the A theme. This is perhaps because unlike other parametric axes such as dissonance/consonance, tonal proximity/remoteness, and diatonic/chromatic, voice-leading does not suggest an obvious associative lane of interpretation. Musical cells, such as the one reproduced in Example 10, contain equal parts melodic octatonicism (such as the T6-alternating ostinato bass), chordal superimposition (such as the overlaid and E and B♭ chords in m. 6) and incremental transposition up m. 3 (such as with the shift from C♯ to E to G). I have argued here that the range of applications of transformational thinking and neo-Riemannian tools to film music analysis is promisingly wide. Neo-Riemannian theory was originally established by Hugo Riemann [5], a music theorist of the late 19th century, who developed a framework that related specific triads to one another. Notice that each operation preserves two common tones in a triad and changes its mode. Around this central pitch third‐relationships circle. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. See Guy Capuzzo, “Neo-Riemannian Theory and the Analysis of Pop-Rock Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 26.2 (2004). These A pair of step-by-step model analyses from Waltz with Bashir and Batman: Mask of the Phantasm are presented as straightforward and difficult cases for neo-Riemannian techniques, respectively. diss., Yale University. Even the dominant thirteenth chords that facilitate the sequencing at the end of the second phrase serve as much as first-inversion hexatonic mediants as root-position dominants, and they support a melody made up of the pitches of the <37E> augmented triad. In this case, it is Kansas farm boy Clark Kent making his way across a barren arctic plain (Image 2).24 The dozen chords involved in this progression are untethered to even the loosest sense of a governing tonic, but not every motion between them feels equally harmonically alien. This reduction is paired with Example 3b, a short diachronic network that demonstrates the way in which transformational length maps neatly onto perceived tonal distance. Example 4c: Transformational network for “The Nautilus.”. Serialism and Neo-Riemannian Theory: Transformations and Hexatonic Cycles in Schoenberg's Modern Psalm op. The switch from B♭-min to E♭-maj in m. 2–3 could be interpreted as a ternary compound, PRL.28 Yet the analysis describes it through the considerably more elaborate (PL∙PR)∙PLP. The analysis has the progression first “pass back through” B-min en route to E♭-maj, a step that garners PL∙PR, the normative transformation. The music is analyzed in Example 5. Small vacillations in the degree of transformational complexity contribute to the mood of suspense-despite-regimentation. (34) This musical material scores Jake’s (Sam Worthington) preparations for landing, followed by panoramic tracking shot of the arrival, including reveals of the massive ecological devastation to Pandora already wrought by Jake’s military unit. Example 3shows the three basic Neo-Riemannian operations. If nothing else, a great versatility comes from NRT’s combination of friendliness to nondiatonic materials and sensitivity to the expressive qualities of chromaticism. $25 to $50 (1) $50 to $100 (1) $100 to $200 (1) Product Type. Example 8c provides an overview of the entire tonal trajectory of the scene, from the tonally hazy material that precedes the reveal through the capture of B♭ and subsequent peregrinations, all the way to the conclusive E major. Example 12: Erich Wolfgang Korngold, assorted hexatonic materials from Sea Hawk action music. What distinguishes Korngold’s Sea Hawk theme and many other works in the larger Hollywood harmonic practice is the fashion in which pan-triadic chromaticism is accommodated seamlessly into a formally straightforward—and singable—melodic structure. While such extended libraries of available moves may have their uses in studies where functional tonicity is an important parameter, I focus on more purely chromatic passages (hence the more homogenous dualistic family). in the music of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.1 The res- urrection of the theories of Hugo Riemann, initiated by Lewin (1982 and 1987, 175-80) and Hyer (1989), has played an important role in the devel- opment of these new techniques. Though less common, complete cyclical rotations are notable elements of the scores from several composers like Miklós Rózsa and Jerry Goldsmith, who make heavy use of octatonic and hexatonic materials. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. diss., Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University, 2012); and Sara Briginshaw, “A Neo-Riemannian Approach to Jazz Analysis,” Nota Bene: The Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Research 5.1 (2012). Please, subscribe or login to access full text content. This can be observed especially in his music for action scenes, in which brief M3 cycles govern the musical surface while stepwise intensificatory modulations and interjections of heroic diatonic themes direct the cue’s overall tonal course. That so much of the most characteristic music of the silver screen conforms smoothly to the analytic desiderata of transformation theory makes the union of these two disciplines a natural and encouraging development. Neil Lerner (New York: Routledge, 2009); and Ilario Meandri, “Dal Meraviglioso all’Antimusica su alcuni cliché del fantastico nel mainstream musicale hollywoodiano” in Suono/Immagine/Genere, ed. For a perspective on classical cadential categories in film music, see Lehman, “Hollywood Cadences: Music and the Structure of Cinematic Expectation,” Music Theory Online 19.4 (2013). To help parse this familiar but complex musical style, Hollywood Harmony offers a first-of-its kind introduction to neo-Riemannian theory, a recently developed and versatile method of understanding music as a dynamic and transformational process, rather than a series of inert notes on a page. For postminimalism, it may prove to be the analytical technique that fits the music like a glove. For clarity’s sake, functioning dominants are housed “inside” the hexagon and predominants outside of it. All told, there are six successive full or partial (including dotted arcs) rotations through the western hexatonic system, represented by the six concentric loops that encircle B, E♭, and G. Loop size corresponds purely with chronology. Important issues for NRT, including harmonic combinatoriality, parsimony, tonal agnosticism, and spatiality, are all introduced and connected to the analysis of film music. Despite its picturesque quality, however, the cello line can be treated as harmonically inessential, adorning more fundamental triadic pitches with piquant unresolved neighbors. Cohn, Richard. The centrality of the romantic repertoire to NRT is clear in the objects of some of its most notable analyses. Hollywood Harmony explores the inner workings of film music. Such work as Cohn’s semiotics of the hexatonic pole, Bribitzer-Stull’s on the Tarnhelm progression, Murphy’s work on many of the remaining progression classes, points to one way in which an aesthetic of film harmony may benefit from transformational tools. Example 3a: John Williams, arctic progression in cue “Fortress of Solitude,” from Superman. Edward Gol lin. Richard Donner). The advantage of tonal agnosticism can be seen with the Mysterious Island fanfare already analyzed in Example 3a. (19) (33) music theory Shore uses the gradual shift in smoothness to achieve a tranquilizing effect, matching in harmonic content the move from the weighty realm of kingly responsibility into the private safe-haven of Aragorn and Arwen’s romance. The hero escapes by accelerating the DeLorean to its maximum speed, triggering its time-travel mechanism and hurtling him into the past, just in the nick of time. Such interpretive underdetermination opens the avenue for a hermeneutics not unlike that commonly applied to traditional leitmotifs, and bears the same potential for charting gross or subtle shifts in dramatic representation across large spans of film time.27. Keywords: The properties of generalized L, P, and R operators are explored in Cohn, “Neo-Riemannian Operations, Parsimonious trichords, and Their “Tonnetz” Representations,” Journal of Music Theory 41.1 (1997); and Robert Morris, “Voice Leading Spaces,” Music Theory Spectrum 20.2 (1998). See Rodman, “Tonal Closure and Design in The Wizard of Oz,” Indiana Theory Review (1998); and “Tonal Design and the Aesthetic of Pastiche in Herbert Stothart’s Maytime” in Music and Cinema, ed. Each dashes from one barely established tonal center to another, resting on one chordal footing only for as long as it takes to make the swing over to a new one. Compre online Mathematics of music: Serialism, Music and mathematics, Regular number, Comma, Neo-Riemannian theory, Pythagorean interval, Gareth Loy, de Source: Wikipedia na Amazon. diss., New York, Columbia University, 1996), Gollin, “Representations of Space and Conceptions of Distance in Transformational Theories” (Ph.D. Less obvious is why triadic transformations should hold the affective sway they do in film musical practices. Example 3b: Analysis of progression from “Fortress of Solitude.”. Example 4b: Herrmann, germinal three chord fanfare found throughout Mysterious Island. From this potential for combinatorial description come two of the most useful properties of neo-Riemannian theory within the context of film musical analysis: the linkage of transformational complexity with aural distance, and the capacity to interpret one progression in terms of another. (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. Neo-Riemannian Music Theories comes out before a volume on general music theory, before Formenlehre, before its own progenitor, atonal set theory, and (perhaps most strikingly) before Schenker. This poses a problem for neo-Riemannian analysis, which is configured to deal with (037)s. Still, the central concerns of NRT—enharmonicism, voice-leading, symmetry and balance, harmonic space, and non-diatonic but tertian organization—remain operative, and thus offer a constructive investigative avenue into Silvestri’s oeuvre. TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative. Rather than falling back on analytical bad habits, such as lumping all mediant progressions together as “coloristic” or “bizarre,” transformational methods can arrive at fine-tuned distinctions in quality and usage of harmonic routines. This is the second boon of NRT’s combinatorial inclination: the ability to interpret one harmonic progression in terms of another. The semitonal contrary motion is identical, there with L sending E to F and P sending A to A♭. transformational theory drawn together under the Neo-Riemannian desig-nation. Neo-Riemannian Theory puts forth a contact us Instead, to continually ramp up musical urgency, he employs a more fundamentally transpositional, rather than smoothly displacemental, technique of harmonic transformation. Closer to the surface, the independent keys Korngold traverses within each phrase also fall entirely within the western hexatonic compass. You might also be interested in our very first Article of the Month, in which Frank Lehman used Neo Riemannian transformations as one of the many tools to analyze movie music. 2015. Television, a sister repertoire to film but one with sometimes importantly different practices, is another. Signification in chromatic film music are often the upshot of calculated maneuvers between binary categories such as parsimony/roughness, unary/complex, and tonal/atonal. Endfield) behaves in a more textbook “neo-Riemannian” fashion than many canonical NRT passages investigated by Romantic era–focused theorists. (36) These include Cohn, “As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert,” Nineteenth-Century Music 22.3 (1999); David Lewin, “Some Notes on Analyzing Wagner: The Ring and Parsifal,” 19th-Century Music 16.1 (1992); and all the case studies in David Kopp’s Chromatic Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Rather, such “tonal agnosticism” allows one to concentrate to other musical features which may be more pertinent to a film musical analysis, without having to claim every unusual progression is a cryptically altered diatonic motion or full-blown modulation. (35) This PL compound is mirrored in the linkage of A and F minor by LP at the cue’s onset. There is also good reason to expand NRT’s musical scope: it magnifies its pedagogical value for students more familiar with Radiohead than Reger. Neo-Riemannian theory has proven particularly adept at explaining features of chromatic music where other theoretical approaches have failed, and in so doing has established itself as the leading theoretical approach of our time. While most of these investigations apply the tools and priorities of NRT and film musicology in a fairly conventional fashion, the two final analyses of this essay assume more heterodox perspectives. Neo-Riemannian theory was initiated by David Lewin in the late 20th century, reviving the theory originally established by Hugo Riemann, a music theorist of the late 19th century, after whom the theory is named. A PL progression initiates the new section, just as it did in m. 1, and corresponds to the opening of a new vista: the reveal of staggering ecological devastation on the surface of Pandora.