Beyond the Leitmotif

Download or read book Beyond the Leitmotif written by Steven Carlton Rahn and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary screen scoring is often described in terms of its emphasis on secondary compositional parameters over traditional thematic processes characteristic of the classical Hollywood era. Nicholas Reyland (2015) coins the terms “corporate classicism” and the “metaphysical style” to define two related trends in current scoring practices that he claims “[privilege] affect and style topical connotation over musical structures developing thematic or harmonic symbolism.” While Reyland acknowledges the broad appeal and accessibility of contemporary screen music, he downplays its potential to engage with longer-form expositions of narrative, asserting that scores instead rely on “affective short hands.” In this dissertation, I argue that recent scoring trends do not necessarily strip away the extra-semiotic dimension of the classical style, but may rather symbolically interact with film narratives through musical processes that deviate from leitmotivic discourse. By applying neo-Riemannian theory and other contemporary analytical approaches to recent film scores that privilege secondary compositional parameters, I highlight symbolic networks in which musical relationships reveal more than local audiovisual parallels, and reflect deeper narrative and character relationships. Stylistic trends in contemporary scoring are linked to broader developments in screen aesthetics that scholars have identified as characteristic features of post-classical cinema. Eleftheria Thanouli (2009) argues that post-classical filmmaking techniques do not work against the communicativeness of the narration and still create a widely accessible viewing experience even as they introduce new aesthetic norms and establish a new narrative paradigm. I suggest that contemporary scoring trends represent a parallel aesthetic development in which the new compositional paradigm does not necessarily reduce the “communicativeness” of the screen music, its capacity to function beyond an affective level, or its ability to operate in an explicitly representational manner. Overall, I aim to demonstrate how musical processes illuminated through contemporary analytical approaches can symbolically engage with aspects of film narrative that are uniquely post-classical