Talking to AI on Nostr: Please re-write the following text as bulletpoints for a presentation :: Prolongation ...
Please re-write the following text as bulletpoints for a presentation ::
Prolongation
In recognizing the importance that harmonic impatience plays in film music, we should not dismiss the constructive power of its seeming antithesis: tonal pro- longation. The idea of prolongation comes from the work of German theorist Heinrich Schenker, for whom simple contrapuntal procedures came together to generate the fundamental tonal structure of a piece.52 However, modern usage is considerably looser toward the term, frequently admitting the use of both of linear procedures and abstract diatonic functions like “dominant” to establish a tonal center. Prolongation allows a tonic to govern spans of arbitrary duration, directing pitch materials toward a goal, effective even when that goal is not lit- erally sounding.53 Because it is often associated with structure rather than ex- pression or rhetoric, prolongation would seem an odd category to impose on film music analysis. But in fact there is a great deal of expressive potential in subtly playing with prolongational implications.
To see how a fairly “well-behaved” case of tonal prolongation can shape the flow of a scene, consider “The Picnic” from Miklós Rózsa’s score to Spellbound (1945, 21:30, ). Occurring near the beginning of the film, Rózsa’s pastorale ac- companies an outdoor stroll between the clinical Dr. Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) and the romantic Dr. Edwardes (Gregory Peck). Most of the sequence is dedicated to light philosophical banter on matters of love, poetry, and psychiatry. A slight obstacle in the couple’s way brings about a momentary change of topic and tonic. The discussion shifts to the beauty of the landscape (though one can tell Edwardes is thinking of something else), and the cue ends with a cut to another location. Mostly written in an “overall” style, Rózsa’s music has few overt audiovisual synch points. Compared to the febrile music of Steiner, the cue is more reliant on a leisurely melody—the main love theme—and a single, diatonically sustained key. This construction makes conventional linear analysis a suitable interpretive lens.54 A Schenkerian middle-ground sketch is provided in Figure 1.6, illustrating the essential arc of the two-minute cue.55
In most respects, Rózsa’s cue adheres nicely to Schenkerian structural con- ventions. “The Picnic” falls into a ternary form that prolongs D major. The first section encompasses the antecedent phrase of the love theme, charting out a ‸3-line based on F♯4. This melodic edifice is interrupted, in standard fashion for
‸
a parallel period, on 2 at a half-cadence, which is elegantly synchronized with
the moment the two doctors briefly pause their walk. The contrasting middle
section is more tonally digressive, as befits the more active and playful tone of
the scene once Edwardes has cracked a joke and Petersen has tumbled through
a fence. Ultimately, however, it can comfortably be read as a contrapuntal ex-
pansion of the underlying tonic through its tonicized subdominant. Rózsa con-
tinues hinting at new keys as soon as the barrier of the cow fence is standing in
the pair’s way, reaching a harmonic far-out point of B major for when Petersen
trips. This key area can be understood as a tonicized upper third of the sub-
dominant G major, and the whole section as a symmetrically prolonged me-
♯♯♮♯♯
lodic neighbor motion, from F 4⇨G4⇨G 4⇨G 4⇨F 4. Once Petersen is back on her feet, Rózsa begins to wend his way back to D, liquidating the chromatic G ,
‸
and securing the original key and 3 Kopfton with an elided imperfect authentic cadence.
A few spots in “The Picnic” challenge Schenkerian priorities, albeit only slightly.
For example, there is the effect of the prolonged seventh and added sixth chords in
the middle section, and the parallel octaves from E to D at the cue’s introduction
(not to mention Rózsa’s idiolectical fondness for parallel intervals in surface voice
leading). However, it is only at the end of cue where the Schenkerian analytical
machinery begins to show signs of malfunctioning. Rózsa does not provide the
‸
cue with a definitive PAC that captures 1 in the main structural register via a dom-
inant-to-tonic motion. Rather, the truncated statement of the love theme’s conse-
quent phrase that begins when Petersen exclaims “isn’t it beautiful” concludes with
‸
a stretched-out, modally mixed plagal cadence (PC). This cadence produces only 1
‸
in an implied inner voice, while the actual concluding pitch is A5 (5). Despite being resolutely monotonal and diatonically functional throughout, “The Picnic” lacks a completely coherent Urlinie. The effect at the cue’s conclusion—highly charac- teristic of Hollywood underscore—is of simultaneous tonal closure and melodic open-endedness. Indeed, in many soundtracks, true structural PACs are absent in non-diegetic music until the very concluding measures of the finale or end credits.
The prolongational idiosyncrasies of Rózsa’s cue have to do with the way that tonality is earned—that is, whether or not it is a product of what Neumeyer (1998: 103) characterizes as “an overarching, teleological, hierarchical” plan.56 It is in this regard that film music is often most unlike its precedents in Romantic con- cert music, as well as other twentieth-century styles like Debussyian impressionism in which key is a more nebulous entity. In film, dramatic effect determines what is earned and what is not. As we have already seen in Now Voyager, musical impa- tience can have a large impact on the way keys are established and sustained. While tonal centers are very often unambiguously prolonged—sometimes with improb- able tenacity, as in rock and minimalist-inspired scores—monotonality is not a re- quirement in film music. Crucially, its abeyance does not automatically represent an inherent structural problem or tension as it might in late Romantic repertoires.
Last-minute key changes potentially outrageous in any other genre routinely take place with the minimum of fanfare in Hollywood. Figure 1.7 gives one such example, the final ten measures of Max Steiner’s score to the pulpy supernatural adventure film She (1935, 1:41:30, ). The movie ends with an astonishingly ab- rupt modulation, totally unmotivated by prolongational logic, earned only in the sense that it produces a jolt of surprise for the movie’s last few frames. This con- cluding passage is preceded by almost a half hour’s worth of wall-to-wall scoring in the protean style we have already encountered from Steiner. It is in that con- text that we arrive at the long-anticipated final cadence.
The climactic statement of the film’s love theme (mm. 1–4), accompanying the heroine’s parting words about love and domesticity, provides the first area of clearly functional harmony heard in a very long time. A dominant-pedal chord in D♭ major resolves exactly as one might wish for a movie with a big, happy, con- servative ending: with a totally unambiguous PAC, ‸5⇨‸1 in the bass dutifully supporting ‸3⇨(♭‸3)⇨‸2⇨‸1 in the melody. The screen fades to black, and at m. 5, Steiner begins to set up one of those key-reinforcing codettas one often finds in Romantic finales. Yet this post-cadential affirmation of D♭ major turns out to be a ruse: the ascending melodic line in m. 6 rapidly turns chromatic, and with whiplash speed, Steiner modulates to the distantly related key of E major, effecting an overall transposition of the tonic by a minor third. This unanticipated—in fact, unanticipatable—new key is confirmed with a brassy (and stereotypically “old Hollywood”) modally mixed PC [iv⇨iiø7⇨I], synchronized with the arrival of the words “The End” on screen. E major then garners its own post-cadential codetta, with the film’s danger theme given the final word in the bass. Arriving as it does at the formal moment one would expect greatest closure and tonal security, there is essentially no narratival or visual motivation for Steiner’s modulation away from D♭. Its justification is instead expressive and temporal, born out of a desire to capture a sense of weirdness and impetuous adventure, one last thrill for the au- dience who came to the theater in expectation of impossible sights and sounds.
Steiner’s big finish in She is a radical example of the undermining of monotonality. But it also illustrates a more generally loose attitude toward single- key prolongation in film music. Composers from the Classical Hollywood Era on- ward have never felt an obligation to end a cue in the same key as it began, or a duty to project a tonic on a middle-ground level, as we have already seen in several cases. Rather than a universal trait of Hollywood film music, prolonged monotonality, or the omission thereof, is an effect available to the composer for associative pur- poses, and secondarily if at all for its coherence-generating potential.
Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler came to essentially the same conclusion while observing an ironic (and to them unfavorable) similarity to the modernist dissolution of tonality in film music. In a passage from Composing for the Films, they state the following:
[Film] tonality remains one of single sounds and their most primitive sequences. The necessity of following cues, and of producing harmonic effects without regard for the requirement of harmonic development, obviously does not permit of really balanced modulation, broad, well- planned harmonic canvases; in brief, real tonality in the sense of the dis- position of functional harmony over long stretches . . . according to the prevailing practice, while the separate chords are banal and over-familiar, their interrelation is quite anarchistic and for the most part completely meaningless (2007 [1947] : 123n2)
The reasoning here is needlessly dismissive of the possibility of harmonic design in film cues and scores. Tonal planning on the level of the cue is clearly extremely common (c.f. Spellbound’s “Picnic”), particularly with monotonally minded com- posers like John Barry or Ennio Morricone.57 Planning on the level of the film, on the other hand, is “rare and precious, representing the exception to the rule, rather than a widespread trend,” as Motazedian notes (2016: 194).
Prolongation
In recognizing the importance that harmonic impatience plays in film music, we should not dismiss the constructive power of its seeming antithesis: tonal pro- longation. The idea of prolongation comes from the work of German theorist Heinrich Schenker, for whom simple contrapuntal procedures came together to generate the fundamental tonal structure of a piece.52 However, modern usage is considerably looser toward the term, frequently admitting the use of both of linear procedures and abstract diatonic functions like “dominant” to establish a tonal center. Prolongation allows a tonic to govern spans of arbitrary duration, directing pitch materials toward a goal, effective even when that goal is not lit- erally sounding.53 Because it is often associated with structure rather than ex- pression or rhetoric, prolongation would seem an odd category to impose on film music analysis. But in fact there is a great deal of expressive potential in subtly playing with prolongational implications.
To see how a fairly “well-behaved” case of tonal prolongation can shape the flow of a scene, consider “The Picnic” from Miklós Rózsa’s score to Spellbound (1945, 21:30, ). Occurring near the beginning of the film, Rózsa’s pastorale ac- companies an outdoor stroll between the clinical Dr. Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) and the romantic Dr. Edwardes (Gregory Peck). Most of the sequence is dedicated to light philosophical banter on matters of love, poetry, and psychiatry. A slight obstacle in the couple’s way brings about a momentary change of topic and tonic. The discussion shifts to the beauty of the landscape (though one can tell Edwardes is thinking of something else), and the cue ends with a cut to another location. Mostly written in an “overall” style, Rózsa’s music has few overt audiovisual synch points. Compared to the febrile music of Steiner, the cue is more reliant on a leisurely melody—the main love theme—and a single, diatonically sustained key. This construction makes conventional linear analysis a suitable interpretive lens.54 A Schenkerian middle-ground sketch is provided in Figure 1.6, illustrating the essential arc of the two-minute cue.55
In most respects, Rózsa’s cue adheres nicely to Schenkerian structural con- ventions. “The Picnic” falls into a ternary form that prolongs D major. The first section encompasses the antecedent phrase of the love theme, charting out a ‸3-line based on F♯4. This melodic edifice is interrupted, in standard fashion for
‸
a parallel period, on 2 at a half-cadence, which is elegantly synchronized with
the moment the two doctors briefly pause their walk. The contrasting middle
section is more tonally digressive, as befits the more active and playful tone of
the scene once Edwardes has cracked a joke and Petersen has tumbled through
a fence. Ultimately, however, it can comfortably be read as a contrapuntal ex-
pansion of the underlying tonic through its tonicized subdominant. Rózsa con-
tinues hinting at new keys as soon as the barrier of the cow fence is standing in
the pair’s way, reaching a harmonic far-out point of B major for when Petersen
trips. This key area can be understood as a tonicized upper third of the sub-
dominant G major, and the whole section as a symmetrically prolonged me-
♯♯♮♯♯
lodic neighbor motion, from F 4⇨G4⇨G 4⇨G 4⇨F 4. Once Petersen is back on her feet, Rózsa begins to wend his way back to D, liquidating the chromatic G ,
‸
and securing the original key and 3 Kopfton with an elided imperfect authentic cadence.
A few spots in “The Picnic” challenge Schenkerian priorities, albeit only slightly.
For example, there is the effect of the prolonged seventh and added sixth chords in
the middle section, and the parallel octaves from E to D at the cue’s introduction
(not to mention Rózsa’s idiolectical fondness for parallel intervals in surface voice
leading). However, it is only at the end of cue where the Schenkerian analytical
machinery begins to show signs of malfunctioning. Rózsa does not provide the
‸
cue with a definitive PAC that captures 1 in the main structural register via a dom-
inant-to-tonic motion. Rather, the truncated statement of the love theme’s conse-
quent phrase that begins when Petersen exclaims “isn’t it beautiful” concludes with
‸
a stretched-out, modally mixed plagal cadence (PC). This cadence produces only 1
‸
in an implied inner voice, while the actual concluding pitch is A5 (5). Despite being resolutely monotonal and diatonically functional throughout, “The Picnic” lacks a completely coherent Urlinie. The effect at the cue’s conclusion—highly charac- teristic of Hollywood underscore—is of simultaneous tonal closure and melodic open-endedness. Indeed, in many soundtracks, true structural PACs are absent in non-diegetic music until the very concluding measures of the finale or end credits.
The prolongational idiosyncrasies of Rózsa’s cue have to do with the way that tonality is earned—that is, whether or not it is a product of what Neumeyer (1998: 103) characterizes as “an overarching, teleological, hierarchical” plan.56 It is in this regard that film music is often most unlike its precedents in Romantic con- cert music, as well as other twentieth-century styles like Debussyian impressionism in which key is a more nebulous entity. In film, dramatic effect determines what is earned and what is not. As we have already seen in Now Voyager, musical impa- tience can have a large impact on the way keys are established and sustained. While tonal centers are very often unambiguously prolonged—sometimes with improb- able tenacity, as in rock and minimalist-inspired scores—monotonality is not a re- quirement in film music. Crucially, its abeyance does not automatically represent an inherent structural problem or tension as it might in late Romantic repertoires.
Last-minute key changes potentially outrageous in any other genre routinely take place with the minimum of fanfare in Hollywood. Figure 1.7 gives one such example, the final ten measures of Max Steiner’s score to the pulpy supernatural adventure film She (1935, 1:41:30, ). The movie ends with an astonishingly ab- rupt modulation, totally unmotivated by prolongational logic, earned only in the sense that it produces a jolt of surprise for the movie’s last few frames. This con- cluding passage is preceded by almost a half hour’s worth of wall-to-wall scoring in the protean style we have already encountered from Steiner. It is in that con- text that we arrive at the long-anticipated final cadence.
The climactic statement of the film’s love theme (mm. 1–4), accompanying the heroine’s parting words about love and domesticity, provides the first area of clearly functional harmony heard in a very long time. A dominant-pedal chord in D♭ major resolves exactly as one might wish for a movie with a big, happy, con- servative ending: with a totally unambiguous PAC, ‸5⇨‸1 in the bass dutifully supporting ‸3⇨(♭‸3)⇨‸2⇨‸1 in the melody. The screen fades to black, and at m. 5, Steiner begins to set up one of those key-reinforcing codettas one often finds in Romantic finales. Yet this post-cadential affirmation of D♭ major turns out to be a ruse: the ascending melodic line in m. 6 rapidly turns chromatic, and with whiplash speed, Steiner modulates to the distantly related key of E major, effecting an overall transposition of the tonic by a minor third. This unanticipated—in fact, unanticipatable—new key is confirmed with a brassy (and stereotypically “old Hollywood”) modally mixed PC [iv⇨iiø7⇨I], synchronized with the arrival of the words “The End” on screen. E major then garners its own post-cadential codetta, with the film’s danger theme given the final word in the bass. Arriving as it does at the formal moment one would expect greatest closure and tonal security, there is essentially no narratival or visual motivation for Steiner’s modulation away from D♭. Its justification is instead expressive and temporal, born out of a desire to capture a sense of weirdness and impetuous adventure, one last thrill for the au- dience who came to the theater in expectation of impossible sights and sounds.
Steiner’s big finish in She is a radical example of the undermining of monotonality. But it also illustrates a more generally loose attitude toward single- key prolongation in film music. Composers from the Classical Hollywood Era on- ward have never felt an obligation to end a cue in the same key as it began, or a duty to project a tonic on a middle-ground level, as we have already seen in several cases. Rather than a universal trait of Hollywood film music, prolonged monotonality, or the omission thereof, is an effect available to the composer for associative pur- poses, and secondarily if at all for its coherence-generating potential.
Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler came to essentially the same conclusion while observing an ironic (and to them unfavorable) similarity to the modernist dissolution of tonality in film music. In a passage from Composing for the Films, they state the following:
[Film] tonality remains one of single sounds and their most primitive sequences. The necessity of following cues, and of producing harmonic effects without regard for the requirement of harmonic development, obviously does not permit of really balanced modulation, broad, well- planned harmonic canvases; in brief, real tonality in the sense of the dis- position of functional harmony over long stretches . . . according to the prevailing practice, while the separate chords are banal and over-familiar, their interrelation is quite anarchistic and for the most part completely meaningless (2007 [1947] : 123n2)
The reasoning here is needlessly dismissive of the possibility of harmonic design in film cues and scores. Tonal planning on the level of the cue is clearly extremely common (c.f. Spellbound’s “Picnic”), particularly with monotonally minded com- posers like John Barry or Ennio Morricone.57 Planning on the level of the film, on the other hand, is “rare and precious, representing the exception to the rule, rather than a widespread trend,” as Motazedian notes (2016: 194).