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Weird, Menacing, and Colorful

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Hollywood scoring has contributed to popularizing polychords and polytonal harmonies-i.e., the superimposition of conflicting tonally-resonant, tertian harmonies-by associating these modernist musical techniques with narrative situations involving extreme tension, violence, and the supernatural.There have been relatively few studies on this issue, however, and those that exist do not engage deeply with recent theories of polytonality.In this article, I propose an approach to film music analysis that is more explicitly conversant with the tools of formal music theory, using it to explore elements of harmonic polytonality in Bernard Herrmann's film music.Using a variety of examples from a large number of film scores, I show that Herrmann's polyharmonies are associated with two main narrative categories, which I call the "weird" and the "menacing."These two categories are often inextricably linked, so that harmonic polytonality depicts-and helps establish-the threat, danger, and violence posed by unnatural or "abnormal" characters, objects, and situations, among them psychopaths, sociopaths, extraterrestrials, and supernatural creatures.I argue that Herrmann's polychords cannot be understood on strictly pitch terms, as their musical and narrative effects are often highly dependent on aspects of timbre and perceived texture.Drawing from theories that posit a blurred line between harmony and timbre in twentieth-century music, I advance an analytical model for Herrmann's polychords integrating elements of harmony, texture, and timbre.Using this model, I show how Herrmann shapes the degrees of harmonic dissonance, textural fusion, and timbral harshness of his polytonal harmonies so as to calibrate the intensity of their expressive associations.
DOI: 10.30535/mto.31.4.5
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7124604937
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