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The Major Tritone Progression in Recent Hollywood Science Fiction Films

Murphy, Scott
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Abstract
In the 2002 film Treasure Planet, composer James Newton Howard accompanies the primary shot of the titular orb with an undulation between two major triads a tritone apart. I offer three approaches to understanding the appropriateness of this image/music pairing. First, I present several scenes from recent Hollywood films that conspicuously combine this triadic progression with settings of, or objects from, outer space. Second, I relay ways in which the intrinsic harmonic and voice-leading characteristics of this triadic progression invoke the concepts of great distance, ambiguity, and unfamiliarity. Third, I conclude with a more thorough study of Howard's harmonic language in the score for Treasure Planet, suggesting that this progression and the scene it accompanies represents the culmination of musical and visual/narrative processes, respectively.
Description
This is the author's accepted manuscript, and the publisher's official version is available electronically from: http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.06.12.2/mto.06.12.2.murphy.html
Date
2006-05
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Publisher
Society for Music Theory
Research Projects
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Keywords
Film music, Science fiction, Tritone, Voice-leading, Newton Howard, James, Treasure Planet
Citation
Murphy, Scott. “The Major Tritone Progression in Recent Hollywood Science Fiction Films,” Music Theory Online 12/2 (May 2006)
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