Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema by Frank Lehman (review)

When composer Dimitri Tiomkin won an Oscar for the score of The High and the Mighty in 1955, he accepted it stating, "I would like to thank Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Strauss, [and] Rimsky-Korsakov" (quoted in Thomas Maremaa, "The Sound of Movie Music," New York Times, 28 March 1976). Tiomkin was finally acknowledging the roots of twentieth-century Hollywood music in nineteenth-century symphonic music. Indeed, in the hands of several composers like Tiomkin, Hollywood film music began to gradually outgrow its roots and form its own aesthetics, functions, and style. It is this musical independence that Frank Lehman defines and investigates in Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema. His focus, implied in the title, is on chromatic harmony and its ability to "sculpt mood and structure narrative" (p. 10). He defends the treatment of harmony that creates the effect of sounding "like film music" to contemporary listeners (p. 7). His "goal is to help listeners understand film scoring practices better" (p. 9) by demonstrating that through the maneuver of harmony, Hollywood composers moved away from nineteenth-century music's influence and established Hollywood music's own sonic principles.

Lehman establishes three main theses. First, he argues that the use of consecutive consonant triads characterizes Hollywood music. Second, he suggests that film-music analysis should center on how pitch design (chords, scales, progressions, and keys) is "interdependent with narrative, visuals, and editing" (p. 8). Third, he asserts that chromatic harmony in Hollywood music results from the negation of tonal norms of centricity, diatonicity, and functionality to triads. Richard Cohn called this "pan-triadic" tonality, or "pantriadicism" (Richard Cohn, Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Consonant Triad's Second Nature [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], xiv). Lehman devotes his study to demonstrating that Hollywood composers have resorted to the succession of nonfunctional, noncentral, and non-diatonic triads as their chief tonal idiom to achieve expressivity and drama. Therefore, Lehman's methodology relies heavily on music theory. Hollywood Harmony employs roman-numeral analysis and Schenkerian graphics. Transformational theory, however, occurs more prominently in the book, especially through neo-Riemannian theory (NRT), a branch of transformational theory that expands the triadic transformations that Hugo Riemann postulated in the late nineteenth century.

If film music is indebted to late romantic music, then NRT—a theory created to analyze this repertoire—should be a resourceful tool. Lehman demonstrates that NRT can reveal musical meaning and dramatic structures in pantriadic music and proves that Holly-wood practices have derived pantriadicism from romantic models. The author does not claim the combination of film music and transformational theory/NRT to be groundbreaking, but he brings his voice to the scholarship by proposing a broader spectrum than used in previous studies: he does not confine his book to just one composer, filmic genre, or time period; he treats Hollywood film music as a genre. Thus, his theses and methodology serve not only within the limits of the book but also to widen the borders between film-music studies and both music theory and musicology.

The book moves from general conventions on how chromatic harmony interacts with narrative in Hollywood films to more specific approaches to pantriadicism and NRT. Chapter 1 demonstrates how Hollywood film music conforms to and distances itself from romantic European art music. Harmony "contributes most substantially to the tonal habits of Hollywood" (p. 20), and Lehman discusses practices of chromatic harmony and tonality that exemplify these habits. Chapter 2 furthers the study of chromaticism and tonality as generators of drama. Lehman first discusses a few unique harmonic techniques in Hollywood films and subsequently the expressive effects and dramatic functions of pantriadic harmony in Hollywood films, introducing the reader to the basics of NRT and marking the borders between NRT's own aesthetics and that of other theories, such...