Conference Agenda

The music of Edvard Grieg has defined the “sound of trolls” through the long-standing popularity and widespread use in popular culture of “I Dovregubbens hall” [In the Hall of the Mountain King] and other pieces of troll music. However, the trolls could have sounded very different. Grieg’s contemporary and close friend, Norwegian composer and pianist Agathe Backer Grøndahl presents an alternative musical construction of trolls. In I Blaafjellet [In the Blue Mountain], Op. 44 (1897), she thematizes several aspects of trolls and troll-like beings in a manner strikingly different from the typical Griegian troll music. Focusing on I Blaafjellet, this paper presents a comparative analysis of Grieg’s and Backer Grøndahl’s troll music, highlighting the musical means (some of which evoke musical topics) used in their portrayal of trolls and the broader cultural implications of these portrayals. Trolls are an important part of Norwegian folklore, and their musical portrayal doubtlessly contributed to constructing a Norwegian national identity. In the 1890s, constructing a national identity (connected to the fight for national independence, obtained in 1905) was at the center of Norwegian consciousness. Backer Grøndahl performed I Blaafjellet during the single most important display of Norwegian music in the late nineteenth century, the Bergen Music Festival, organized by Grieg in 1898. As the only woman composer on the festival program, she inserted her alternative portrayal of fairy-tale beings into the discourse on “Norwegian-ness” in music. Understanding identity through the lens of performativity, this paper discusses how Backer Grøndahl and Grieg, in this specific historical context, were doing Norwegian-ness through their troll music. Building on previous analytical research highlighting how Grieg evokes the uncanny in his troll music, it demonstrates how Backer Grøndahl, in certain movements, uses other means than Grieg to evoke the uncanny and in others avoids the uncanny altogether.

To “create a sense of awe and fear,” raising hair and chilling bones, composers of Western art music and drama have used the ombra topic for centuries (McClelland 2012, iv). Film composers also use ombra similarly, building on features and associations from concert and opera repertoire (McClelland 2017). One new film subgenre that emerged after Godzilla (1954) was giant monster movies (kaijū films). The Japanese term for “strange beasts,” kaijū films became associated with specific narrative arcs, special effects-filled horror, and–obviously–monsters. I argue that giant monster movies developed a subtopic of ombra that I call the “kaijū subtopic.” Taking composer Ifukube Akira’s theme for the Godzilla franchise as the prototypical example, I argue that the kaijū subtopic becomes a musical expectation of giant monster movies, with dozens of examples across several forms of media. Using a corpus of thirty media objects between 1957-2021, I determine the key features and associations of this subtopic, including low brass instrumentation, fortissimo dynamics, angular non-tonal melodies, and monophonic textures, which create associations of destruction, war, nuclear energy, and environmental disaster.

I consider how a Western topic transfers into Japanese media, using specific examples of the subtopic’s use in Godzilla (1954) as a case study. Drawing on Everett’s framework of intercultural transference (Everett 2004), I discuss how what was originally a product of Western art music and dramatic storytelling (ombra) takes on new meaning when imported into Japan (kaijū). As the kaijū genre proliferates after Godzilla (1954), the narrative themes of the film become the kaijū subtopic’s associations. The kaijū subtopic originated as a form expressing the “other” through music, and Godzilla (1954) uses ombra as a musical metaphor for the American other. However, the popularity and iteration of subsequent films constituting the genre take this music and reinscribe it with meaning as something new, a kaijū subtopic associated with Japanese monsters rather than American ones. Musical topics have been used in film as shorthand for cultural differences (Buhler 2019). The kaijū subtopic shows how musical materials are shared across cultural and international lines and reinscribed with meaning.

Social media platforms like TikTok have revolutionized the way people listen to music (Giraldo 2020). TikTok’s algorithm incentivizes users to choose from only the most used audios (and those similar in mood or affect) for their videos when participating in any given trend. This is a modern parallel to the function of film cue sheets used by silent film pianists that helped establish topics through categorization of music by aspects like general affect and on-screen action. Trending audios are instead categorized by “aesthetic,” defined as a “collection of images, colors, objects, music, and writings that create a specific emotion, purpose, and community,” (Palmer 2024, 8) and are often described with the suffix “-core” (e.g. “cottagecore”). I argue that these categorizations result in an environment primed for the use of topical cues, conditioning users to become “competent listeners” that listen to social media audio topically. I explore this through a currently emerging topic in social media I call the “liminal topic” that is mainly characterized by audio manipulation, auditory allusions to the past, and electronic timbres.

Liminal spaces took the internet by storm in early 2020 and is defined as an internet phenomenon and urban legend of a “nonplace representation of a familiar yet unknown and increasingly uncomfortable space” (Wiggins 2024, 5). On TikTok, this aesthetic is often labeled as “liminalcore,” “dreamcore,” and “weirdcore.” The liminal topic emerged from audios accompanying trending liminal space videos and is mainly characterized by audio manipulation, intonation inconsistencies, and auditory allusions to the past. The auditory allusions to the past work to invoke nostalgia in the listener and can be achieved either through references to childhood cultural phenomena or allusions to older recording technologies (i.e. intentionally staticky or poor audio quality). Building upon Heidegger’s “Thing theory” (2009), Chrostowska’s philosophy of nostalgia (2010), and the work at the intersection of topic theory and affect (Grant 2020), I demonstrate that both the visual observation of liminal space and the auditory liminal topic heard on TikTok result in the same affect and effectively communicates the unease, nostalgia, and uncanniness associated with liminal spaces to social media users.