Conference Agenda

Many authors abstractly apply transformational labels to their analyses based upon the shortest distance in pitch-class space. However, emotional Affekt associated with a progression can differ depending upon voice leading, which does not always match an author’s transformational label. By examining voice leading in Parallel Tritone Progressions (PTTPs, described as hybrid tritone progressions in Murphy 2012), I show how voice leading relates to emotional Affekt in film. Often haphazardly reduced to a label of T6P or RPR without regard to the voice leading, PTTPs tend to induce Wonderment (Lehman 2018) along a spectrum between Awe and Frisson (Huron 2006) with varying intensity. PTTPs’ capability to influence emotional Affekt is enhanced through their common formal placement as either an initiating or near penultimate progression. Using PTTPs as a case study, I argue for specificity in transformational labels that match the voice leading due to their associations with differing emotional Affekte.

Through the lens of film analysis and the framework of abjection as a tool for semiotics, this paper demonstrates how Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry (1997) uses sound in film to explore Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. This interdisciplinary approach reveals how the film’s soundscape functions as a site where the boundaries of selfhood and the abject provide confrontations, misunderstandings, and negotiation of new insights into Kristeva’s psychoanalytic framework and its relevance to film music analysis.
Additionally, this paper will provide a music theory analysis of the blues song “St. James Infirmary,” performed by Louis Armstrong and His Savoy Ballroom Five, in which the last moments of the film provide a symbolic message to the audience about the fate of the protagonist Mr. Badii. In the film, rather than confronting the abjection within himself, Mr. Badii distances himself from his actions’ emotional, faith-driven, and psychological implications. Additionally, the film discusses abjection due to the lack of music and the forced perspective of Mr. Badii himself. The reluctance of the secondary characters to aid him with his death also underscores the moral complexities surrounding the confrontation with abjection, as the secondary characters seem to understand this type of abjection on a surface level more than Mr. Badii grasps.
By the time the song debuts in the film, the audience does not know Mr. Badii’s fate, whether he lives or dies, and whether a secondary character has helped him with his moral dilemma of confronting his pain through assisted suicide. However, the song “St. James Infirmary,” which uses a funeral march to layer the harmonic structure of the blues, can be interpreted in many ways and may not be as open-ended as it seems. The song’s musical and cultural associations and the cultural associations of a film set in Iran suggest a more definitive commentary on mortality and the inescapable nature of the abject.

The bifurcation of film music into diegetic and nondiegetic categories yields a helpful (and functional) distinction, allowing viewers and scholars to classify musical performances as “[issuing] from a source within the narrative” (Gorbman 1987, 22) or emanating from a source not depicted or acknowledged onscreen. However, as Anahid Kassabian (2013) has observed, instances of screen music that do not fit tidily into one of these categories are relatively easy to recall. Kassabian and many others (Smith 2009, Winters 2010, Penner 2017) have pointed to the insufficiency of these two terms to adequately describe the gamut of possible relations between a piece of music and a depicted fictional world. Instead of providing a strict taxonomy of these interactions, this presentation considers a “trajectory” of musical ideas across a “fantastical gap” between the “separate realms” of diegetic music and nondiegetic music (Stilwell 2007, 184 and 186–187). Stilwell considers ways that this gap has been and can be traversed, noting that “the trajectory of music between diegetic and nondiegetic highlights a gap in our understanding, a place of destabilization and ambiguity” and that “when that boundary between diegetic and nondiegetic is traversed, it does always mean” (186). This presentation draws attention to this boundary by considering uses of the classical voice at crime scenes in two Batman films, Batman Begins (2005) and The Batman (2022). Trajectories across the fantastical gap help to connect and delineate fantasy and reality, an important concern when examining Batman media, which tends to meld elements of the realistic and the fantastical. By analyzing the application of diegetic and nondiegetic music surrounding criminal behavior in Batman films, this presentation shows that crime scenes present an opportunity for composers to depict psychological conditions by traversing the fantastical gap.