Conference Agenda

Film music scholarship has long emphasized leitmotif as a principal means of narrative coherence. Studies of franchise scoring likewise tend to focus on thematic recurrence and brand identity. Yet less attention has been given to a related but distinct practice: the reappearance of non-leitmotivic cues drawn from earlier franchise installments.

This paper examines that practice in John Williams’ music for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. In the film’s extended opening flashback sequence, passages from earlier Indiana Jones films are reintroduced. These moments do not function as recurring character themes; rather, they involve the reuse and adaptation of specific non-leitmotivic cue material from earlier films. By reinstating this material, the score participates in the film’s broader effort to situate its aging protagonist within a recognizable musical past.

Rather than functioning as character signifiers or even "Easter eggs," these cues reconstruct a prior sonic environment through the reinstatement and recontextualization of earlier materials. This positions the film as a form of musical historiography: the score curates and stabilizes its own past, highlighting moments central to the franchise’s musical identity. Considered alongside broader theories of musical borrowing, this practice suggests that self-quotation in franchise cinema functions not only as reference but also as a means of shaping the franchise’s musical memory. The selective revival of particular cues—especially from The Last Crusade—reveals an internal logic through which the series structures its musical past, providing a context for observing processes of musical memory and historical positioning in practice.

Although Fantasia (1940) predates Disney’s deliberate entrance onto the education market, its didacticism and efforts toward representational accuracy have been observed as characteristics of Disney’s edutainment (Van Riper 2011): an ideological intervention selling together education, entertainment, and “a particular view of citizenship, culture, and society” (Giroux 2010). For example, the “Meet the Soundtrack” scene anthropomorphizes the soundwave to teach symphonic timbres and judgments of tone quality based on some implicit standards. Yet it flexibly construes a representational logic, only loosely imitating the physical properties of a soundwave. As I see it, the scene distorts empirical knowledge to better convey its aesthetic politic: to synonymize a Westernized or Europeanized ear with a virtuous civility, a learned taste for the “fine and beautiful” that Walt Disney later noted as a defining characteristic of US American culture (Watts 1995). The broader intervention of my project, then, is to examine how the Disney empire manipulates affordances of music and fantasy to “colonize the [Americanist] imagination” (Cypher and Higgs 1997) and marshal codes of conduct.

I begin with an analysis of the scene scored by Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite as its musical manipulations problematize a facile distinction between fantasy and reality. I demonstrate how Stokowski’s rescoring and Fantasound sound-panning activate an imaginative audiation process based on tonal schemas to yield an intermediary phenomenon between the sounding and not-sounding. I then contrast this fantasy aurality with the jazz interlude, the only musical evocation of America that is singularly recorded without fantastic interventions in sound engineering or animation. The scene is choreographed as a live performance, a keen if uncanny display of white bliss where orchestral musicians disrupt stage etiquette with impunity. Figured by screen authorities MC Deems Taylor and conductor Leopold Stokowski, white America appears real and powerful while all other scenes blur into a postmodernist collage of vague alterities, enchanted myths, and phantom auralities. Fantasia arguably entrains a tonal ear and appreciation for the symphonic canon while hailing America as a cultural authority with curatorial, directorial, and pedagogical jurisdiction. Ultimately, I conclude that the film determines a musical civility for a global audience by administering fantasies.

Few moments in Star Wars have sparked as much confusion and outrage as the kiss between Rey and Kylo Ren in The Rise of Skywalker (2019). The potential romance between Rey and Kylo Ren—dubbed “Reylo” by supporters—sparked major fan debate, with opponents countering by coining the term “Reyno.” Central to this rift is John Williams’s music for the saga. As I demonstrate, Williams’s scores throughout the saga have represented romance with a distinct musical language, but his music for this kiss was entirely different. The music for love (eros) in the original and prequel trilogies is rather straightforward accompanying more typical couplings of Han and Leia and Padmé and Anakin. However, the sequel trilogy leans more heavily into sentimentality and nostalgia than the first six films ever did. Because of this, other types of love are brought forward: familial love (storge) and platonic love (philia), among others. The "Reylo" kiss is therefore an excellent case study into how various types of love can be scored simultaneously.

My analysis will center around the newly emerging discourse on the Love topic in film. Despite the extensive use of the Love topic throughout western art music, concrete research on its characteristics is lacking. Three publications from the last fifteen years have attempted to rectify this gap within film: Rebecca Fülöp’s dissertation (2012), Daniel Obluda’s dissertation (2021), and most recently, Tom Schneller and Táhirih Motazedian’s article, “Tugging at Heartstrings: Bittersweet Harmonies in the Classic Hollywood Love Theme.” Through this analysis I will introduce several new subsets of the Love topic, expanding it from its roots in eros to encompass many other types of love. By situating the “Reylo” kiss within William’s broader musical language for love, I argue that the cue destabilizes conventional markers of cinematic eros and instead blends romantic, familial, and sacrificial signifiers. In doing so, it expands the expressive scope of the Love topic in film and offers a more nuanced framework for understanding how multiple forms of love can be scored simultaneously.