Film Score Analysis

In this course you’ll examine the role of music in visual storytelling, explore how film composers establish and use an effective musical vocabulary, and learn to see films through the lens of a filmmaker. Analysis in this course emphasizes thematic and textural development and other musical elements that contribute to the overall narrative of the picture. You will learn how to utilize different dimensions of music—such as tempo, rhythm, timbre, harmonic language, and melodic contour— to support film in specific ways: expressing the film’s narrative structure, the characters’ transformation, the world of the film, the characters’ inner life, and more. We’ll also investigate how musical choices reflect the filmmakers’ visual choices in the making of their movie: shot angles, color palette, editing, and more. Each week during the first half of the semester, the course will cover one dimension of music and how it relates to the film and the story. During the second half of the term, we will deeply explores the music of one film each week.

This course will not only help you become a more effective film composer, but a more effective dramatist. This course will cover textural and electronic scores, in addition to traditional scores, and will emphasize a variety of genres and a diverse set of filmmakers and composers.

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

Explain how film composers establish a particular sound for a film
Demonstrate how a film composer’s musical choices support storytelling in film
Recognize recurring themes and understand theme transformation in film music
Analyze non-thematic film scores
Articulate a general breadth of knowledge in film

Syllabus

Lesson 1 Themes and Thematic Transformation

Lesson 2 Harmony in Film Music, Part 1

Lesson 3 Harmony in Film Music, Part 2

Lesson 4 Tempo, Pulse, Rhythm, and Harmonic Rhythm in Film Music

Lesson 5 Instrumentation and Genre in Film Music

Lesson 6 Spotting and Cue Anatomy

Lesson 7 Gone with the Wind

Lesson 8 Psycho

Lesson 9 Patton

Lesson 10 Joy Luck Club

Lesson 11 Road to Perdition

Lesson 12 BlacKkKlansman

Requirements

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