Building Worlds: Timbre in Music for Cinema and Tonbilder: Suite for Instrumental Ensembles & Visuals

Film composers devote considerable time and energy building a timbral lexicon or“soundworld” for every project. In fact, timbre is the foremost concern throughout the compositional process for many film composers, often superseding pitch structure (e.g theme, harmony, tonal goals). Historically, this emphasis on timbre over pitch structure comes from a practical place — complex pitch structures need time to develop independently, and thus compete with the dramatic action of a film, whereas tone color alone can provide immediate dramatic accompaniment. Many analyses of film music prioritize the development of theme and its adjacent pitch structures over timbre; the analyses in this dissertation flip these priorities. Through close readings of works by John Williams, Ennio Morricone, and Sergei Prokofiev, I focus on the soundworld of film scores when I analyze them, like film composers do when they compose them. I use several timbral analysis methods to achieve this focus, including the traditional study of orchestration, musical gesture analysis, embodied cognition research, and acousmatic music theory