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kateI saw Star Trek for the second time today and loved it just as much as I loved it the first time.
I still feel that while the soundtrack was good, it was not particularly Star Trekkian, and as I napped this afternoon I became conflicted about whether that made the composer faily, or the screenwriters a little bit clueless.
You see, here's the thing.
The theme to Star Trek, all Star Treks with the exception of Enterprise, is quartal. What that means is that it uses fourths as the main interval of its melodic and harmonic structure.
The typical interval of non-contemporary classical music - and indeed even current popular music - is the third. Chords are made of thirds, and by moving from chord to chord, it means that the underlying harmonic structure is made of thirds (even if they move in fourths, which is common). This means there is an inherent power structure in music (because there are Major ('happy') and minor ('sad') thirds), strong and weak chords that do everything from create tension to show you a path home. It is this power structure that creates that indefinable sense of longing or sadness or heroicism. It is this structure that makes emotion possible in music. There are other things, of course, rhythm and timbre and orchestration, and sometimes they are the main thrust behind an emotion (or movement - rhythm is excellent at depicting the sea - and that lecture (about the difference between and yet brilliance of the soundtracks to Pirates of the Caribbean and Master and Commander) is for another time), but mostly, it's the internal chord structure that drives our emotion in soundtrack music.
Now, knowing that, what quartal music does is fight that structure. Quartal music is about freedom and equality (because fourths and fifths are Perfect, not Major or minor), about open spaces and discovery. It's about going where no one has gone before. Let me start with another composer of quartal music - Aaron Copland. The famous Copland pieces, the ones that really say 'this is American music' are quartal. They are about that sense of freedom and adventure. Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Appalachian Spring - most especially Fanfare for the Common Man. These pieces conjure up the American frontier, the sense of going into the unknown to see what's there.
Now, with RaceFail 2.0 ongoing, I have to add a caveat here that the sense of discovery and adventure inherent in Copland's Americana is totally missing the pain and frustration of the people who already lived in that 'virgin land' that they thought they were the first to go to. I'm not saying the act of expansion was right or good. I am saying, however, that a certain attitude, one that is often considered valiant and heroic, is what Copland's music captured brilliantly. It may have been that Copland did not understand how that sense of adventure and discovery came with such a high human cost. I doubt that he was aware (as so many of us were ignorant of the connection between the lauded frontierspeople and the native people that they killed or displaced).
That said, the sense of discovery and adventure was what Copland captured beautifully. And I'm absolutely 100% certain that both Gene Roddenberry and the composer of the original Star Trek theme (Alexander Courage) knew about Copland's music and emulated it for the emotions it conveyed. The quartal opening conveys awe and wonder at the spoken words space - the final frontier. The opening 'tinkly' notes are quartal, the first interval being a downward fourth. It's not all fourths (that's not necessarily what makes something quartal anyway) but the fourth is the dominant interval and the opening clearly conveys the sense of openness, freedom, adventure, and discovery that's the main mission of this ship. The horn theme is the most obvious quartal part of the theme, two fourths in close succession, moving on to a totally quartal fanfare theme. This is the part of the theme that we so recognize.
That's the part of the theme that Jerry Goldsmith copies note for note in the Next Generation theme. Goldsmith's theme is more technically quartal once it gets past the fanfare (Courage's theme is slightly less quartal once it gets to the wordless vocals, though it still has some sense of openness within the more linear structure), in that it uses more fourths, but it's not truly quartal - it's still tertiary, but with the fourths more prominent in the structure.
Deep Space Nine's theme (by Dennis McCarthy and Jay Chattaway) doesn't include that famous quartal fanfare, but it does open with a quartal line in the horns, clearly reminiscent of the Star Trek themes that came before it, and remains definitively quartal throughout - a first for the Star Trek franchise. It is broad and wide - it uses a huge range, keeping the quartal harmonies intact by using the distance inherent in leaping fourths. Quartal music suits brass quite well, and this theme is entirely a brass fanfare.
The theme to Voyager by Jay Chattaway does more than reminisce about the original Star Trek quartal fanfare - it inverts the theme. Not exactly, but in shape (and if I had time to analyze more closely, I'm betting in interval too, though I'm going on my rusty ear here). The Voyager theme is interesting in that it too is entirely quartal - but a very different kind of quartal than DS9. This type of quartal harmony takes a series of fourths (which if played in order, would be several octaves) and puts the notes next to each other, supported by a quartal chord structure underneath. What this does is remove the space and openness - keeping a sense of the unusual harmonies of the fourths, but allowing more linear melodies. This means that you lose a bit of that openness but gain more emotion - the condensed structure works more like a tertiary harmonic structure.
Okay, that's a history of quartal music within the Star Trek franchise.
Quartal harmonic structure - any semblance of it - is what's missing from the most recent Star Trek movie soundtrack. There is no openness, no awe, no wonder, no sense that they are discovering anything or going boldly where no one has gone before.
At first, I thought it was a failing of the composer (Michael Giacchino). That while he wrote an exceptionally beautiful score, and one that enhanced the movie wonderfully, he missed one of the main philosophical points of Star Trek theme music.
Now, I don't think it was his failing at all. Indeed, since the movie itself was an AU, there's the sense that this movie is entirely new, so perhaps ignoring quartal music was a conscious decision. I disagree if that was Giacchino's reasoning. The movie still owes its entire existence to TOS, so the music shouldn't have shunned it entirely.
However, as far as I can tell, the movie in no way espoused that particular philosophy. There was no frontier-exploring. There was no adventure, there was no sense that they were going where no one had gone before. Indeed, they didn't go where no one had gone before. If that's the reason Giacchino left out quartal music... then I think he may be a genius.
This is not a criticism of the movie. I liked it - it had adventure and character building and drama and shiny digital effects and all kinds of things that I enjoyed immensely. It didn't, however, give me a sense of wonder or awe at the concept of the federation, the kernel that was (as far as I know - and I'm not really a Star Trek fan, so if I'm wrong, feel free to correct me) the basis of the show's idealogical premise. I don't think the movie was lacking for it - much - but the fact that the composer understood that and mirrored it in the soundtrack? Genius.
I still feel that while the soundtrack was good, it was not particularly Star Trekkian, and as I napped this afternoon I became conflicted about whether that made the composer faily, or the screenwriters a little bit clueless.
You see, here's the thing.
The theme to Star Trek, all Star Treks with the exception of Enterprise, is quartal. What that means is that it uses fourths as the main interval of its melodic and harmonic structure.
The typical interval of non-contemporary classical music - and indeed even current popular music - is the third. Chords are made of thirds, and by moving from chord to chord, it means that the underlying harmonic structure is made of thirds (even if they move in fourths, which is common). This means there is an inherent power structure in music (because there are Major ('happy') and minor ('sad') thirds), strong and weak chords that do everything from create tension to show you a path home. It is this power structure that creates that indefinable sense of longing or sadness or heroicism. It is this structure that makes emotion possible in music. There are other things, of course, rhythm and timbre and orchestration, and sometimes they are the main thrust behind an emotion (or movement - rhythm is excellent at depicting the sea - and that lecture (about the difference between and yet brilliance of the soundtracks to Pirates of the Caribbean and Master and Commander) is for another time), but mostly, it's the internal chord structure that drives our emotion in soundtrack music.
Now, knowing that, what quartal music does is fight that structure. Quartal music is about freedom and equality (because fourths and fifths are Perfect, not Major or minor), about open spaces and discovery. It's about going where no one has gone before. Let me start with another composer of quartal music - Aaron Copland. The famous Copland pieces, the ones that really say 'this is American music' are quartal. They are about that sense of freedom and adventure. Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Appalachian Spring - most especially Fanfare for the Common Man. These pieces conjure up the American frontier, the sense of going into the unknown to see what's there.
Now, with RaceFail 2.0 ongoing, I have to add a caveat here that the sense of discovery and adventure inherent in Copland's Americana is totally missing the pain and frustration of the people who already lived in that 'virgin land' that they thought they were the first to go to. I'm not saying the act of expansion was right or good. I am saying, however, that a certain attitude, one that is often considered valiant and heroic, is what Copland's music captured brilliantly. It may have been that Copland did not understand how that sense of adventure and discovery came with such a high human cost. I doubt that he was aware (as so many of us were ignorant of the connection between the lauded frontierspeople and the native people that they killed or displaced).
That said, the sense of discovery and adventure was what Copland captured beautifully. And I'm absolutely 100% certain that both Gene Roddenberry and the composer of the original Star Trek theme (Alexander Courage) knew about Copland's music and emulated it for the emotions it conveyed. The quartal opening conveys awe and wonder at the spoken words space - the final frontier. The opening 'tinkly' notes are quartal, the first interval being a downward fourth. It's not all fourths (that's not necessarily what makes something quartal anyway) but the fourth is the dominant interval and the opening clearly conveys the sense of openness, freedom, adventure, and discovery that's the main mission of this ship. The horn theme is the most obvious quartal part of the theme, two fourths in close succession, moving on to a totally quartal fanfare theme. This is the part of the theme that we so recognize.
That's the part of the theme that Jerry Goldsmith copies note for note in the Next Generation theme. Goldsmith's theme is more technically quartal once it gets past the fanfare (Courage's theme is slightly less quartal once it gets to the wordless vocals, though it still has some sense of openness within the more linear structure), in that it uses more fourths, but it's not truly quartal - it's still tertiary, but with the fourths more prominent in the structure.
Deep Space Nine's theme (by Dennis McCarthy and Jay Chattaway) doesn't include that famous quartal fanfare, but it does open with a quartal line in the horns, clearly reminiscent of the Star Trek themes that came before it, and remains definitively quartal throughout - a first for the Star Trek franchise. It is broad and wide - it uses a huge range, keeping the quartal harmonies intact by using the distance inherent in leaping fourths. Quartal music suits brass quite well, and this theme is entirely a brass fanfare.
The theme to Voyager by Jay Chattaway does more than reminisce about the original Star Trek quartal fanfare - it inverts the theme. Not exactly, but in shape (and if I had time to analyze more closely, I'm betting in interval too, though I'm going on my rusty ear here). The Voyager theme is interesting in that it too is entirely quartal - but a very different kind of quartal than DS9. This type of quartal harmony takes a series of fourths (which if played in order, would be several octaves) and puts the notes next to each other, supported by a quartal chord structure underneath. What this does is remove the space and openness - keeping a sense of the unusual harmonies of the fourths, but allowing more linear melodies. This means that you lose a bit of that openness but gain more emotion - the condensed structure works more like a tertiary harmonic structure.
Okay, that's a history of quartal music within the Star Trek franchise.
Quartal harmonic structure - any semblance of it - is what's missing from the most recent Star Trek movie soundtrack. There is no openness, no awe, no wonder, no sense that they are discovering anything or going boldly where no one has gone before.
At first, I thought it was a failing of the composer (Michael Giacchino). That while he wrote an exceptionally beautiful score, and one that enhanced the movie wonderfully, he missed one of the main philosophical points of Star Trek theme music.
Now, I don't think it was his failing at all. Indeed, since the movie itself was an AU, there's the sense that this movie is entirely new, so perhaps ignoring quartal music was a conscious decision. I disagree if that was Giacchino's reasoning. The movie still owes its entire existence to TOS, so the music shouldn't have shunned it entirely.
However, as far as I can tell, the movie in no way espoused that particular philosophy. There was no frontier-exploring. There was no adventure, there was no sense that they were going where no one had gone before. Indeed, they didn't go where no one had gone before. If that's the reason Giacchino left out quartal music... then I think he may be a genius.
This is not a criticism of the movie. I liked it - it had adventure and character building and drama and shiny digital effects and all kinds of things that I enjoyed immensely. It didn't, however, give me a sense of wonder or awe at the concept of the federation, the kernel that was (as far as I know - and I'm not really a Star Trek fan, so if I'm wrong, feel free to correct me) the basis of the show's idealogical premise. I don't think the movie was lacking for it - much - but the fact that the composer understood that and mirrored it in the soundtrack? Genius.
For easy organization later:
no subject
on 5/23/09 02:12 am (UTC)(Now I need to go play with our Star Trek sheet music and see if I can feel what you're describing.)
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on 5/26/09 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
on 5/23/09 02:24 am (UTC)no subject
on 5/26/09 02:05 am (UTC)no subject
on 5/23/09 04:25 am (UTC)I read somewhere that a TV series with the new cast is under consideration - if it happens, I will be very curious to hear the theme music.
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on 5/26/09 02:06 am (UTC)no subject
on 5/23/09 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
on 5/26/09 02:06 am (UTC)Glad to help!
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on 5/29/09 07:28 pm (UTC)I think I may be in the minority here, but I *love* the soundtrack; I love that it echoes bits and pieces of Star Trek, but that it wasn't the same, kind of like the universe itself.
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on 5/29/09 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
on 5/30/09 12:32 am (UTC)no subject
on 5/30/09 12:46 am (UTC)I think I'm on for tomorrow - where are you guys meeting up? (
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on 5/30/09 12:47 am (UTC)no subject
on 5/30/09 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
on 5/29/09 09:32 pm (UTC)(Also, wow I'm glad my officemate has gone home and I don't have to explain why I've been sitting here humming for five minutes.)
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on 5/30/09 12:47 am (UTC)Meh - what's a little humming between officemates? ;)
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on 5/30/09 12:04 am (UTC)no subject
on 5/30/09 12:54 am (UTC)no subject
on 5/30/09 01:22 am (UTC)Chalk me as another person who likes the new soundtrack. I think the end theme is one of the best versions of the Alexander Courage theme I've heard.
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on 5/30/09 01:41 am (UTC)no subject
on 5/30/09 01:26 am (UTC)I really think there was a lot of subtle stuff like that. They did something similar with the design of the Kelvin, by flipping the traditional design of all Trek ships 90º.
(but now I have the Voyager theme stuck in my head, dammit.)
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on 5/30/09 01:42 am (UTC)I'm glad this rambling made sense to other people!
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on 5/30/09 06:51 am (UTC)I completely agree about the film bypassing the frontier mythos (and all themes associated therewith) which so saturated previous canons. I don't think that's a bad thing - I find Hollywood's vague drift away from Westerns stronger at the moment and an interesting phenomenon, since the relationship between US creators/audiences and the Western mythos is a strong indicator of it's overall dominant paradigms - but I'd also argue that they went way backwards in source material, going straight from the age-old three-arc hero destiny story, which Giacchino's pretty good at composing for (the Incredibles, Speed Racer, etc).
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on 5/30/09 01:43 pm (UTC)I agree about this being a hero destiny story (not actually my favorite), and also that Giacchino is brilliant at writing for it. He did make clear that this was new and also that it was space (a sense of moving the key away from 'home').
It's not the expansionism that I miss about Trek, actually. It's the TNG (sorry - I'm not a TOS fan, so I can't speak to that!) policy of diplomacy first, and to the last possible option (the Prime Directive, yay!). It was that particular attitude about going out and finding out what's out there that I really loved and felt so new to me when I was first watching the series. I missed that here. I felt entitlement, and 'righteous' anger and no real attempts at diplomacy at all. There's also a certain vigilanteism in media today that makes me uncomfortable. I don't think any of us should take it upon ourselves to wreak vengeance, I really don't.
Okay, what? I really didn't think I had that much to say about the subject. *boggles*
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on 5/30/09 09:39 pm (UTC)I think the one thing that can be said about this film was that it tried to set everything up as ~*~*Exceptional Circumstances*~*~ within its own universe as validation for the vigilantism, what with the time travel and Nero's level of potential destruction and the mass death of all the other ships before the Enterprise got to Vulcan, and so on and so forth. And the characters were constructed as being thoroughly exceptional themselves - they're genius level, all of them, and the only thing we're led to believe is their possible flaws in terms of their work is their lack of experience. So they're kind of like implicit superheroes within their own universe, only without the webswinging or the supersuit and such, a lot like Alias was.
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on 5/31/09 02:06 pm (UTC)And I very strongly agree that a critical element of the original series IS missing here -- reflected in the departure from the Copland-esque perfect/open fourths, as well as the more general idea that this is NOT your original "boldly go where no man has gone before" Trek. You are kinder to the movie than I have been -- I think the movie fails on several levels, although I chalk up at least a portion of that to my own preconceptions, esp. of Kirk as mythic hero (this Kirk is a conniving thug, IMO, and although I can't paint a Kirk-prime portrait of a perfect guy by a long shot, he was likeable, which Kirk Redux most definitely is not) -- but this musical analysis makes a ton of sense.
And really -- in a somewhat shallower vein, mid-sixties composers were ripping off Copland right and left, you know? Specifically for Westerns, for any sort of storyline that was expansionist, settler-ish, that spoke of that open prairie sort of mythic place-type. It is the most distinctively "American" sort of music I can think of (at least in a classical vein), and both as a product of its time AND as a political commentary -- Trek after all was created during the original race for space, competitive, imaginative, fraught -- it is a very natural fit.
I have my own questions about a composer being able to flip seamlessly from Incredibles -- for which I believe Giacchino did a spectacularly successful retro soundtrack -- to Trek, which has a long tradition of serious orchestral music. It sorta boils down to "Trek Music: Ur Doin It Wrong." *grin*
Thank you for this! (And how delightful is it that you posted about music theory? I was one of those folks who pissed people off as an undergraduate by LIKING my theory classes -- and fell in love with it as a grad student. Yay theory!!)
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on 6/3/09 01:18 am (UTC)I'm not a TOS fan (and I kind of particularly dislike Kirk, from the couple of eps I've seen) so it's no surprise I was kinder to the movie than you were. Different cups of tea and all.
I'm on the fence about whether or not Giacchino chose not to use quartal harmonies on purpose. There's a case to be made that he just went with what he knew, but there's also a case to be made that he looked at the movie, saw what was missing, and then decided to take that out of his soundtrack. And I like to think that's what happened, because that would make him a soundtrack genius, and there's really not that many of them out there. (He's pretty well on his way, honestly, he had a firm grip on the instrumentation and theme and motive, which can be sadly lacking in soundtracks.)
I love theory too, always have, so I'm pleased as punch to put it to good use.
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on 6/1/09 09:18 pm (UTC)no subject
on 6/3/09 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
on 6/1/09 10:56 pm (UTC)no subject
on 6/3/09 01:22 am (UTC)Thank you! I'm pleased I could put my music theory to good use.
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on 6/2/09 02:07 pm (UTC)That's the part of the theme that Jerry Goldsmith copies note for note in the Next Generation theme
I'm going to be a geek here - he wrote this theme for "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" (and it was later reused). So at the time, he was definitely emulating the sound of TOS on purpose, rather than trying to make it slightly different for the new series.
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on 6/3/09 01:32 am (UTC)According to imdb, Alexander Courage wrote the theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (I thought I had checked that before I posted, but I checked again just to be sure). Unless I am misunderstanding what you're saying (entirely possible).
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on 6/6/09 01:09 pm (UTC)I saw it again last night and realised that the 'classic' Trek music occurs only right at the start (before the first scene), before it morphs into the new.
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on 6/3/09 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
on 6/3/09 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
on 6/6/09 01:39 pm (UTC)Now I absolutely LOVE this soundtrack, and because my previous Star Trek experience is limited to the movies and a few scattered TNG episodes (Post ST:2009 it has exploded ... O.o) I can't claim to have noticed something missing.
But I can tell you what I did notice, that I found very interesting in an 'exploring new frontiers' sort of way;
The main theme is not rhythmically rigid. From the very beginning it starts with very weighted thirds, and it took me until my third viewing of the movie to figure that out; it's very subtle.
Then in Hella Bar Talk it returns as straight duples. The duples are repeated again, very decisively, in Enterprising Young Men. However, later on *in the same track* (1:38 in) they return as triples, repeated as triples, then back to duples in the dual-theme section (1:57 in).
I have to go to work now, so I can't go through the rest of the soundtrack, but this switch from triples to duples and back occurs regularly throughout the soundtrack.
Perhaps Giacchino was trying to accomplish through rhythm what the others had accomplished through chordal structure?
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on 6/7/09 10:20 am (UTC)Quartal harmonic structure - any semblance of it - is what's missing from the most recent Star Trek movie soundtrack. There is no openness, no awe, no wonder, no sense that they are discovering anything or going boldly where no one has gone before.
Without necessarily trying to attribute more to Giacchino than he perhaps deserves, I would agree that in Trek XI, they did absolutely no discovering, no boldly going, and that was rather the point. Three fourths of the story is about playing catch-up to a universe inarguably altered, and rather than seeing these characters in the middle of their five-year exploratory mission, we're seeing them thrust too-young into a situation that only their ability and skill makes them survive.
I think the intimacy that is created by the repetitive percussion, the utilization of the low brass section (as opposed to the love affair with solo trumpet that defined so many Star Trek themes/music) works both to provide the atmosphere of struggle and the audience's knowledge that we are watching a different--perhaps harder and darker--universe, while maintaining the optimistic notes of the generation of a historical crew through the constantly-repeated "friendship" theme that's always just shy of fanfare.
It makes "End Credits" both welcome in its use of Courage and Goldsmith's themes, but also pointedly out of place and thus appropriately played at the end. We've just been told, throughout the entire film, that this is not the same universe, that the same things won't inevitably happen; but at the same time, the origin of this universe is predicated on the existence of the original one, and there is also the promise of adventure once these cadets are truly commissioned as crew of the Enterprise.
So...I think it plays perfectly as a reflection of the themes of the movie, and that to utilize the quartal themes that draw on the openess, curiosity, and wonder so integral to the original premise. The film's intention is unquestionably to provide a basis for restarting these adventures, and in every sense they have pulled apart this new universe from the old; it seems only right that the music would reflect this too.
Anyway, thanks for the food for thought. Have you seen the tracklist for the soundtrack? How cheeky, those titles! Also, how short an OST. It's not even an hour! They cut out so much of it.
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on 6/7/09 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
on 6/10/09 02:13 am (UTC)Thank you SO MUCH for posting this. I really hope you are correct about MG's brilliance (is there a way to ask him? I get the feeling that Jaybrams would be interested!), but even if you're not, fans can wank almost anything. :)
Very well done.
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on 6/14/09 09:30 pm (UTC)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUHyFwLv-fs
Enjoy.
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on 6/18/09 06:15 pm (UTC)Thanks for writing this!
(aolian on LJ)
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on 6/21/09 04:40 pm (UTC)I'm currently at music school (where I'm not a music major, but EVERYONE I KNOW is), and so the first thing that struck me about the new movie's score was how...unmemorable it was. I literally can't remember a single line from it, and I usually walk out of theatres humming. So I'm assuming that it was Typical Action Movie Score, which is kind of unfortunate.
I did read somewhere (I can't remember where, sorry) that the composer had been asked to stay away from the TOS theme, explicitly if not stylistically. I'm not sure what the decision-makers in that scenario thought they were accomplishing by that, but apparently it upset the fans enough that the next movie's music will be closer to the older ST scores.
My one gripe with the new movie is the lack of "OMG, space is big!" feeling that TOS was so suffused with. I'm kind of glad the score didn't try to reflect that (since it WASN'T THERE) but I'm hoping that future movies go back to the theme of exploration.
The 4ths, of course!!!
on 8/27/09 04:10 pm (UTC)I agree with your thesis. The future will be heralded by expansive sounds, by heavenly music!
Thank you.
Whoops
on 8/27/09 04:14 pm (UTC)Sorry, I meant Kate! Thank you again!