We're up to GOD HELP THE OUTCASTS! What a fabulous song. I'd like to share some thoughts on what makes this song sound so penitential and prayer-like.
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Here are three things that contribute to its prayerful atmosphere:
1. plagal cadences (IV-I)
2. recitative-style in the verses
3. descending lament in the chorus

Generally, tonal music uses V-I cadences. These are called "authentic cadences." But church hymns often conclude with a IV-I cadence over the final word "amen." This is known casually as an "amen cadence," and formally as a "plagal cadence."
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Sure enough, "God Save the Outcasts" ends with a powerful series of "amen cadences":

But we don't have to wait until the end of the song to hear these "amens."
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The very first measure of the song is a IV chord, resolving to I in measure 2:

I've used some colors to highlight rhythmic phrases that do repeat. Notice how all the blue measures have the same rhythm, and all the green measures have the same rhythm. But also notice how none of the blue measures are exactly the same note-wise, nor are any of the green measures. The repetitive rhythms keep us grounded, while the pitches are leading all over the place.

But wait, it gets better.

Compare measures 1-2 with mm. 9-10, which, melodically, are almost identical. The harmonies are totally different!

Same with mm. 5-6 and 13-14. The notes are almost all the same, but the harmonies are completely different.

Again, there are some elements that repeat to keep us grounded, but around those few stable pieces, everything else is constantly changing. This gives the music a very introspective and improvisatory feel: just as Esmerelda is spinning out her prayerful thoughts in real-time, so, too, is she spinning out her music.

Finally, there's the shape of the famous chorus. It's basically just a descending scale. The measures I've colored pink drop almost a complete octave - 1 7 6 5 4 3 2 - but stopping just before the 1, delaying that sense of completion. Then, in green, the melody jumps back up to 5 and tries its descent to 1 again... and as before, that resolution to 1 is delayed, as the melody begins again at 5 and descends, with an arpeggio, down to the 5 an octave lower:

​So there are two elements at play here.

First, there's the descending melody which is a common signifier of sadness (think of that poignant line from Aladdin, "would they see a poor boy? No siree...")

​Second, there's the evasion of resolution, getting almost all the way to 1, but not actually getting there, which I hear as a musical expression of Esmerelda feeling like her desires are never quite fulfilled, always just out of reach. In other words, perfect for a musical prayer.

And there you have it! Three elements that make this song sound prayerful: the plagal cadences; the non-repetitive melody/harmony; and the descending melody in the chorus.

Of course, there's SO much more we can say about this song. But let's pause here, and my next post will dive into the equally introspective "Heavens Light / Hellfire."

I hope you enjoyed this blog post - the seventh in a 12-part series about the Hunchback of Notre Dame soundtrack! The remaining parts will be posted weekly.
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If you'd like to support this blog, I invite you to to do so with a one-time or monthly donation at Ko-Fi.com/DisneyMusicTheory. Monthly subscribers get access to my teaching guides and sample assignments, as well as the deep spiritual satisfaction of supporting a blog about the music theory of Disney music! ❤️

Hello, fellow nerds!

I'm so excited to dive into the next song from Hunchback of Notre Dame: "Topsy Turvy."
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Let's do it!

This song introduces a new style that didn't show up in any of the previous songs. For lack of a better term, I call it the "Broadway Chorus" style. Imagine a huge chorus on a Broadway stage, with the guys holding canes and the girls wearing feathers, with colored smoke and huge brass fanfares, etc, etc... and imagine the bawdy, boisterous, super-enthusiastic music that goes along with it. That's what I'm talking about.

"Topsy Turvy" is full of this style, from the melody's 5-#5-6 undulations to the accompaniment's boom-chucks and walking bass lines to the sudden key and tempo changes and all those juicy IV - iv chord progressions. Kevin Lynch made a fabulous YouTube video analyzing 10 different musical theater clichés and nearly EVERY SINGLE ONE shows up prominently in this song:

1. Chord progressions that move from IV to iv
2. Augmented 5th chords, particularly as part of a 5-#5-6 melodic line
3. Walking bass lines
4. Boom chuck accompaniments
5. Chug chords (this is the only cliché I don't hear in "Topsy Turvy")
6. Sudden key changes
7. Double time
8. Sus chords
9. Big pull back
10. Hits on 2 and 4 + a button

Last but not least is the grotesque shouting of the crowd: "TOPSY TURVY!" These tone clusters – super dissonant bunches of notes sung at the same time – sound like a toddler randomly banging its fist on a piano. On one hand, the major dissonance shows how unruly the crowd is; on the other hand, the mechanical nature of their shouting (all together on quarter notes) shows their mob mentality.

Why did Alan Menken mix all these styles in this song?

It'd be so easy to just say, "he liked these styles, so why shouldn't he use them?"

And that'd be very lovely, but also very wrong. :-)
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Take a look at the image below, which shows a visual structure of the song. You can see when each style is being used:

Notice how each style is being used in a very different way.

The fanfare is used to demarcate major breaks in the music. It appears first at the very beginning, and then again before the "gypsy" music is introduced. Make sense; this is how fanfares typically are used. (Imagine blaring trumpets introducing a guest to a queen and king....).

The "gypsy" music comes as a surprise exactly in the middle of the song, a dramatic/climactic turning point when the crowd starts to get more violent. In the Western music tradition, this kind of music is often used as a way of building emotional/sexual tension. It's meant to be exotic; so instead of writing the whole song in this style (which would normalize it and lessen its exoticness), it's just used briefly in the middle for a sudden burst of emotional/sexual tension.

The "Broadway chorus" style is always paired with the grotesque shouting; together, they serve as the main "meat" of the song, setting up a stylistic norm against which the other styles sharply contrast.

See, this is why studying music theory is so important.

If you're just casually listening to the music, simply as music, simply as something pleasant to listen to, you miss so much of the storytelling. Sure, it's still fun and enjoyable. But it's like listening to a speech in a language you don't understand - you might enjoy the rhythm and the melodic ups and downs, but if you don't understand a single word that's being said, then all you're getting is the most superficial of superficial understandings.

By the same token, if all you're listening to are chord progressions (you know, the only thing anybody ever really talks about...), you're also missing out on the storytelling.

But if you can discern different musical styles, and understand their connotations, and listen to how they're interacting with each other, and ask why, why, why -- then everything just springs to life with so much meaning that you may never have even dreamed could be expressed through musical sounds.
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tl;dr - MUSIC IS MORE THAN JUST ENTERTAINMENT, AND MUSIC THEORY IS MORE THAN JUST CHORD PROGRESSIONS!

Hello, fellow nerds!

​Another week, another analysis of the Hunchback of Notre Dame soundtrack! :-)

"Out There" is a very cool song, for so many reasons, but it's not just cool: it's also very characteristic of this film score and plays an important role in the musical storytelling.

Like "Hellfire" (which we'll talk about in a few months), "Out There" is comprised of two sections – one sung by Frollo about the dangers of going outside, and the second sung by Quasimodo about his dreams of going outside. It shows how polar opposite they are, and yet, it also shows how they're obsessed with the same things.

In fact, it's not only this obsession with the outside world (whether avoidance or desire) that unifies Frollo and Quasimodo in this song. Their melodies are also very similar, both being based on the oscillating "bell-like" leit-motif that was foreshadowed in "Bells of Notre Dame."
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Frollo's solo:

As I've written in a previous post, the dialectical relationship between Frollo and Quasimodo is a major theme throughout the movie – in the plot, in the animation, in the dialogue, and yes, also in the music.
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In this post, I want to focus on the ways in which Menken's score differentiates between Frollo and Quasimodo as diametrically opposed in the two halves of this song.  I'll write about differences in orchestration, modes, and melodic intervals, though again, this is by no means intended to be comprehensive. There is SO much to say about this incredible song, so this will just be a little taste. :-)

Frollo's half of the song is very dark – dark in emotion, and also dark in terms of the bell tower's lack of sunlight. By contrast, Quasimodo's half of the song is very bright – full of dreams, full of joy, and basking in the sunlight of the outside world.

One of the ways this contrast is expressed in the music is through differences in orchestration.

There is a long, widespread musical tradition in the Western world, going back hundreds of years, that associates lower pitches with darkness and higher pitches with light (which is why Frollo's voice is much deeper than Quasimodo's).

In this light (pun intended), it's significant to note that during Frollo's half of the song, the orchestra is comprised almost entirely of low strings, brass, and woodwinds. Low-pitched cellos feature prominently. Even when the violins come in, they're playing very low in their registers.
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But as soon as Frollo's solo ends, the orchestration completely changes to a brighter sound, with sweeping, high-pitched violins and upwards-soaring horn calls. The orchestration throughout Quasimodo's half of the song is very high in pitch, symbolizing the brightness of the outside world, Quasimodo's dreams, and the purity of his soul.

It seems straight-forward enough: Frollo's half is predominantly in minor, while Quasimodo's half is largely in major. Minor = sad, and major = happy, right?

Well, major and minor aren't the only modes or scales one can use, and Menken loads Quasimodo's section with several other association-laden modes: Mixolydian b6 and Lydian.
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YouTuber Jake Lizzio has called the Mixolydian b6 scale "the wonder scale," because it's often used in popular music and film music to evoke feelings of wonder. It's exactly the same as the standard Mixolydian mode, but with scale degree 6 lowered by a half step:

But what makes this "Wonder Scale" so... wondrous?

How is this scale different from all other scales?
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As Lizzio explains in his YouTube video, the first half of the Mixolydian b6 scale is exactly the same as major, while the second half is exactly the same as minor. It's like if the happy major mode and the sad minor mode had a baby and exactly half of each parent mode's genes ended up in the baby. That baby would be the bittersweet Mixolydian b6 - "The Wonder Scale."

What's cool about this mode is that it has a major I chord but a minor IV chord. None of the other standard modes are like this. Not the major or the minor; not the Lydian, the Phrygian, or the regular Mixolydian. Not Aeolian, Ionian, Dorian, or Locrian. The Mixolydian b6 is totally unique among all of these modes by having a major I and minor IV.
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Quasimodo's half of "Out There" begins immediately in the key of C Mixolydian b6 ("the wonder scale"). His melody emphasizes the major-like lower scale degrees 1-5, while the accompaniment features the minor-like upper scale degrees 6 (Ab) and 7 (Bb), all over a C pedal in the bass:

Now, that Mixolydian b6 scale in the above example is fascinating, because it leads straight into a passage that uses a different mode: F Lydian.

The Lydian scale also has very wondrous, dreamy associations. I'll spare you the theoretical details (since I spent so much time already on the Mixolydian b6), but what's really important to know about Lydian are the following two points:

1. Unlike all other standard modes, Lydian has a major I chord AND a major II chord.
2. It has a tritone between 1 and 4, which, when resolving up to 5, presents a magical sort of harmonic resolution.

When Quasimodo expounds upon his dream – "out there among the millers and the weavers and their wives, through the roofs and gables I can see them" – both of these unique aspects of the Lydian mode are highlighted. The chords simply alternate between I and II (both major), back and forth, back and forth, while the melody emphasizes the #4 (B natural) over the orchestra's tonic drone.
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Altogether, this mixture of Lydian and Mixolydian b6, along with passages of Major, in Quasimodo's half of the song produces an atmosphere of dreaminess, hope, and wonder that contrasts sharply with Frollo's minor-key half of the song.

The last thing I want to write about is the contrast in musical intervals.

Frollo's half of the song features very narrow musical intervals. The melody tends to move either by step or by smallish intervals like 3rds and 4ths. This musically expresses the narrowness of Frollo's world-view, the crampiness of Quasimodo's living quarters, and a feeling of emotional suffocation.

On the other hand, Quasimodo's singing features very large intervals. Throughout the Disney tradition, large intervals are often used to represent hopes and dreams, from "When You Wish Upon a Star" to "Into the Unknown."
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But what's especially significant here isn't just the predominance of large intervals, but specifically the highlighting of 7ths on the words "out there." Menken similarly featured leaps of 7ths in the movie Newsies (1992), when Jack sings about his dreams of living in Santa Fe. Menken also used leaps of 7ths as a leit-motif in Beauty and the Beast (1991), representing the Beast's hope for love and redemption. (Hunchback of Notre Dame came out very soon after Newsies and Beauty and the Beast, in 1996). In Menken's musical style, 7ths represent dreams - in this case, Quasimodo's dreams of escaping the narrowness of life in the Bell Tower.

Hello, fellow nerds!

Hooray! It's here: the fourth post in my quest to analyze all the songs in "Hunchback of Notre Dame!"

Today's subject is the song "Bells of Notre Dame," and gosh, there's just SO much to say about it.

So. much.
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But I'm going to focus on just one particular aspect of it, which is how it introduces three musical leit-motifs that reappear throughout the score. These three melodies are fascinating because they're dialectical. That is, they are emotionally self-contradictory and provide a complex musical commentary on the movie's many themes: disability, justice, monstrosity, good, evil, the church, and so forth.

Glad you asked! A leit-motif is a musical pattern that recurs throughout a movie and is associated with a particular character, location, emotion, or idea. For example, think of the "Imperial Death March" that we always hear when Darth Vader enters a scene. Or that Jaws "baaaaaaaaaaa-DUM baaaaaaaaaaa-DUM" theme that signals the shark's approach. Even before these characters appear on screen, we know that they're about to do so, because we hear their leit-motifs.

But the interesting thing about leit-motifs is that, as film music scholar Frank Lehman has put it, they're "semantically imprecise, inconsistent, or changeable." They can change their form and meaning over the course of a film to show how a particular character is transforming. They can also represent multiple ideas at once, or shift from representing one emotion to representing another.

The following image shows an excerpt from the end of the song (mm. 255-267). This is the part where Frollo has been told that he must raise baby Quasimodo as his own child, as repentance for murdering the boy's mother (and nearly murdering the kid himself).
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As you can see, it's basically a string of short, contrasting melodic ideas, which I've numbered 1-3. 

These are some of the major leit-motifs that recur throughout the rest of the film, and here they are already, all clumped together, at the end of the introductory song.

I call them:

1. The "Out There" theme
2. The "Quasi-Frollo" theme
3. The "Cathedral" theme

The Cathedral Theme appears countless times throughout the movie in connection with Notre Dame and, more broadly, Christianity. For example, we hear it in the background music when Frollo tries to throw baby Quasimodo into a well outside the Cathedral, "sending this demon to Hell where it came from." We also hear it in the chorus of "Hellfire," when Frollo sings about his own soul descending into Hell. And we hear it, triumphant and joyful, when Clopin sings about "the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells of Notre Dame!"

What's interesting about this leit-motif is that it sometimes appears triumphant and glorious, while at other times it's demonic and tragic. In short: it's both good and evil.
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Here's a fabulous example: as shown in the image below, "Bells of Notre Dame" begins with a clear statement of the Cathedral Theme in minor, while the song ends with its re-statement in major. In this context, I hear it representing the cathedral itself, and specifically the bell towers. What's less clear to me, however, is the commentary that this is making: is the cathedral both good and evil? Uplifting and destructive? A sanctuary and a prison? Well, yes - all of this - as we discover over the course of the movie.

Every good hero has their nemesis. Luke Skywalker has Darth Vader. Harry Potter has Voldemort. Quasimodo has Frollo.

But sometimes, over the course of a story, we discover that the hero and the villain are far more alike than might at first appear. And not only that: their narratives are so intertwined that it is impossible to think of one without the other.

As Darth Vader reveals before his death: "Luke, I am your father."

As the prophecy in Harry Potter declares: "Neither can live while the other survives."

And as Clopin sings: "Who is the monster, and who is the man?

Quasimodo and Frollo are so fundamentally different from each other. Yet, strangely, they are also very similar, like two sides of a coin. They are both, in their own ways, monsters; and they are both, in their own ways, people. Their narratives are intertwined to such an extent that one cannot imagine Quasimodo's life without Frollo, and one cannot imagine Frollo's life without Quasimodo.

This dialectic is a major theme in the movie, developed not only in the dialogue, plot, and animation, but also in the music itself.
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Consider the leit-motif that I labeled "the Quasi-Frollo Theme" --

Imagine the sound of a clock tower striking midnight: "dong... dong... dong... dong..." It's monotonous. It's rigid. It's forceful. In between each stroke, there's this ominous silence that feels like holding one's breath.

That's the sound Alan Menken evoked at the very beginning of the movie, shown in the sheet music excerpt below. Check out those repeated whole note Ds in the bass clef! Every measure begins with a massive "dong": fortissimo, accented, extremely low-pitched, and marked "roughly, with force" (as if being struck by the bellringer).

"The Bells of Notre Dame" follows a long classical tradition of imitating bell sounds, stretching all the way back to the 17th century.  Bell imitations became especially popular during the 19th and 20th centuries among composers of virtuoso piano works, and to this day have inspired numerous pedagogical character pieces for young piano students. For example, here's a very short list of 20 classical works from the 17th-21st centuries, whose collective influence shines forth in Menken's bell-like music for Hunchback:​

• 1610 (ca.) - William Byrd, "The Bells" for harpsichord
• 1683 - Johann Paul von Westhoff, "Imitation of Bells" for unaccompanied violin
• 1685 - Nicolas Lebègue, "The Bells" for organ
• 1722 (ca.) - François Couperin, "The Bells at Cynthère" for harpischord
• 1851 - Franz Liszt, "The Bells of Geneva" for piano
• 1861 (ca.) - Charles-Valentin Alkan, "The Bells" for piano
• 1891 - Edvard Grieg, "Bell-Ringing" for piano
• 1895 (ca.) - Rita Strohl, "Christmas Bells" for piano
• 1904 - Maurice Ravel, "The Valley of Bells" for piano
• 1905 - Blanche Selva, "Bells in the Mist" for piano
• 1905 - Blanche Selva, "Bells in the Sun" for piano
• 1913 - Sergei Rachmaninov, "The Bells" for choral symphony
• 1934 - Francis Poulenc, "Nocturne No. 3: The Bells" for piano
• 1950s (ca.) - Margaret Bonds, "The Bells" for piano
• 1980 - Krassimir Toskov, "Bell Chime" for piano
• 1998 (ca.) - Dennis Alexander, "Bells of San Miguel" for piano
• 2001 (ca.) - Bernice Frost, "Evening Bell" for piano
• 2002 (ca.) - Mary Hauber, "Victory Bells" for piano
• 2003 (ca.) - Elvina Pearce, "Joyful Bells" for piano
• 2010s (ca.) - Jesper Hansen, "The Bells of Night" for piano

There are many things to say about Menken's imitation of bell sounds in this song. But in this introductory post, I'd like to share with you three of the techniques that he borrowed from the classical tradition.

As already mentioned, "The Bells of Notre Dame" begins with massive clock strokes in the orchestra: fortissimo, accented, extremely low-pitched, and marked "roughly, with force" (as if being struck by the bellringer).

Here are some classical works by Franz Liszt, Blanche Selva, and Maurice Ravel that use this same technique of repeating a single note multiple times, albeit with very different moods in mind:

Just as a bell swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, one of the most common ways that classical composers imitated bell sounds was by alternating back and forth between two notes a step apart.

Menken used this technique in the middle of "Bells of Notre Dame," for the instrumental transitions between vocal solos. Here are two examples in which 8th notes a half-step apart are repeated, one after the other, for four measures:

Especially interesting is how Menken wove this technique into his lilting vocal melodies, which don't alternate strictly between two notes, but are definitely "somewhere in that zone" (to quote a later Disney princess). For example, in the main theme of this song, look at just how many notes are either an A (in blue) or a step above/below A (in green)!

Again, Menken did not invent this technique of evoking bell sounds by alternating between two notes a step apart.

Another 17th-century example is Nicolas Lebègue's "Les Cloches" ("The Bells," ca. 1685) for organ. Not only does the soprano line rock between G and A, but the alto line rocks between E and F. So the effect is of two different bells swinging in unison:

And jumping ahead several centuries, Rachmaninov used this same technique to imitate the ringing of church bells for Easter in 1893, at the start of the 3rd movement from his Suite No. 1 for two pianos:

When classical composers wrote ostinatos that alternate between two notes a step apart, as in the above examples, one might imagine small bells. But other times, composers alternated between two notes a leap apart, giving an impression of larger bells.

A fascinating example from the 17th century is the blisteringly virtuosic third movement of Johann Paul von Westhoff's Violin Sonata No. 3 for unaccompanied violin (1683), subtitled "Imitazione delle campane" ("imitation of bells.") The first several measures contain rapid alternations between notes that are a fourth, fifth, sixth, and even seventh apart.

200 years later, Rachmaninov often wrote bell-like piano pieces with booming leaps in the left hand, such as this excerpt from his famous Prelude​ in G Minor, Op. 23 No. 5 (1903):

A less-known example, from Jacob Schaeffer's masterful Yiddish choral work, "Kirkhn Glokn" ("Church Bells," ca. 1930), combines all three of the above-mentioned techniques: the alto and bass alternate between two notes a fourth apart; the soprano alternates between two notes a step apart; and the tenors repeat a single tone.

So, too, does this passage from Alan Menken's "Bells of Notre Dame" utilize all three techniques:

Perhaps it's no surprise that the most obviously "bell-like" moments in "Bells of Notre Dame" don't copy the classical tradition exactly, but rather adjust it to Menken's own musical personality.

To see what I mean, let's do a thought experiment.

1. Begin with a two-bar ostinato. Put a repeating note in the bass (technique #1). Alan Menken likes thirds, so have the melody alternate between two notes a third apart (technique #3). For kicks, we'll add the lyrics: "bells, bells!" Here's what it looks and sounds like:

2. Alan Menken likes sequences. So, let's take that two-bar ostinato and turn it into a sequence. For dramatic effect, have the last step of the sequence go up a 3rd, rather than a 2nd:

3. Now let's add a dramatic ending. Open fifths are another classical technique for imitating bell sounds, so let's tack on two open fifths a fourth apart, ascending this time rather than descending. Then repeat those two measures a fourth higher. And there! We've got the end of "Bells of Notre Dame!"

And there you have it: a musical passage that is thoroughly Alan Menken, but draws on three different centuries-old classical techniques for imitating bell sounds (repeated notes, alternating thirds, and open fifths).

I hope you enjoyed this blog post - the third in a 12-part series about the Hunchback of Notre Dame soundtrack! The remaining parts will be posted weekly over the next few months.

​If you'd like to support this blog, I invite you to to do so with a one-time or monthly donation at Ko-Fi.com/DisneyMusicTheory. Monthly subscribers get access to my teaching guides and sample assignments, as well as the deep spiritual satisfaction of supporting a blog about the music theory of Disney music! ❤️

There's a fascinating story behind how the song "Olim," from Hunchback of Notre Dame, came to be.

Before the film was completed, it was determined that the now-famous song "God Help the Outcasts" was too dramatic and would need to be replaced. Thus, Menken and Schwartz created "Someday" to replace it. But that, too, was deemed too dramatic, so they decided to just stick with the original plan and use "God Help the Outcasts."
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But, as lyricist Stephen Schwartz explained in a published Q&A, "everybody liked 'Someday.'" So they preserved it in two ways. First, they turned it into a pop song for the closing credits. Second – and to the point of this blog post – they turned it into a Gregorian-style chant for the very opening of the film.

To wit: "Olim" takes its melody from the opening line of "Someday," and its text is a Latin translation of the latter's second verse:

"OLIM OLIM DEUS ACCELERE HOC SAECULUM SPLENDIDUM ACCELERE FIAT VENIRE OLIM"
"Someday, someday, God speed this bright millennium. Let it come someday."

In many ways, the melody from "Someday" lends itself to being reconstructed in a Gregorian style. Like Gregorian chant, it uses predominantly seconds and thirds, and the overall range is limited to one octave. Although the background harmony is rooted in major, the melody itself appears to be in Mixolydian, one of the more common modes used in Gregorian chants. This modal flavor is reinforced by the ascending third in the melodic cadence.

Perhaps most notable of all are the long, repeated notes that begin and end the tune. Menken took this opportunity to begin  and end "Olim" with a series of reciting tones, perhaps the most recognizable element of Gregorian-style chants. Every syllable of the opening words "Olim, olim deus" is on the note A, as are every syllable of the concluding words "fiat venire olim."

Nevertheless, it's important to recognize that "Someday" itself was not composed in the style of Gregorian chant, and so, as well, is "Olim" not entirely authentic. The sequential structure, for example, which is stylistically unsurprising for "Someday" is historically anachronistic for "Olim," as is the cadence that leaps from a third below the final. When I asked about this melody in the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society group on Facebook, someone further explained that although "the scale is pretty clearly Mixolydian, the melody does not behave like a medieval mode. [...] I don't see the typical structural pitches here that one would in the medieval Mixolydian--in this key, A, E, G, and D."
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But, as in most film music, the point here is not to be 100% authentic. The point is to create the illusion of being in a particular time, place, and mood. And given that Disney's target audience is NOT medieval music scholars, only a few very salient musical techniques are needed to create this illusion.

​I hope you enjoyed this blog post - the second in a 12-part series about the Hunchback of Notre Dame soundtrack! The remaining parts will be posted weekly over the next few months. If you'd like to support this blog, I invite you to to do so with a one-time or monthly donation at Ko-Fi.com/DisneyMusicTheory. Thanks so much!

Hello, fellow nerds!

Welcome to the VERY FIRST post in a 12-part series about the Hunchback of Notre Dame soundtrack!

And today’s post is about the VERY FIRST sounds we hear in this movie.

No, contrary to the track-list on the commercial CD, the first thing we hear is not, in fact, “The Bells of Notre Dame.”

Rather, it’s “Olim” – a monodic chant sung by a group of off-screen monks.... and in the history of Disney music, it's absolutely revolutionary.

You know how lots of Disney movies start with that iconic, animated castle, to the tune of “If You Wish Upon a Star?” Just as the castle is Disney’s visual logo, so, too, is “If You Wish Upon a Star” Disney’s audio logo. (Fun fact: this audio logo was orchestrated by Dave Metzger, who later orchestrated all of Frozen, Frozen 2, and Moana.)

​And until Hunchback (1996) and Pocahontas (1995) came along and changed things up, it was only after this audio-visual logo finished its course that a Disney film’s soundtrack would begin. 

But then, something changed.

In 1995, Disney released Pocahontas. Instead of "If You Wish Upon a Star," the castle logo was accompanied by drum beats, leading directly into the score's opening song:

Why is this so revolutionary? By the mid-1990s, audiences were so used to hearing the logo as separate from the film, that blending the logo with the film's soundtrack – or even preceding the logo with the film's soundtrack, as in the case of Hunchback – must have come as a big surprise. But it's more than just surprising. It immediately steeps us in the world of the film, destroying the Hollywood artifice of "here's the production company that brings you this show, and now that you've acknowledged us, here's the show." It's such a powerful technique that Disney continued to use it in many of its later movies. (The Incredibles and Frozen come immediately to mind, for instance.)

I hope you enjoyed this blog post - the first in a 12-part series about the Hunchback of Notre Dame soundtrack! The remaining parts will be posted weekly over the next few months. If you'd like to support this blog, I invite you to to do so with a one-time or monthly donation at Ko-Fi.com/DisneyMusicTheory. Thanks so much!

"Frozen" and "Moana" songbooks just arrived in the mail! Thanks to those of you who donated to my Ko-Fi page for giving me the money to buy these!

And now (because I said having these scores would help me help you, didn't I?), here is an awesome example of rhythmic diminution from "Let it Go."

The first two measures present a melody in 8th notes; the next two measures repeat the same melody in 16th notes.

You're welcome! (And thank you!)

​❤️

There are many reasons I dislike "interval reference songs."

And I may be unpopular for saying so: interval reference songs are one of the most popular ear training methods.

The concept is simple: if you want to remember what a minor 2nd sounds like, think of the Jaws theme. If you want to remember a perfect fourth, think: "Here comes the bride!" Perfect fifths? "Star wars!"

While this works to a certain extent, I have so many complaints about it.

But my biggest complaint is that they take musical intervals completely out of context.

Consider the examples in this excerpt from my four-page reference guide, "Teaching Musical Intervals Through Disney Music: A Source Sheet for Teachers."

​Example #1, from Snow White, begins with a perfect fourth. But it's not simply a perfect fourth: it's a cadential leap from the dominant to the tonic, energetically launching us into the beginning of the melody. This is the same opening gesture that music theory students learn when they associate "Here Comes the Bride" with perfect fourths.

But how different it is from Example #2!

Example #2 begins with this same opening gesture, a perfect fourth leaping from the dominant to the tonic. BUT, then it has another perfect fourth just a couple bars later: from 6 up to 2. Unlike the opening 5-1 gesture, which relieves tension, 6-2 increases tension. While 5-1 completes a cadence, 6-2 initiates a cadence. In short: while both are perfect fourths, they feel, mean, and sound very different.

Example #3 adds a descending 4th into the mix. But it's not simply a descending 4th. It descends from 5 to 2, from the dominant to........... just quite NOT the tonic. It delays resolution. In a sense, it's exactly the opposite of "Here Comes the Bride," which resolves tension by moving from the dominant up to the tonic. Here, the dominant, moving downwards, is stopping just short of the tonic.

So why don't I like interval reference songs?

The truth is, I do agree that they can be very useful...... but we need to learn how to use them in context. If a student is in the middle of a dictation exercise, and they encounter a perfect fourth from 6 up to 2, then thinking about "Here Comes the Bride" is just as likely to confuse them as it is to help. And if it does help, the student is likely to lose their sense of the melody as a whole, requiring the teacher to replay it for them.

But what if we conceptualized interval reference songs differently?

What if, instead of learning a song to pair with "perfect fourths," we learned a song to pair with "the perfect fourth from 5 up to 1?" And a different song to pair with "the perfect fourth from 6 up to 2," and yet another for "the perfect fourth from 5 down to 2?"

"Here Comes the Bride" is a GREAT reference for perfect fourths when they're used as an opening gesture from 5 up to 1.

Example #3, from Moana, is a GREAT reference for perfect fourths when they're used as a teasing gesture from 5 down to 2.

Examples #2 and #4 are GREAT references for perfect fourths in sequential contexts.

Using interval reference songs in this way requires, in some sense, a paradigm shift in how we think about musical intervals.

Instead of treating them as isolated sounds – this note to that note – we should treat them as musical gestures that serve particular functions within a musical context.

What do you think?

I invite you to download my four-page guide, "Teaching Musical Intervals Through Disney Music: A Source Sheet for Teachers," and give some thought to the examples it includes. How can you use these to improve your teaching and learning? What other examples could you draw on, if you shift your focus from isolated intervals to intervals in context?

Disney music can be SO USEFUL for theory teachers!

Even a tiny snippet, like this one from Newsies (name that tune?), can help us teach our students so much:

- simple/compound meter
- hemiola
- transposition
- extended harmony / added dissonance
- parallel intervals
- blue notes
- motifs
- syncopation

Here are some of the questions we're going to tackle:

• What's the difference between "modes" and "scales?"
• Why do we want our students to learn about them?
• How can we easily, and meaningfully, remember the 7 classical modes WITHOUT counting half steps and whole steps?
• How have Disney composers used modes to evoke a variety of emotions?
• What examples from Disney music can you use in your teaching?

Musical examples will come from the following Disney films:

• Frozen 2
• Beauty and the Beast
• Little Mermaid
• Nightmare Before Christmas
• Brave
• Pocahontas
• Mulan

And we'll discuss the following modes:

• Major and Minor
• Ionian and Aeolian
• Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, and Locrian
• Pentatonic

Are there any topics you'd like me to discuss in future webinars? Let me know in the comments! :-)

Hi friends,

I hope you're well!

As you may have noticed, I have not been very active on my blog these past few months.

There are personal reasons for this, but first and foremost, I would like to say the most important thing:​

I value and appreciate your interest in this project so very much, and I look forward to resuming with regular posts when I'm able to do so. Meanwhile, I will continue to post on an as-the-muse-inspires me basis, while I figure out how to get my life in order.
​
OK, so, now for the personal updates that may help to explain my radio silence:

My Ph.D. diploma won't say "Samuel Elliot Zerin" on it, but rather "Samantha Elisheva Zerin." A few weeks ago, I came out publicly as transgender. As you can imagine, the months leading up to this announcement were both exciting and intensely stressful. But I am truly humbled by the overwhelming support I have received from my family, friends, colleagues, and community. If you would like to follow my transition/journey, I invite you to follow me on Twitter @ShuliElisheva.

I have a new blog, where I've been posting my poetry and musical compositions under my pen name "Shuli Elisheva". This project began in June 2019 as a way of processing my emotions as I struggled with my gender identity and transition. With a few exceptions, I write all my poetry first in Yiddish and then translate them all into English. My musical compositions include both vocal and instrumental music. I plan to continue with this creative project on an as-the-muse-inspires-me basis; it's not only helping me continue to process my gender transition, but also to fulfill my deep craving for a creative outlet.

I'm looking for a steady day job to help pay the bills, so that I can continue my social media projects without constantly worrying about money. Ultimately, my goal is to make a living from sharing my research and teaching online. Although I have been exploring ways of doing this for a couple of years now, I've had to constantly battle a tension between (1) wanting to create an authentic and engaging presence and (2) needing money ASAP. Unfortunately, the latter has often hindered my ability to do the former. SO, I am hoping that once I have a steady day job, I'll be able to focus on truly being me in my social media work. Meanwhile, freelancing in a variety of areas is helping me piece together some income (blogging, tutoring, video editing, translation work, adjunct teaching, etc), but this has been neither sustainable nor predictable for me.

Frozen 2 came out last week, and the soundtrack is SOOOOOOOOOOO good!

I live-tweeted my reactions to *almost* the entire soundtrack earlier this week; I'll post it here when I've gotten through the whole thing, but meanwhile you can view the Twitter thread by clicking here.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Let's do an actual analysis of the opening song, shall we? ?

​(Disclaimer: I transcribed the notes by ear, so there may be some inaccuracies. I was a little unsure of the 3rd-4th measures in the second system, but everything else seems pretty clear.)

So, what really excited me the most when I first heard "All is Found" is its folksy, fantasy-esque sound.

But what makes it sound so folksy?

Here are some thoughts, just based on the opening verse:

• orchestration: breathy voice + guitar
• meter: syncopated dance rhythm in the bass
• mode: aeolian (with a whole step between 7 and 1)
• harmony: parallel root-position chords; open fifths; non-classical progressions
• production: tons of reverb = wide open landscape
  

What do you think? What'd I miss? What else do you like about this song, aside from its folksiness?

IF YOU HAVEN'T HEARD IT YET, you should! Here's the entire soundtrack on Spotify:

Who's seen Frozen 2???

Not me (yet!)

But the soundtrack is already up on Spotify! So I'm going to listen to the whole soundtrack now, literally for the first time in forever, and share my thoughts in real time.

OK, first of all, this soundtrack is HUGE. 46 tracks! Some of those appear to be covers, but still. So excited to experience this.

Just glancing at the track list, I'm excited to see that Olaf (Josh Gad) gets several songs! And seriously, there's a continuation of "Reindeer(s) are better than people"?? ?​

WOAH - what a great opening! I love the folsky, fantasy-esque feel of it. It's modal (Mixolydian? Love those bVII-I cadences). There are magical chromatic mediants. It's a breathy female voice, accompanied by...what instrument is that? Some kind of dulcimer?

I also love how the piece builds up tension -- starting with a very thin orchestration, then get thicker with a wash of strings, and then even thicker... so powerful.

​Listening to the first track again. The melody comes out in bursts... it's not one long melody. It's a little phrase, (breathe), a little phrase, (breathe), a little phrase... part of what makes it so folksy. (Oh, and gotta give a shout out to those magical string triplets!)

Starting off with an ensemble number this time! (Doesn't the Frozen 1 broadway show do the same? But not the movie...) Cool to hear our favorite characters returning, one by one, before the whole chorus joins in.

​The obvious thing is to write about the energy (1-7-6-5 bass ostinato, power chords, etc). BUT, what really excites me is when Elsa enters and ALL THAT GOES AWAY! Weird tonal shift, string tremolos, very soft... just like her solo in "First Time in Forever." Marks her as uncanny!

I've only just listened to the opening, but... so cool. The "destiny topic" that Jesse Kinne talked about at this year's American Musicology Society conference is so salient: the solo female voice over a hollow piano accompaniment...

Also, the piano's odd meter reminds me of "Do You Wanna Build a Snowman..." Is it just me?

Kristen Anderson-Lopez might be new favorite Disney composer... and Frozen 2 might be my new favorite Disney soundtrack. My goodness, "Into the Unknown" is soo dramatic... don't even know where to begin... But on a different note, I hear so many references to the Frozen score in "Into the Unknown" - background melodic stuff, lyrical references, even topical stuff (the destiny voice like in the troll scenes from Frozen 1, the galloping rhythms in what feels like a chase?)

?​?​?​?​?​

​Only just listened to the opening measures, but now I'm SO CURIOUS to see the movie! It starts off so Olaf-y, with that Broadway style... and then the sudden slashes... perfect! OK, now to listen to the rest of the song...

​So, obviously, it's fun that Olaf's character is musically connected with punchy Broadway cabaret type stuff. Also cool, though, how this old musical style is mixed with digital sound effects -- echos, alien-like bleeps, heavy reverb.... so creative.

What a cool idea to have a reprise of a Frozen 1 song in Frozen 2... but it's immediately different, b/c it starts off a cappella. And then when Sven comes in with his advice, the shimmering strings make him sound like the voice of G-d...!

OK, again, just listened to the first few measures, but..... ELECTRIC GUITAR??? Whaaaaaaaat.

It's nice how Kristoff harmonizes himself in "Lost in the Woods" (did he record each track separately, or is this just a digital effect? Either way...) (Note: later found out that Bobby Lopez asked Kristoff to sing 18 different tracks to layer over each other!)

... also, why are we back in the 80s suddenly? ? I'm really impressed by the Anderson-Lopezes' stylistic versatility in this score. Film composers generally have to know how to write in many different styles, and it's just done so well in Frozen 2.​

There are some cool orchestral things in here... sudden silences in the chorus, string echos, sci-fi-esque aug 7ths.... what was Christoph Beck's role in these songs? Did Anderson-Lopez write all the background texture in these songs, or did Beck? Or someone else? (Edit: later found out it was Dave Metzger who did most of the orchestration, not Beck.)

I'm curious about the Queen Iduna vocalise (3-2-3-1), which we hear not only sung by Evan Rachel Wood in this track but also weaved into the piano accompaniment. Is it a leit-motif throughout the underscoring? Again, haven't seen the movie yet. But it's just screaming LEIT-MOTIF!

So empty... such loss & solitude... there's the almost non-existent texture in the beginning with long drawn-out chord tones... background cello solos... her sobs... harp ostinati... dear G-d, does this movie have a tragic ending? Better keep listening....

OK, I've listened to all the vocal tracks. So interesting how Elsa and Kristoff barely sang in Frozen 1, but they've got most of the singing in Frozen 2. And Anna - Anna only sings at the very beginning and the very end? And how enigmatic her final solo is - no resolution?

​Taking a break for breakfast. Then I'll skip over all the cover versions and head right to the instrumental tracks. This is fun!

OK, listening again, now to the instrumental versions of each song. Karaoke?

When I've taught Disney music in the past, students get so caught up in lyrics that they can't listen to the actual music. These would be great for analysis, eliminating the distraction of lyrics!

To be sure, lyrics are important, too. But as a music theorist, it really irks me when people ONLY talk about lyrics, as if lyrics are the be all and end all of Disney music. So it's cool to have just the background tracks to listen to.

"Into the Unknown" without the vocal track is cool. You can really hear how stagnant the opening ostinato is, until suddenly the shimmering strings come in with new harmonies. Again, lyrics are important but can be a distraction - here I can listen distraction-free.

"When I am Older" - instrumental track. The big silences in the middle, when Olaf would be singing a cappella, are so hilarious.

Interesting that there doesn't seem to be a villain song. Is there no villain? Or does the villain just not sing (like in so many of the pre-Menken Disney films)?

Nice plagal cadence (aka "amen cadence") at the end of the last vocal track. (Disclaimer: there's a V-I cadence after the IV-I cadence. But still. Nice touch.)

OK, on to the underscoring by Cristoph Beck. ("Underscoring" is all the background music you hear in a movie when characters are NOT singing. In my opinion, it's sometimes the best / most interesting music in a Disney musical, but NOBODY TALKS ABOUT IT!)

0:00 this sounds SO familiar, very wintery... like Inside Out? Home Alone?

0:07 oh cool, it's the same theme as the opening of Frozen 1

0:10 uh oh, what's this menacing low brass interruption?

0:13 oh, phew, the theme is back

0:17 whaaaaaat (low brass)

0:32 - this is flying music... wonder what the animation is like here.

​0:50 - DO YOU WANNA BUILD A SNOWMAN!!!!!

A huldra is a Norwegian forest/water nymph. So is this gonna be like the trolls from Frozen 1?

- nice opening with a folk flute/pipe, emphasizing open fourths and fifths. - oh, nice repetition a step higher!

- sudden entrance of piano timbre is so magical.

So many magical things going on in the orchestration ...

- the use of a folk instrument over a string drone
- the sudden addition of a piano timbre
- the chimes
- the quasi-tremolo 7-7-1-1-7-7-5-5 ostinato in the strings
- chromatic mediant harmonies
​- harp-like broken chords

Nice pentatonic melody on a folk pipe. But then, the orchestration changes from folk instruments to orchestral instruments. Sure, orchestration usually changes to make repetitions less repetitive, but... there MUST be something driving this folk --> orchestra shift?

​WOAH -- so amazing. I'm used to hearing these swirling arpeggios played by strings at moments of panic/tension/running. It's a cliché in film music. But to hear them on piano (and brass!) is so unusual - it's like my ears are exploding!

The clock tower chimes are a nice touch. I wonder if there's actually a bell tower in the movie, or if this is purely for timbral effect?

The timbral palette is incredible. Forget about listening for a melody. This track is all about the interactions among so many diverse timbres.

Woah, what wind! The string whips, the woodwind/brass double-tonguing, the woodblocks, the sudden appearance of a deep, deep brass theme.

WAIT WAIT WAIT

IT'S THE FEAR MOTIF FROM FROZEN 1!!!!!!

So there are definitely leit motifs from the first film in the second film. OMG

The Frozen 2 soundtrack has a much more overall sci-fi / fantasy vibe to it than the Frozen 1 soundtrack. These slowly-unfolding aug7 chords in the second half of "Wind" are so trippy...

Oh hey, it's the opening vocals come back, this time a cappella in a 2-part canon. I wonder why? Will have to see the movie. The opening of this track (0:15-0:40) reminds me of Giacchino's Inside Out score. And the aug7ths after that are so alien-y...

​So much cool stuff being done with high-register piano timbres in this soundtrack. I love it.

Another timbre-based track. AND...... it's the fear leit-motif from Frozen 1 again!

Honestly, I was so exhausted from analyzing these couple dozen tracks that I couldn't get through the rest! But I'll certainly be writing more about this soundtrack / film in the coming weeks!

OK, hear me out.

I know, I know, this is probably going to ruffle some feathers.

And the thing is, I really do love Beethoven! Really truly!

And, not only that – but I even agree with the weight of pedagogical tradition that the opening of Beethoven's 1st Piano Sonata is a GREAT example for teaching music theory students about the concept of melodic foreshortening.

But here's the thing:

I've got a 4-year-old son who is OBSESSED with a Disney Junior TV show called The PJ Masks. And not only is he obsessed with the show – he's obsessed with singing the theme song!

The PJ Masks theme song is catchy; it's fun; it's raucous; it's mysterious and spylike in the grand musical tradition of James Bond, Mission Impossible, and The Incredibles.

So what does this all mean?

Well, what happens when the melody gets foreshortened like this is that it builds up a lot of energy and forward momentum. Every time the melodic phrase repeats, we expected it to be repeated exactly, but it's like our breath is being cut short... again, and again. So in addition to building energy and momentum, it also builds up suspense and even anxiety, drawing the listener closer and closer into the music.

So next time you're binge-watching Disney Junior shows on Netflix, and the PJ Masks comes on, listen to the theme song with foreshortening in mind. I guarantee, you'll feel EXTREMELY NERDY, and it will also make the music SO MUCH MORE FUN and INTERESTING to listen to!

​:-)

Michael Giacchino's score to Disney-Pixar's Inside Out is soooooo good.

In fact, when it came time to pick a movie for our family Movie Night this weekend, I requested Inside Out specifically because of the music.

But as we were watching, I began to notice something really fascinating in the visual character design, which, I think, has an interesting connection with the music.

Maybe you noticed this before?

Or maybe you hadn't - but once you see it, you really can't unsee it.
​
So, you know how all the emotions look totally different? They're different colors. Different shapes and sizes. They personify different stereotypes...

But take a closer look at Joy and Sadness.

Don't they have... the exact same eyes?

And the exact same nose?

And did you ever wonder why Joy has blue hair, just like sadness?
​
And have you ever noticed – if you look really, really, really closely – that Joy often radiates a blue-ish glow?

It's almost as if Joy and Sadness are the same emotion?

Of course, one of the main themes of the film is that you can't have joy without sadness – a theory that psychology researcher Brené Brown has widely promoted in her popular books and TED talks.
​
Joy and Sadness are two sides of the same coin.

~ ~ ~

So, ok, let's talk about the music!

The opening track, titled "Bundle of Joy," is one of my favorite bits of film music... ever.

​It just tugs at my heart-strings:

As the track title suggests, this music is all about joy. In fact, as the music starts to play, joy is the only emotion present in Riley's head (even if, importantly, she's glowing blue).
​

But why, then, does the music sound so... sad to me? Or perhaps, rather, bittersweet?

To answer this question, I purchased a PDF of the sheet music from MusicNotes.com, took it to the piano, and set to work on figuring out how this works.

To my astonishment, I discovered that the entire track contains only two chords!

There's a G major 7 chord (G-B-D-F#), and an F major 7 chord (F-A-C-E), and that's it.
Just those two chords.

And yet, somehow, the music sounds so much more complex than that. It feels, to me, like it's wavering between major and minor. It feels, to me, like there are some interesting cadences going on in there. It feels, to me, like the music has discrete sections to it, like the music has a direction it's heading in, a goal that it's aiming towards.

​Well that, my friends, is the beauty of major 7 chords.

If you divide a major 7 chord into two halves, the bottom half is a major triad and the top half is a minor triad.

And this is key to understanding the bittersweet nature of "Bundle of Joy" from Disney-Pixar's Inside Out.
​
Let's take a closer look at the melody and accompaniment:

All four of these measures have the same chord – a G major 7 chord.

And yet, there's just enough ambiguity to create the illusion that it's alternating between major and minor triads.

The accompaniment just rocks back and forth between the notes D and B, which are found in both G major and B minor chords. So if we only heard the accompaniment, we wouldn't have any way of knowing if it's major or minor.

In order to know if it's major or minor, we'd have to add either a G to that B/D (to make it G major) or an F# (to make it B minor).

And that's exactly what the melody does.

In all four measures, the note G is heavily emphasized in the melody, suggesting G major.

But at the same time, there are a few spots – at the beginnings of measures 3 and 4 – that strongly emphasize the note F#, suggesting B minor.

And of course, these Gs and F#s are part of the G major 7 chord.

So even though it's all one chord – a G major 7 chord – it feels as if it's wavering between two different chords, one major and one minor.
​
And not only does it do that in these first four measures, but then these four measures get repeated several times: outlining an F major 7 chord, then back to a G major 7 again (with a slightly embellished accompaniment), and then again F major 7.

Of course, I could be totally wrong. After all, who says that we have to consider those 4-measure phrases to be one single chord, one single major 7 chord? Why COULDN'T we think of them as, in fact, wavering between two entirely separate chords, one major and one minor?
​
Well, take a closer look at those bottom two lines, where G maj7 and F maj7 repeat with a slightly embellished accompaniment.

What's the new embellishment in the accompaniment? It's a broken major 7 chord!
​
And lest one think that this is still just incidental, take a look at how the next section begins, with those crystal-clear, slowly-unfolding G major 7 and F major 7 chords:

Of course, music isn't only about harmony, and there's more than just harmony making this music sound bittersweet.

There's also the orchestration: a solo piano melody, way up high at the top of the keyboard, above shimmering violins. As I wrote in an earlier blog post about the music from Toy Story, piano+violins = heightened emotion. And high registers typically signify goodness/purity, in contrast to low registers that signify villainy and anger.
​
And then there's the ostinato element, which film composers often use to establish, draw out, and maintain an emotional atmosphere.
​
And there are the metalicky sounds of someone rubbing their finger on a wine glass, which contribute to the magical feeling of the music, while also serving as little pin pricks that temporarily jerk us out of the acoustic dream-world of piano and strings.

So there's a lot going on to make this music sound bittersweet. And isn't that the whole point of the movie? That joy and sadness are one and the same?

You know what drives me BONKERS?

When people say that music theory is about "right" and "wrong" answers.

"This is the correct way to notate that measure," they say.

"This is an incorrect voice-leading pattern," they insist.

To be fair, it's not just music theory. Grade-based education rewards this sort of gooked-up thinking, especially when standardized tests are involved.

No, my friends, music theory is NOT about "right" and "wrong" answers.

And when I taught music theory to Ivy League students at Brown University, I made this clear in every. single. class.

Music theory is subjective.

And that's INCREDIBLY important to understand.

Here's a perfect illustration of what I mean.

At the beginning of the semester, I gave my students a handout much like the one shown above. (I gave them "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," but since this is a blog about Disney music, I decided to use a more appropriate example for this blog post. :-))

And I asked them:

"Which notation do you like better? #1, #2, or #3? And more importantly, WHY?"

At this point in the semester, my students had learned only the very basics of musical staff notation. They hadn't yet learned about harmony or formal structures. They hadn't yet learned about key signatures, dynamics, or scales.

So, as it happens, they were very confused when I asked them which notation of this tune they liked best. They had no idea how to answer, or how to even begin to process the question. Especially when I told them that all three of these notations, when performed, sound the same; all that differs is how they're written down. (Note the tempo markings!)

But I pushed my students.

And for the next 45 minutes, we had a lively, fascinating, and engaging discussion about the subjectivity of musical notation.

Take a look at notation #1, shown above. What patterns do you notice?

Remember, my students had only just begun to learn the most basic of basics. But even with minimal knowledge, some patterns can be easily noticed.

For example, the first three measures all have the exact same rhythm.

They also have the exact same lyrics.

And, they also have the exact same melody... except that each measure starts a note higher than the measure before.

Essentially, this way of notating the music breaks up the melody into four chunks, each chunk confined to a single measure. This allows us to clearly see that, except for the ending, each chunk (measure) is virtually identical, with each successive chunk starting a step higher than the one before.

It's also a very compact notation: only four measures! That makes it relatively easy to read. On the flip side, the dotted 8ths and 16th notes can be very daunting for a beginner. So, from a practical perspective, there are reasons to both love and resent it.

If version 1 shows us patterns that can be seen with the naked eye, and version 2 shows us patterns that are revealed by a magnifying glass, then version 3 is like looking through a microscope.

​Each sentence is now spread out over four measures, allowing us to examine its finer patterns.

Each quarter of the four-measure sentence, as we now can clearly see, consists of two notes. But they alternate straight (half note + half note) and syncopated (dotted half + quarter) rhythms.

It's an interesting pattern, isn't it? Sure, we can certainly find that pattern in versions 1 and 2, but only in version 3 is it clear as day.

From a practical perspective, again, the beginning student might find this notation both a relief and an iron curtain. It consists entirely of (dotted) half and quarter notes. No 8ths! No 16ths! Easy-peasy, right? On the other hand, it's so "zoomed-in" that the much larger patterns revealed in versions 1 and 2 are totally obscured. So the overall structure and phrasing can seem very enigmatic.

Now let's return to the original question: which version do you like better, and why?

Well, it all depends on what your SUBJECTIVE goals and preferences are.

Do you prefer a more compact notation (4 measures) or a more spread out notation (15 measures)?

Are you cool with 16th notes? Or would you rather stick with halves and quarters?

Are you interested in seeing the larger, overall patterns? Or, like a scientist examining a fossil under a microscope, do you prefer the tiny nuances?

Again, all three of these notations, when performed, sound virtually identical. (Yes, there are tiny differences with regard to metric pulse – which I made sure to discuss with my students – but otherwise they are the same.)

None of them is objectively "the correct one," and none of them is objectively "incorrect."

They are all equally valid, because at the end of the day, musical notation is a tool. We use it to reveal patterns that we're most interested in and to obscure those patterns that we deem unimportant. And since we all have different goals and preferences, so, too, will our notational decisions sometime differ.

And that's beautiful.

​Isn't it?

Question: what's the hardest concept to teach intro music theory students?

Well, there are all sorts of advanced harmonic concepts involving intricate voice-leading, harmonic resolution, motivic development, and so forth.

But by the time you get that far, your students have already developed a strong foundation of knowledge to help them understand these more advanced topics. They're already masters at reading and writing musical notation, which enables them to organize their ideas on paper. The advantage here cannot be understated.

I would argue that one of the hardest concepts to teach is actually one of the most basic, usually covered in the very first classes of Music Theory 101. And that concept is meter -- the idea that music is organized into beats and measures, with an underlying pulse comprised of strong beats and weak beats.

Think about it: to understand meter and how we notate it, the student has to already understand a wide range of intersecting concepts: beats, measures, pulse, rhythmic division, staff lines, bar lines, beaming, and of course all of the symbols (note heads, stems, flags, dots, rests, etc). And even once all of this information is learned, terminology soon becomes complicated: "whole notes" fill a whole measure in 4/4, but not in 5/4 or 6/4. By contrast, in 2/4, it's the half note that fills the whole measure.

It's a lot to take in all at once.

But even once the basics are well-understood, there's still one aspect of meter that – in my own experience teaching university students – continues to stump students for quite some time.

And that aspect is metric pulse.

What's the difference between 2/4 and 4/4?

Aren't 3/4 and 6/8 exactly the same?

Why use 8/8, when you could just use 4/4?

For some reason, the idea that each meter has its own unique pulse – that 3/4 feels different than 6/8 because one of them is triple and the other is duple, for instance – is really hard for students to grasp.

In the spirit of helping my fellow educators teach about meter, I'd like to offer a useful example from Disney's Frozen, which might help your students to better understand metric pulse.

The song I'll discuss is actually metrically ambiguous, but this is precisely its pedagogical value. The ambiguity forces us to listen more closely than we otherwise might. It also encourages us to tackle difficult questions about what meter is and why it matters.

And finally, it's an INTRIGUING example, because it doesn't start off with musical instruments. Rather, it begins with the sound of ice saws being thrust through the frozen waters of Norway... not what you'd expect to hear in a course on music theory!

(starts around the 0:42 mark in this video)

As I've written in a previous blog post, one of Disney's hallmarks is a musical technique called "Mickey-Mousing" - the close synchronization of music, sound effects, and animation. "Frozen Heart" is a great example. As the scene opens, we see the workers thrusting their saws into the ice, and we hear the sound effects that result from this labor. There's no indication, at first, that what we're hearing is music. But when the workers start singing, the sound of the ice saws continues, becoming an important part of the music's percussion section. Are the ice saws musical instruments? Well, not necessarily, but that's exactly the point: as in so many other Disney movies, this scene blurs the boundaries between music and noise.

But I digress.

Here's an unmetered notation of the song's opening, starting with the ice saws and continuing with the melody:

I have heard this song so many times, but until this weekend, I was completely stymied by its metric pulse.

See, here's the thing: I imagined hearing each of these ice saws on the strong beats of either 2/4 or 4/4. That seems logical enough, but then the melody comes in awkwardly early, on a weak beat. The pulse feels consistently "off," accenting beats that feel like they should be weaker, while glossing over beats that seem like they should be more prominent. What gives?

And then this weekend, I was driving down Cypress Avenue on my way to our local grocery store, listening to this song, and it suddenly hit me. What if the workers aren't sawing on the strong beats, but rather on the weak beats?

What if, instead of sawing on the first beat of each measure, they actually saw on the second beat? WHAT IF THE SCORE ACTUALLY BEGINS WITH A REST? Here's what that would look like:

Bingo! Now, the melody comes in strongly on beat 1, and the pulse moving forward feels totally natural. The percussive sawing on the off-beats alternates with the singers' down-beats, creating a driving "heeve-ho" effect that befits a labor song.

In fact, this alternative notation feels so natural to me, that I can't believe I never thought of it before.

But that's the thing.

Why didn't I?

Why had I misheard this, for so long, as sawing on the downbeats, if that's so clearly not what's happening?

The answer is: the complete, total, and utter lack of musical context.

When the saws begin sawing, they don't sound like music. Each crash through the ice sounds identical. There's no alternation of strong and weak. There's no melodic contour or harmonic context to help shape an underlying pulse. How, in short, could one possibly know whether they're sawing on the downbeats or upbeats, when there aren't any contrasting sounds to tells us where downbeats and upbeats lie?

It's only once the singing comes in that we can identify a musical relationship: the sawing suddenly aligns with the melody's weak beats.

When students learn about meter, it's important for them to understand that meter doesn't work in isolation. Rather, it's a system for organizing the relationships among myriad musical elements. When all we hear is the repeated sounds of ice-saws crashing through the ice, each time with the same pitch, dynamic, and articulation, and always evenly spaced one from the next, how can meter exist? It's only once we add in the melody – with its melodic contour, rhythmic diversity, harmonic implications, and so forth – that the sound of the ice saws enters into a musical system, interacting and contrasting with other musical elements.

As a metaphor, consider that you're working on a puzzle. An enormous, 5,000-piece puzzle. You know the type. It's maddening, but so addictive. Anyway. You take a few pieces out of the box and look them over. They all look exactly the same. They are all solid black, with two innies and two outies. Now ask: which part of the picture are these? It's a ridiculous question, isn't it? Where is there a picture? Where are there parts? These are just a group of identical, solid-black pieces.

It's only once you dump out all of the rest of the pieces – all 5,000 of them – and you see that they are all different that any sense of a larger whole can come into play. Eventually, it becomes evident that these black pieces are part of one section of the puzzle, while these sparkly pink pieces are part of a different section, and these other pieces go somewhere else. It's only when contrasting elements enter into a relationship with each other that any sense of a larger whole can exist.

And that's how meter works. It organizes contrasting elements, contextualizing them in relation to each other, and showing how they all add up to a larger, meaningful whole.

The great thing about discussing "Frozen Heart" with our students is that is provokes conversation. Because it's so ambiguous, the students can be easily dissuaded from thinking they can take a single "correct answer" for granted. Instead of memorizing the single "right answer," they can actually think about the material, discussing the relative merits of each interpretation with their classmates.  In the process, they dive into fundamental questions of what meter is, what it does, and how it works. It also challenges us to ask difficult questions about what music even is in the first place, which, in my experience, is GUARANTEED to spark curiosity and fill an entire class period with lively, engaging discussion.

What do you think? Would discussing this song make it easier for your students to understand meter? Let me know in the comments below!

What an incredible song this is! So poignant, so emotional, so sad, yet so happily nostalgic... how? I mean, seriously. How does this music evoke such powerful emotions?

Over at our Facebook group, an elementary school teacher and Disney enthusiast named Darla hinted at an answer to this question: "The chords and progressions are breathtakingly beautiful."

The chords do seem like a good place to start, don't they?

And YES, in fact, there's a lot one could say about the emotional impact of the harmony in this song.

BUT, I would argue that the harmony is actually only a small part of what makes this song so emotionally stirring.

The orchestration, the vocal performance, and the silences are also REALLY IMPORTANT in establishing the mood, and yet, these are precisely the elements that are most often ignored by music theorists.

You see, back in the good ol' 19th century, German Romantics like Richard Wagner and Edouard Hanslick began promoting an idea called "absolute music."

"Absolute music," in short, is the idea that a musical work is defined exclusively by its harmony and counterpoint. Everything else – orchestration, performance techniques, dynamics, articulations, extra-musical associations – everything else is just gravy.

And so, the argument goes, Bach's "Prelude in C Major" from the Well-Tempered Clavier is the same piece of music, regardless of what instrument it's played on, how fast it's played, how loud it's played, or how the notes are articulated.

Honestly, this ideology is kind of poisonous. Believe what you want about musical ontology, but the ideology of "absolute music" has led music critics, audiences, and scholars to dismiss the importance of orchestrators. "Composers compose, and orchestrators just prepare it for performance."

I actually got into a fight with someone on Twitter last year, when I suggested that Disney's orchestrators should get more credit for their work. The dude I was fighting with argued that since the orchestrators don't actually write any of the music, they shouldn't get any credit. I replied that the orchestration plays a HUGE role in shaping the musical work, which I guess was pretty cheeky, because then I got blocked.

But let's return to "When She Loved Me" from Toy Story 2. It's orchestrated for piano, solo cello, strings, and soprano. That's the same orchestration that's used in countless commercials for medications, life insurance, public safety, and more, in order to get our emotions and pocketbooks flowing. I mean, just listen to this YouTube compilation called "The Most Emotional Commercials Ever Made" -
  

This is important, because those of us who have grown up listening to countless commercials (and movies, TV shows, and pop songs) use piano and strings to evoke strong feelings of sadness, have learned to associate the sound of piano and strings with sadness. Of course, not all piano/orchestra music is sad; the orchestration is only one piece of the puzzle. But, nonetheless, I don't think it's really debatable that orchestration is a significant part of what music theorists might call "a sentimental topic" in commercial music.

And yet, this orchestration would be dismissed by adherents to the ideology of "absolute music" as simply artifice – as the superficial clothing in which the more significant harmony is beautified. And they'd be wrong, wouldn't they? I mean, can you imagine if this song were performed by a military band, with blaring trumpets and pounding war drums? It'd be totally different!

Another important element here is the vocal performance. If you listen closely to Sarah McLachlan's voice in this recording, you'll hear all sorts of details that strongly contribute to feelings of sentimentality. Her voice cracks, for instance, and it slides from note to note. She often switches between a full-bodied timbre and a thinner, airier timbre.

These vocal techniques are not typically notated in sheet music, in part because the ideology of absolute music – the ideology that only the harmony and counterpoint really define a work of music – is so deeply ingrained in Western musical practice that most people just haven't felt the need to develop ways of writing them down.

And yet, I would argue, the vocal techniques employed by McLachlan in this song are SO crucial in establishing the song's mood and emotional impact.

One last element that I'd mention here is SILENCE. Yes, that's right - silence! Claude Debussy famously said that "music is the silence between the notes," which seems rather odd, if you think of music as a bunch of notes.

But listen to the way this song is phrased. Almost every measure ends with a rest in the vocal part and a sustained note in the accompaniment. The music doesn't flow like a mighty stream. It comes in small sighs. She sings a few words, and then she stops. Then she sings a few more, and she stops. Think about the way people talk when they're feeling deeply sentimental: this is it!

So, in sum:

What makes this song sound so deeply sentimental? Yeah, the chords are important. But if you really want to know? Listen to the orchestration, the vocal performance, and the silences, because that's where so much of the emotion is created.

Here's a tricky riddle:

Listen to the following scene from Disney's Pinocchio. Do you hear "music" or "sound effects?" Or both, or neither, or something altogether different?

Obviously, this is supposed to sound like chaotic noise. That's the whole point of this scene: Jiminy Cricket can't sleep, because he's too much bothered by the random ticking of countless clocks, Gappetto's disgusting snoring, and the fish's bubbly breathing. So should we refer to this audio as "a noisy mix of sound effects?"

But the ways that these sound effects and their collective, chaotic noise are created rely on well-known musical techniques, employed by composers and performed by musicians. In other words, they're not the result of randomness, but rather of a carefully constructed musical score.

So when we ask if this is "music" or not, it really depends on whose musical experience we're prioritizing: the diegetic experience of the characters in the movie, or the creative experience of the composers and performers? (Or, for that matter, our own perspectives as listeners and thinkers?)

In this blog post, I'll explore some of the ways that this scene blends the boundaries between music and sound effects. Then, I'll conclude with a famous psychological study by Dr. Diana Deutsch that shows how simply the act of reading this blog post can literally change whether you hear this as music or not.

​Let's get started!

In the image above, I've tried to notate some of the clocks' rhythms to show how they're interacting in musical ways. It's really hard! Part of what's difficult about transcribing the rhythms in this scene is that they aren't all consistent: some clocks come and go, while others remain more-or-less constant. As well, they don't all seem to be in the same meter, causing some cross-bar discrepancies that are really hard to decipher.

But consider the interactions of the brown circular pendulum, the acorn pendulum, the flower pendulum, and the heart pendulum, which I've transcribed in the image above. They form, in multiple layers, what music theorists call "hemiolas" – that is, the effect of hearing one clock tick thrice in the same time that another clock ticks twice. This is a common rhythmic device that can be traced in the classical music tradition at least as far back as the Renaissance.

We don't just hear these hemiolas in the ticking of the clocks – we also see them in the rolling of Jiminy's eyes.

To see what I mean, check out this 15-second clip (above).

First, the eyes on the owl clock move side to side with a simple, duple rhythm.

Jiminy's eyes repeat this same motion.

Then, the pendula from two different clocks move in a likewise rhythm, but in contrary directions.

Jiminy's eyes repeat this same motion – with one eye moving to the left while the other moves to the right.

And then we get to the cool part: the ticking of two other pendula forms a hemiola (3:2) rhythm...

... and Jiminy's eyes follow the rhythm and motion of that hemiola! One eye follows the triplet clock, while the other follows the duple clock, until Jiminy is so confused that he just shakes his head in frustration.

There's a technical term for this close synchronization of sound and animation. It's called "Mickey Mousing," because it's a technique that Disney pioneered in his earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons (late 1920s), developed to an art in his Silly Symphonies (1930s), and enshrined as a standard device in basically every single Disney movie from Snow White to Ralph Breaks the Internet.

It's a technique that blurs the boundaries between music, sound effects, and choreography. On one hand, the sounds appear to be coming naturally from the actions of characters and objects; and yet, the ways that those sounds are constructed are undeniably musical.

Despite the apparent monotony of this scene, if you listen to the pitches of every clock, snore, and bubble, you might notice that it's entirely in the key of F major.

Some of the clocks alternate between the pitches F and A (the root and third of an F major chord). Others clack away at F, A, or C. Gappetto's snoring takes the form of a glissando from a low F to a high F and back down again. The fish's breathing glissandos up from F to C (the tonic to the dominant). 

Or perhaps it's more meaningful to say that this isn't "in F major," but rather that pitches in this scene "outline an F major triad." Indeed, there aren't any other chords, which means that there aren't any progressions or cadences that could ground us in a particular key. Rather, what we have is a single chord, stretched out through an entire scene, which reinforces the scene's overall monotony, but in a distinctly musical way.

If one were to create a structural map of the audio in this scene, it might look something like this:

1. A - An ostinato alternates between the root and the third of an F major chord, against the backdrop of hemiola cross-rhythms.
2. A' - Various clocks hammer away at the root, third, and fifth of an F major chord, against the backdrop of hemiola cross-rhythms (including with Jiminy's eyes)
3. B - Gappetto snores with a glissando in F major
4. B' - The fish breathes in F major.

One might further note, then, that the dynamics gradually get louder from section to section, with slight subito decreases in dynamic at the start of sections B and B'.

One could contrast the thick orchestral texture of the A sections (featuring clocks), in contrast to the thinner texture of the B sections (featuring snoring/breathing).

In other words, one could structure this scene not only in terms of the animation, but also in terms of the sound itself.

What is music? If you look in a dictionary, you'll get a definition that is ontologically-fixed. That is, you'll have a definition that can be applied to any source of sound to tell you: "this is music" or "this is not music." Either the sound is music or it isn't, right?

When I played this scene from Pinocchio for my music theory students at Brown University and the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and I asked them if it's "music" or "sound effects," my students were fairly split. Some said it's music, others said it's sound effects, yet others said it's both, and, of course, there were those who just had no idea.

The same thing happened when I asked this question on Facebook and Twitter: not much agreement as to whether this is music or not!

However...

The more my students listened to it, and the closer they listened to it, and the more they shared and debated ideas, something remarkable began to happen.

Within minutes, nearly every student agreed that the audio in this scene could be called "music."

What changed their minds? Well, I don't believe that the initial nay-sayers were simply convinced by the arguments of their classmates. Nor, do I suspect, were they only trying to please their teacher. (I made it very clear from the beginning that I didn't think there was any correct answer, and that I was more interested in disagreement and debate than in blind acceptance.)

So what happened?

Dr. Diana Deutsch, a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, studies the psychology of music. She is best known for her work on musical illusions, particularly the so-called "Speech to Song Illusion."

In 1995, Deutsch recorded a snippet of spoken audio, set it on loop, and made a remarkable discovery. The more she listened to this recording of her speaking voice, the more it began to sound like music. And it wasn't just her. She would play this recording of her speaking voice for group after group after group, and in every case her subjects would initially claim that it was a recording of her talking..... but after listening to it just a handful of times, her audiences would not only begin to hear it as music, but would even sing it back to her with such clarity that it could be notated with precise pitches and rhythms.

Deutsch's "Speech to Song Illusion" proved that one-and-the-same audio recording could be alternately interpreted by listeners as "music" or "speech." And not only that -- but the same listeners who were initially so convinced that it's speech needed only hear it a few times before completely changing their minds and calling it music. In other words, what makes music "music" isn't the actual sound itself, but rather the listener's experience of the sound.

As it turns out, what makes us hear music as "music" is repetition. When we hear someone talking, our brains initially latch on to the words that they're saying. But if we listen to them talk on repeat, our brain gets so used to the words that it begins listening for other details: pitch, rhythm, timbre, articulation...

The same applies to any sound. When we listen to a sound on repeat, our brain tunes in to a wide range of details that we otherwise wouldn't have noticed. Our brains try to organize and make sense of these details, and eventually, we hear them as music.

So is the audio in this scene from Pinocchio "music?" Well, I don't think that we can objectively say "yes" or "no." Obviously, Jiminy Cricket experiences it as noise. But the more we listen to it, the more we analyze it, the more we discuss it, the more it will begin to sound like music... regardless of how we initially heard it.

Any sound can be music, if only are brains are open to the possibility.

Here's a leit motif, called the "Cathedral Motif," that weaves its way through the entire score of Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame.

We hear it, for example, in D major when Clopin sings with reverence about the bells of Notre Dame.

We also hear it, for instance, in D minor when Frollo sings about his soul descending into Hell.

What do you think?

It's well-known among film music fans that leit motifs represent certain characters, emotions, or ideas.

But so, so, so often, leit motifs are more complicated than that. As the cool kids say, leit motifs can be semantically flexible: carrying a wide array of meanings that ebb and flow over the course of a film.

This is certainly the case with the "Cathedral Motif," which perhaps shows how a Cathedral can be a place of both sanctuary and imprisonment, or how a soul (in Christian theology, at least) can ascend to Heaven or descend to Hell, or how religion can be (ab)used for both good and evil.

And it's also the case with other leit motifs in Hunchback, such as the theme from "Out There" that we also hear during Quasimodo's public humiliation, or the recitative-like melody with which both Quasimodo and Frollo sing so much of their music.

​But enough of what I have to say. What do you think? I'm really curious to know!

In my previous blog post, "The Chord of Death: How the Neapolitan Chord Makes 'Remember Me' from Disney's Coco Sound So Sad," I made the following argument:

1. "Remember Me" from Disney's Coco is in D major
2. But it sounds SO SAD! WHY???
3. Because it starts with a minor plagal cadence, which blends the major and minor modes
4. And also because the phrase after that uses an applied Neapolitan chord ("the chord of death") to create the illusion that the music is switching to the relative minor, B minor
5. But it's not actually switching to B minor - it's still in D major!

​I responded that although the music seems to be switching to B minor, it only does so for a single measure, which is too short to call it a real modulation:

​But perhaps I was oversimplifying. As Dr. Meyer went on to explain, small-scale modulations like this – "localized tonicizations" – are a fairly common phenomenon and were used extensively by Bach. By this reasoning, the music does, in fact, shift to minor, even if only for a couple of measures - and hence, it sounds sad:

So this got me thinking... if that's what's going on, then what happens in the rest of the song? Are there other small-scale tonicizations like this that take the music "to distant lands" à la Bach?

It's an interesting way of looking at this. The opening phrase is in D major-ish... ("ish," because of the modal mixture). Then it's got a solid cadence in B minor. Then it's got a solid cadence in G major. Then the second verse begins in D major-ish again, just as the first verse had done. And then we get a series of adventurous sonorities that seem to take us through a circle of fifths - B minor, to E minor, to A major - which finally resolves with a cadence in D major. (And not even D major-ish this time... legit D major!)

So the question is, how do we make sense of this all?

One way would be to say that it's all in D major, but that the second phrase prolongs a vi chord by using an applied cadential formula, and the third phrase prolongs a IV chord by using its own applied cadential formula, and that then leads back to an actual cadence in D major. In other words, the first verse is basically I - vi - IV - DomAug7 - I, and each phrase just stretches out each of those chords for added color and length.

Another way would be to say that it starts and end in D major, but in between it meanders to a variety of other tonalities: the relative minor (B minor) and a nearby major (G major). In other words, rather than stretching out each chord in a relatively straightforward progression, it's taking us on an emotional journey through related minor and major tonalities.

What do you think? It's certainly a fascinating song, and I so wish that I had time today to dive into the second half of it! (Well, there's always another day!)

How can a Disney song in D major sound so, so sad?

The emotional power behind the music of "Remember Me," a bittersweet song of farewell from a father to his daughter, is deep and complex. In this post, I'll just give a hint of what's happening in the first couple phrases. Perhaps in the future, when I have more time, I'll dive into the rest of the song, as well!

The song begins with a "minor plagal cadence," a form of modal mixture that replaces the major IV chord with a minor iv chord. It's like pulling the rug out from under the listeners' feet: we think we're in major, but suddenly it sounds like minor, and then it cadences in major again. As music theory YouTuber Jake Lizzio puts it, this is a progression "to make you cry."

But what I really want to write about is what comes next: a Neopolitan cadence in the relative minor, B minor.

In their study on music and emotions, theorists Daniela and Bernd Willimek describe the Neapolitan chord (bII) as "a symbol of death," noting its use in a song by Schubert to highlight the phrase "weinen ganz totenbleich" (weeping, and deathly pale).

In fact, the Neapolitan chord – which appears in measure 4 of "Remember Me" – has long been associated with death and destruction.

Vivaldi, for instance, used the Neapolitan chord in the second movement of his Four Seasons to evoke human suffering during the blaze of summer: "Under a hard season, fired up by the sun / Languishes man, languishes the flock and burns the pine."

Mendelssohn-Hensel used it in her song "Ferne," Op. 9 No. 2, on the word "ertötest" (mortify): "Why do you mortify me?"

There are so many more examples one could give – from Mozart's Requiem Mass, Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata, Wagner's opera Das Rheingold – which also utilize the Neapolitan chord in conjunction with deathly thoughts.

But the point is, the Neapolitan chord also plays a crucial role in establishing the mood of "Remember Me" from Coco​, and understanding the long history of its usage in classical music can help us better appreciate its use in Disney.

Glad you asked!

The Neapolitan chord is a ii chord in minor, but lowered by a half step. For example, in C minor, a regular ii chord is a D chord, and the Neapolitan (bII) is a Db chord. That's jarring, because Db is not part of the C minor scale. In other words, it's chromatic.

But why is it associated with death?

Part of the reason, perhaps, is that lowering scale degree 2 turns the minor mode into the Phrygian mode, which, as I wrote in a previous blog post, is also associated with death.

Another possible reason is that the Neapolitan chord is generally used as part of a cadence (bII - V7 - I), and when you do that, you set up a tritone between the root of the Neapolitan chord and the root of the dominant chord. Tritones, of course, are also associated with death.

What's especially interesting about "Remember Me" is that it doesn't, in fact, use the Neapolitan of D major. Rather, it uses the Neapolitan of the relative minor key, B minor, followed by a full V7-I cadence, making us feel like the music has suddenly slipped into minor. But it hasn't gone into minor! The song really is, ultimately, in D major. This is just one of the many tricks that composers Kristen and Robert Anderson Lopez used to make the song feel like it's ever floating between major and minor, not quite happy but also not quite sad:

And it's ironic, isn't it? Coco's father wrote this song for her so that she'd remember him while he's away on his concert tour and look forward to seeing him when he gets back. But while he's away, [spoiler alert!] he gets murdered. And decades upon decades later, after waiting so long for his return, Coco has almost entirely forgotten him.

So it's appropriate that the song should hinge on a chord that Vivaldi, Bach, Hensel, and so many others have for centuries associated with death.