Analyzing "Hunchback of Notre Dame" - 7. What Makes "God Help The Outcasts" Sound So Religious?9/13/2020 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. 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 Plagal Cadences (IV-I)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." 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." The very first measure of the song is a IV chord, resolving to I in measure 2:  It's weird to begin a song in the middle of a cadence, but it really sets the penitential mood. Recitative-Style in the VersesCatchy melodies are often very repetitive. But part of what fascinates me about this melody is how non-repetitive it is. While there are some melodic phrases that seem to sort of, kind of, repeat, they're rarely repeated exactly the same. They're always morphing, always leading in new directions. And not only that, but when phrases do seem to repeat melodically, their harmonies are TOTALLY different:  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. Descending Lament in the ChorusFinally, 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. 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! ❤️
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Hello, fellow nerds! I'm so excited to dive into the next song from Hunchback of Notre Dame: "Topsy Turvy." 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  But wait, there's more!It'd be easy to just say that "Topsy Turvy" is in this Broadway chorus style and be done with it. And it'd make sense: the bawdy, boisterous, hustle-bustle that always pops up in my mind when I hear this style perfectly fits the "topsy turvy" street fair depicted in this song. Except, there are other styles mixed into the song as well. For example, the song begins with a solemn fanfare, whose contour and gestures resemble those of the "Cathedral" motif that we've already examined in the earlier songs.  And then there's the "gypsy" music in the middle of the song, when Esmerelda dances. It uses the so-called "gypsy scale" (aka "Hungarian minor scale" - like a regular minor scale but with raised 4 and 7, creating augmented 2nds). It features virtuoso violin solos that roll the bow across all four strings. It constantly accelerates, from a slow dance to a whirling frenzy.  And of course, how can we miss – though it's easy to miss because it only shows up very briefly – the theme from "Out There," which we hear very briefly in an orchestral interlude while Quasimodo is being publicly humiliated. It's such a poignant moment that highlights the powerful storytelling role of leit motifs. Quasimodo sang "Out There" when he was locked up in the tower and dreaming of how incredible it would be to walk along the streets with everyone else. But now that he's actually out there in the streets, he's being tortured and humiliated.  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.  Gene Structure of "Topsy Turvy"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. :-) 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. tl;dr - MUSIC IS MORE THAN JUST ENTERTAINMENT, AND MUSIC THEORY IS MORE THAN JUST CHORD PROGRESSIONS! I hope you enjoyed this blog post - the sixth 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! ❤️ 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. 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. Wait, hold on a minute: what's a "leit-motif?"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. OK, cool, so what are these leit-motifs in "Bells of Notre Dame?"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). 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:
The Cathedral Theme: Both Good and EvilThe 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. 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.  The Out There Theme: Not In HereThe "Out There" motif is cool, because its most basic 3-note component is a mirror image of the Cathedral Theme. And of course it is: one of the major themes of the movie is the dialectical relationship between the cathedral and the world outside it. While Frollo claims that he's protecting Frollo by keeping him locked in the bell tower, in fact the exact opposite is true. The sanctuary is a prison, and his true home is far away from where he grew up. So it makes sense that these two leit-motifs should be interconnected.  The "Quasi-Frollo" Recitative: |
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AuthorSamantha Zerin has a PhD in historical musicology from New York University, and has taught music theory at NYU, Brown University, and the Borough of Manhattan Community College. She is also a composer and poet, and teaches private students. To learn more about Dr. Zerin and her work, you can visit her main website, www.CreativeShuli.com Archives
July 2020
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