Hollywood Harmony is a passionate love letter with two addressees. In this volume, Lehman writes not only about his love for cinema and the music that accompanies it, but also his love for the toolsets offered by transformational music theories, the best-known of which is often called ‘neo-Riemannian theory’. An analytical framework essentially invented by Lewin (Reference Lewin1987) and refined by writers such as Hyer (Reference Hyer1995), Cohn (Reference Cohn1997 and Reference Cohn1998) and Hook (Reference Hook2002), neo-Riemannian analysis is generally used to study chromatic music based on major and minor triads, especially in cases where there may be no central tonic around which to orient a passage's chords and/or where enharmonic respellings are required. In short, as Capuzzo (Reference Capuzzo2004, pp. 196–7) and Murphy (Reference Murphy and Neumeyer2014, pp. 483–4) have argued, it is an ideal methodology for studying the neo-Romantic triadic compositional style pervasive in film scores.
As there are two subjects of his letter, so are there two audiences for this book. On the one hand, the book is intended for an audience of professional music theorists and makes substantial contributions to the field of music theory, but on the other hand Lehman does not strictly position the volume within the disciplinary confines of music theory, but in the broader field of film music studies, whose scholars doubtless share his enthusiasm for film scoring but may not be fluent in the technicalities of transformational analysis. At the outset, he describes the reciprocal goal of the book – to show what music theory has to offer film music studies, and vice versa – and explicitly understands that the book requires ‘a delicate balancing act, adapting and presenting its findings in a way consonant with the transdisciplinary nature of film music studies, but without sacrificing sophistication for the sake of accessibility’ (pp. 5–7).
If the book has a shortcoming, it is in the handling of the balancing act: sometimes it feels like the amalgamation of two books, one for each audience, and a general discussion meant for one audience can abruptly give way to meaty, technical detail for the other. This occurs, for example, late in the book when a heady and theoretically dense meditation on monist and dualist accounts of triadic music theory (pp. 214–217) interrupts what is perhaps the book's greatest achievement – Lehman's cubic model of triadic harmony, which I will return to below. So, on the one hand, there is a very real risk that a non-theorist reader might get confused and overwhelmed with some of the technical language; but on the other hand, neo-Riemannian practitioners of a particularly formal bent might be uncomfortable with some of Lehman's methodological fuzziness. For example, the non-theorist may be baffled by the equivalence between T5 and D (p. 93), and such a reader would probably be even more confused that these are also equivalent to LR(m) and RL(M). At the same time, the music theorist might wish for a rigorous rationale for importing as transformations things like transposition labels, native to set theory and a 19th-century conventional Riemannian label. This is especially true since Lehman is happy to use other toolsets, such as Roman numeral analysis, elsewhere in the volume. In other words, it is possible that this aspect of the book may frighten off the former reader or irk the latter – and this would be most unfortunate, because the volume has a tremendous amount to offer both of them.
For the purposes of this review, I am less concerned for readers in the second camp, and I expect that a review housed in a music theory journal will engage in a detailed dialogue with the book's theoretical apparatus. Instead, I worry about readers in the first camp: the non-theorist who glances at Figure 1.4 and its reference to ‘diat1#’ (p. 33), and feels lost by the label, even though ‘diat’ itself appears in the prefatory glossary (p. xiii) and is written out on the following page as ‘1# diatonic collection’ (p. 34). I worry about readers unfamiliar with Schenkerian reduction who struggle to listen along with the companion website to Figure 1.6 (p. 38) or Figure 2.3 (p. 55). I worry about the reader who is asked to contend with transpositional and transformational cycles in Chapter 2 before encountering Table 3.1 and the following discussion of its vocabulary of triadic transformations (pp. 90–95). In fact, it may even be that many readers would benefit by starting this book with Chapter 3, because it would be a shame for the non-theorist to give up before being treated to some of Lehman's most astounding analyses (I wonder if there was a late-stage decision to reverse Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, as the prefatory pages on ‘Abbreviations, Orthography, and Examples’ promise detailed explication of the transformations in Chapter 2, p. xiv).
I fret about these readers because I would not want them to conclude that this book is for someone else, and to miss the section on ‘Whole Tone Dreams’ and its observations that certain immanent features of the collection accord with its ‘dreaminess’ trope: the traits of the collection ‘all but annul tonal hierarchy and position finding, and thus map with ease onto expressive states of weightlessness, disorientation, and hypnogogia’ (pp. 51–54). I would not want these readers to miss an opportunity to learn about the basics of neo-Riemannian theory – and, in particular, how each of the various chordal transformations conveys a characteristic musical effect, and how those effects can be employed to advance specific narrative ends. Such readers would benefit immensely from an engagement with the lively discussion of a wide-ranging collection of scores by Elliot Goldenthal (pp. 96–105). And I want these readers to see how concatenations of transformations reveal a surprising ‘leitharmonic’ development that takes place among the title themes for the three Dark Knight movies – one that spans the work of two different composers (p. 131).
I would be sorry for the film music enthusiast who gave up on the book before reading Lehman's gripping account of Howard Shore's score for the Lord of the Rings trilogy: how the limited harmonic palette of chords mostly built on D, E, and F nonetheless produces an ‘overwhelming impression … of ceaseless motion and change’ as the camera follows the lighting of the beacons from mountaintop to mountaintop in Return of the King (pp. 174 –75); the hidden symmetries and harmonic surprises that elicit chills in the ‘Théoden Rides Forth’ cue of The Two Towers (pp. 179–85); or the harmonic swirls and eddies that captures the awe and wonder of the Argonoth sequence in The Fellowship of the Ring (pp. 192–97). And, as mentioned above, no reader should skip Lehman's greatest achievement, his cubic model of triadic space (pp. 203–207), which allows him to propose a multiplicity of chromatic musical narratives that he expertly engages in the analysis of a diverse set of film compositions: Mark Snow's scoring from a 2001 episode of The X-Files, Hugo Friedhofer's Joan of Arc (1948) score, Max Steiner's Lady of Fatima (1956) score and Alfred Newman's 1943 score to The Song of Bernadette (pp. 220–34).
In short, there may be occasional infelicities in Hollywood Harmony's organisational and argumentative strategies, but what they occlude is a genuinely novel and energetic approach to film music scholarship; and here, I should advocate for a second edition, as a reconfigured volume could well position this as the definitive handbook of harmonic transformation in cinematic scoring for years, if not decades, to come.
