Film Music Notes

Understanding the art of film music

Launch Sale – 20% off Action-Music Harmony 3

Learn to write common action chords with more than one tonic. Understand how these dissonant but tonally-based harmonies are used in action scenes for several purposes: scoring long passages over a single chord, emphasizing key moments in the narrative, and expressing common associations.

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Coming Soon – Theme Writing 2

Write melodies that mean what you want them to mean. Melodies in tonal music tend to conform to underlying linear patterns that have different emotional meanings when they are elaborated in different ways. By analyzing many of the best-known themes to emerge from Hollywood scores, you’ll learn these basic shapes and how the elaborating techniques can create expressive effects that are perfectly suited to a theme’s association.

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Music Theorist

Mark Richards, PhD

I worked as a Professor of Music Theory for several years in universities, specializing in film music, Beethoven, and rock music in my teaching and research. For more than two decades, I have taught music theory and analysis to all ages and at all levels from the community music school to the large university. I have published articles on film music and have a new chapter on John Williams’ Star Wars themes forthcoming in 2022.

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