Mark Richards Paper: Film Music Themes: Analysis and Corpus Study – EXAMPLES AND APPENDIX

Film Music Themes: Analysis and Corpus Study – EXAMPLES AND APPENDIX

The phrase structure of film music themes remains virtually unexplored in scholarly literature. In Mark Richards’s article from 2016, he proposes an analytical system that expands and adapts Caplin 1998 in order to categorize the gamut of film music themes in some detail. This system is then applied to a cross-section of 482 themes from Oscar-nominated scores ranging from the early 1930s to the present day. In doing so, notable divisions appear around 1960 and 1990, times that coincide with trends that drastically affected the composition of film music in general.