Halp! Williams is hurting my brain again

I'm not about to start creating probabilistic pie-charts of his rhythms... But I have a sinking feeling that would be almost as useful as the way I’m analyzing this piece now.

It's part of my summer assignments, and it's turning out to be the hardest part so far.

Here is a midi.

And here is how I analyzed it:



Skipping ahead a bit, here is the reprise:



None of this seems to make much sense

Williams certainly likes to screw around with traditional hymn-like tonality, doesn't he? My advice is to treat a lot of the weird harmonies as they are - created by a whole lot of dissonant passing tones that really don't add up to much of anything when analyzed traditionally.

Williams treats a lot of chord functions loosely, a la Prokofiev. The penultimate chord in this cue looks nothing like a dominant chord, but it certainly sounds and functions that way.

That's all I can say about this - I too stumbled across this a couple years back, and said 'wtf?' But I actually LOVE this cue, just for it's kooky use of harmony.

Thanks, but I can't help feeling there's more of a system to the way he writes... maybe he does it in a different way, writing the melody (which is clearly traditionally tonal) and then "dropping" notes beneath it in a way that leads to smooth partwriting and mostly tonal chords? Those question-mark chords still confuse me

If you look, most of the NHT's are passing between HT's. The F# in the first measure is the 7th which is passing from the 1 to the 6th.

For the most part there is nothing special going on except the use of NHT's.


Its not G GM7 Em7 C but simply G Em7 C.

The first chord in measure 5 is simply a G chord. Notice its the same soprano line as the first measure and the alto is the same with a slight modification. The F# and Eb are just leading tones.

One thing you need to do is make sure your #'s and b's are notated properly. #'s will ascend and b's will descend. e.g, in measure 5 in the bass you have C# moving to a Cn. Since the C# is passing from D to C its obvious that its a Db instead. (C# resolves to D unless, of course, its obvious that its an altered C note(which still will usually be notated as a Db))

I would even go so far to say that the 2nd phrase was copied from the first and then modified to give it a bit of a variation instead of a repeat(specifically since 4th measure of the 2nd phrase changes).

So my suggestion is that you compare the first phrase with the second and see how it differs and see how the harmony differs(at a glance it is the same except the last measure).

Also note that once you here something in one context you have more room for ambiguity the second time around because your ear has already set up the expectation. When the 2nd phrase comes in it sounds different yet its the same harmony. The difference is because of the super metrical accented NHT's yet the patterns are still very similar.

The point being is that there is not really essentially modifications to the harmony, rhythm, or melody(at least from glancing at it) and so there is really nothing different. It is just a repeat of the first phrase(well, actually its a "repeat" with a codetta).

Anyways, I wouldn't try to work at it too hard. The main point is that you should try to figure out what he is doing rather than account for every note. I'd also worry more about the basic harmonies as you are labeling things without using the context of surrounding chords. Although its not necessarily wrong your making it much harder to see the forest instead of the tree's and it was probably not conceived that way(he most likely thought in terms of basic harmonies with NHT's).

Notice how the recap uses the ideas from the expo. Its best to try and figure out how these ideas were combined and modified to really understand what is going on. Sometimes this explains a lot more than just knowing the harmony(actually most of the time in this kinda music). e.g., it can, say, explain why he used some note at some point that seems odd or why, say, he modified the motive at some point which lead to a new harmony from the original which doesn't seem to make since without that context.