Crimson Tide: Hans Zimmer, Subliminal Harmony, and Submerged Voices
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/2036-461X/23447Keywords:
Corporate Classicism, Hans Zimmer, Choral Voices, Neo-Riemmanian Theory, NarrationAbstract
Crimson Tide (Tony Scott, 1995) is a signal example of Hollywood action-adventure movies of the past forty years and in particular of the “high-concept” movie. The score by Hans Zimmer is a landmark score for the composer and consolidates his reputation for scoring films of that genre. This article addresses the now-famous Zimmerian work process and several stylistic traits, including the use of a male chorus. Choral voices in the film’s context provide both a synecdochic link to the submariners but also function as a commentative chorus. Using Neo-Riemannian theory, the potential contribution of which to film-music studies is still only now beginning to be explored, I examine the deployment of specific harmonic strategies that create a link back to earlier Hollywood film-music practices and show how Zimmer represents less an evolution than a continuation of recognisable styles and idioms.
Downloads
References
Audissino, Emilio. 2021a. The Film Music of John Williams: Reviving Hollywood’s Classical Style. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, revised and updated edition of Audissino, Emilio. 2014, John Williams’s
Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music Style. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Audissino, Emilio. 2021b. Film Music in Concert. The Pioneering Role of the Boston Pops Orchestra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blake, Edwards. 1998. “Hans Zimmer”. Film Score. Last accessed November 16, 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/20080716025014/http://www.filmscoremonthly.com/features/zimmer.asp.
Bordwell, David. 2002. “Intensified Continuity Visual Style in Contemporary American Film”. Film Quarterly 55 (3): 16–28.
Bribitzer-Stull, Matthew. 2015. Understanding the Leitmotif. From Wagner to Hollywood film music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Buhler, James, and David Neumeyer. 2016. Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Buhler, James. 2020. “Music, Digital Audio, Labor: Notes on Audio and Music Production for Contemporary Action Film.” In Music in Action Film: Sounds Like Action!, edited by James Buhler and Mark Durrand, 273–91. New York: Routledge.
Cooke, Mervyn. 2019. “A Bridge Too Far? Music in the British War Film, 1945–80.” In Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War, edited by Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska, 86–107. London: Routledge.
Filmtracks. n.d. “Crimson Tide”. Last accessed November 16, 2024. https://www.filmtracks.com/titles/crimson_tide.html.
Greig, Donald. 2021. “Lady in the Lake, Choral Voices, and Narrative Agency.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 15 (1): 37–69.
Halfyard, Janet K. 2013. “Cue the Big Theme? The Sound of the Superhero.” In The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman and Carol Vernallis, 171–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hexel, Vasco. 2016. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s The Dark Knight: A Film Score Guide. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Kerins, Mark. 2015. “The Modern Entertainment Marketplace: 2000-present.” In Sound: Dialogue, Music, and Effects, edited by Kathryn Kalinak, 133–55. London: I.B. Tauris.
Kmet, Nicholas. 2018. “Remote Control: Collaborative Scoring and the Question of Authorship.” Revue musicale OICRM 5 (2): 1–14.
Koldau, Linda Maria. 2010. “Sound Effects As a Genre-Defining Factor in Submarine Films.” MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research 26 (48): 18–30. doi: https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v26i48.2117.
Lehman, Frank. 2016. “Manufacturing the Epic Score: Hans Zimmer and the Sounds of Significance.” In Music in Epic Film: Listening to Spectacle, edited by Stephen Meyer, 27–55. New York Routledge.
Lehman, Frank. 2018. Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lehman, Frank. 2019. “Tank Canons and Shark Cage Fugues: Neo-Baroque Topics and the ‘Learned’ Style in John Williams’s Film Music”, unpublished conference paper, Annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Boston, 31 October, 2019.
Lehman, Frank. 2021. “John Williams’s Action Music in the Twenty-First Century.” In Music in Action Film: Sounds Like Action!, edited by James Buhler and Mark Durrand, 116–148. New York, Routledge.
Lysy, Craig. 2019. Crimson Tide – Hans Zimmer. Last accessed November 16, 2024. https://moviemusicuk.us/2019/04/15/crimson-tide-hans-zimmer/.
Murphy, Scott. 2014. “Transformational Theory and the Analysis of Film Music.” In The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, edited by David Neumeyer, 471–99. New York: Oxford University Press.
Reyland, Nicholas. 2015. “Corporate Classicism and the Metaphysical Style: Affects, Effects, and Contexts of Two Recent Trends in Screen Scoring.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 9 (2): 115–30.
Schelle, Michael. 1999. The Score: Interviews with Film Composers, Beverley Hills, CA: Silman-James Press.
Sonnenschein, David. 2001. Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema. Los Angeles: Michael Wiese Productions.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Donald Greig
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
