Scott Murphy | A Rogue Note in Lars von Trier's Melancholia

Abstract:
Lars von Trier's 2011 film Melancholia, which juxtaposes a taut family drama against Earth’s impending collision with a rogue planet, exclusively uses multiple fresh recordings of the Prelude from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde as its underscore. Replaying such a lionized museum piece, especially when automated through recording technology, is as ritualistic of an affair for the musical acolyte as charting the motions of the celestial bodies is for the astronomer: over and over, points trace predetermined paths through space and time. However, in the recording used for the film's prologue, which proleptically depicts the collision, the English horn player moves up a semitone one eighth note too early during the third phrase. A mere eighth-note duration and semitone in the vastness of Wagner's musical universe makes a world of difference, just as mere hundreds of thousands of miles in the vastness of the cosmic universe makes a world of difference for the fate of our home planet. The narrative of the film proper, accompanied by different recordings with a correct English-horn performance, promotes the notion that the rogue planet will merely “fly by,” insinuating that the musical and cosmic “mistake” of the prologue will remain separate from the film’s diegesis. Yet the film’s main character gradually divines that an impending Armageddon is part of the universe’s design, which is arguably analogized by the lowering of the entire musical score by a semitone in certain distributions of the film, perversely making the errant English horn note of the prologue the only right note in the film’s soundtrack..

Bio:
Scott Murphy is a Professor of Music Theory at the University of Kansas, where he has taught since 2001. His theories and analyses of music for screen media secured his third publication award from the Society of Music Theory in 2024 and have established him as an important thinker about film and television soundtracks. He has also published research into the structures of Western musical works written by composers from Buxtehude and J.S. Bach to Myaskovsky and Penderecki.

Reference List:
- Huron, D. B. (2016). Voice Leading: The Science behind a Musical Art. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
- Rudolph, P. (2022). Präexistente Musik im Film: Klangwelten im Kino des Lars von Trier. München: edition text + kritik.