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The Dies Irae is a melody that composers of film music have employed in hundreds of films, ranging from Metropolis to The Shining, and Star Wars. It is a product of more than 800 years of musical transformation, finding purchase in a variety of musical environments, including the church, the concert hall, and the cinema. Based on a corpus of nearly 300 films, Hearing Death At the Movies models two new ways of thinking about the Dies Irae. First, it identifies three different versions of the melody, each of which signifies a different function of film music. Second, it traces the semantic shift of the Dies Irae from its religious roots to its secular perception as a symbol of death. This study of the most widely-used theme in film music history will change how you listen to movies.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: The "Other" in Horror; the Dies Irae as "Other".- Part I: History.- Chapter 2: Making of a Musical Meme: Wendy Carlos & Stanley Kubrick.- Chapter 3: Tracing Film Music's Most Ubiquitous Melody: Silent Films, Dimitri Tiomkin, and Vampires.- Part II: Theory.- Chapter 4: The Many Guises of Dies Irae: "Prelude to Evil," "Ominous Echo," and "Tension Engine".- Chapter 5: "It Seems to Belong to Civilization": The Dies Irae in Italy, Camp Crystal Lake, and a Galaxy.- Chapter 6: Afterword: The Ghost Light.
About the author
Alex Ludwig is Associate Professor of Music at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Summary
The Dies Irae is a melody that composers of film music have employed in hundreds of films, ranging from Metropolis to The Shining, and Star Wars. It is a product of more than 800 years of musical transformation, finding purchase in a variety of musical environments, including the church, the concert hall, and the cinema. Based on a corpus of nearly 300 films, Hearing Death At the Movies models two new ways of thinking about the Dies Irae. First, it identifies three different versions of the melody, each of which signifies a different function of film music. Second, it traces the semantic shift of the Dies Irae from its religious roots to its secular perception as a symbol of death. This study of the most widely-used theme in film music history will change how you listen to movies.
