Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema by David P. Neumeyer

Author:David P. Neumeyer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2015-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Table 5.1. Casablanca, Max Steiner’s Sketches, Annotations for Reuses, with Comments

Source: Based on sketches in the Max Steiner Collection, Brigham Young University.

Figure 5.1. Casablanca, two stinger chords, orchestration details. (From materials in the Warner Bros. Collection, University of Southern California.)

As figure 5.1 shows, the two chords are also not precisely the same in pitch design: Martin Marks (2000, 168) reproduces the entire first page of the sketch for Reel 4, Part 7, but ironically the reproduction is so clean that it suppresses a smudge in the original sketch: the sharp accidental on F has been erased. There is a similar erasure on F in bar 2 of the tune. An F in the latter case would have been a mistake if Steiner intended to follow the melody exactly, but his original intention seems to have been to intensify the opening as a complex and prolonged G minor sonority (that is, at the tritone from D, the key in which Dooley Wilson was just singing). Still, it is hard to imagine that this version survived past bar 3, when the motive moves upward through the F major scale and the alteration of F to F turns G minor into the supertonic in F major.

Another possible way to look at this opening is in terms of the melody itself. It is clearly in F major, and interpreting the gaze sonority strictly in F means we can hear it—very easily in fact—as a C13 chord. The F in the 5,4 chord, then, would make sense, since it forms the conventional raised eleventh, according to jazz theory and swing-era practice (see figure 5.2 at left, where the presumed bass C2 is added; likewise for the 4,7 chord at right). That C is missing and F is lowered obviously increases the expressive power of the gaze sonority at the same time it obscures its functionality. All this, again, would have occurred to Steiner by the time he was composing bar 3, and the end result is the overwhelming of F major implications by D minor in part 1 of the reunion scene, as discussed in chapter 4. The relationship of sustained chord to melody moving within is the same in both cases: in figure 5.3a, the initial and prominent notes of the two motivic segment are F4 and D4; in figure 5.3b, the initial tetrachord of “As Time Goes By” is B4–A4–G4–F4.

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