Reharmonisation Part 1: Introduction and "Film Music Harmony"

I love musical harmony. Ever since I got really fascinated by music, I remember that I always was especially moved by certain harmonic constellations or choices in music. Songs that had a "non standard" chord progression quickly became my favourites.

This was also one of the reasons why it took me quite a while to appreciate classical music. I felt that it often was harmonically just too boring and permanent changes between tonic and dominant as heard in many overplayed works of the classical and early romantic period kept me away from exploring more in this genre.

When I discovered film music, I felt like I had found a treasure. The grandeur and emotional impact of a large orchestra paired with a harmonic language that was at least for me way more accessible as it used the vocabulary of 20th century tonal harmony felt like the perfect match.

And relatively quickly after opening this box of the pandoras, I realized that I really had no idea about harmony. My harmonic horizon at that time was limited to major and minor triads. I knew there were dominant7 chords, but they sounded like this old fashioned classical music so I didn't bother exploring that. And frankly, managing triadic harmony was more than enough for me to chew on at this time.

But after discovering film music, it dawned on me that this music is doing way more than I was capable of on the harmonic side, yet there were constant harmonic moments in film scores that gave me chills. So I decided to figure this out.

Unfortunately, it took a few years until I really found the right clue: Jazz Harmony. Only after diving a while into this genre out of pure curiosity and because I liked Jazz, I figured out that certain aspect of this harmonic theory brought me results that sounded like these film scores I love. But on the other hand, there were also things in Jazz Harmony that sounded completely NOT like film music. So, it took me a bit to figure out what to distill from it to get closer to what I wanted.

The reason why I'm telling all this is because it gives a bit of context of what I'm trying to do with this new multi part tutorial. The term reharmonisation is most commonly used in the Jazz world. Musicians or arrangers take an existing melody or theme and apply new chords to them in order to create a new spin on a well known piece or to harmonically develop it. There are common strategies how you can reharmonize certain chords in the Jazz world. However, this technique is also extremely relevant for film composers. Being able to give a theme a new harmonic hue is a very essential skillset to keep a composition interesting or to develop a theme through an entire movie.

However, a lot of the standard Jazz reharmonistion tactics sound considerably "un-filmic" and have a strong gravity towards "dominantic" harmony while film music is considerably more "subdominantic" (will explain this later in more detail). 

So the idea of this multi part tutorial is to filter out the strategies that are relevant if you are dealing with the sound world of modern film scores (by modern I mean anything past Golden Age). A lot of what is going on harmonically in film scores is very much based on Jazz Harmony. Modal approaches, Polychords etc. are all common practices in Jazz but are used in a way that makes them sound specifically "Jazz". So it is easy to get confused as there also is no standard literature that really covers the topic of film score harmony in form of an academic text book. There is a book called "Hollywood Harmony" by Frank Lehman, which deals with this topic and has some great insight. However, it is more of an analytical text that tries to understand what is going on from a musicologist's perspective rather than providing practical strategies to use for composers or arrangers.

Of course this topic is incredibly complex and even a multi part tutorial will not allow me to cover it in all detail but I will try to give some guidelines to explore further on your own.

Harmonisation or Re-Harmonisation describes the process of setting a melody in a new harmonic context. Especially for film composers, this is a huge playing field as with proper skills in this field, you can give almost any emotional colour to any melody. Being able to harmonize a main theme in a more sinister or a more heroic way is a great source  for musical storytelling.

Reharmonisations can span from subtle changes like adding a mild chord extension to completely throwing everything over board. Essentially, from a theoretical standpoint, anything goes. You can set a melody in context of completely remote chords and still make it plausible if you are consequent about it. However, more often, it is desirable to stay within certain boundaries to not alienate your audience or go over board with it.

It should be noted that film scores very rarely include radical reharmonisations. Even epic multi part sagas like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of The Rings very often present themes in their original harmonisation. However, this skillset is nonetheless extremely important as flexibility in this regard also allows you to find interesting and captivating harmonic solutions to begin with.

Essentially, you should be aware that you can harmonize any note with any root note in a more or less "simple" way.

Let's for example take C. It is absolutely no problem to place that note in a chord of any tonality without needing to go down the route of freaky Jazz harmony.

Below, there is one possibility to harmonize C in all 12 keys. I consciously avoided any overly complex chords. I would expect any of these chords to be seen in film scoring:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/harmonisation-of-c/s-qkAttUEr08B

So from a standpoint that purely focuses on what is possible, there are essentially endless variants to harmonize something. However of course, as so often in music, context is key. Not every chord followed by every chord sounds like a plausible chord progression and way more often, we need to harmonize several notes of a melody with one chord and not just one note as with the theoretical example above. For instance, if we just had the melody of two half notes going from C to D, it would for instance make it considerably more tricky to harmonize it with a Dbmaj7 chord as in the second bar.

One more thing that I want to focus on in this series as I already wrote above is style. While I could harmonize a C over the root of A with a A7#9 chord and this would be perfectly suitable in Jazz, you would need to search quite hard to find this particular chord type in "generic" film music.

So in spite of the theoretical endless possibilities, the actually available ways might be quite limited. The possibilities are also narrowed by what the melody is doing. A great example is the band Dirty Loops, who got popular with crazy reharmonisations of popular pop songs. They did quite a few of these songs and the interesting aspect is, that they often chose songs that have a tonally relatively static melody. The more limited the pitch material to harmonize is, the easier it is to squeeze it into all sorts of chords. Melodies that consist of chord arpeggios and lots of scale motion are inherently trickier to reharmonize and might limit the possibilities even to just one definitive harmonisation.

In my opinion it is the most important thing to develop a sense to feel where a possibility for an captivating reharmonisation is and having the flexibility to chase it to a satisfying level.

So, in the next parts, we will try to systematically go ahead and talk about strategies to harmonise something with a sensibility for film score sound and without making it into a Jazz tune.