hey, welcome to 12tone!
a while back, I did a video responding to Adam Neely's thought experiment on negative
time signatures, and it was a lot of fun to make.
instead of just finding a thing and telling you about it, I was doing my own working out,
taking something that didn't exist and examining what it might be if it did.
I thought it was a great video, but these sorts of things are hard to force, so I didn't
really plan on doing it again.
that is, until a couple weeks ago, when I tweeted a joke at my friend Ethan from the
youtube channel Sideways asking why he never talked about darkmotifs.
ok, this may require some context.
you see, Ethan makes videos about film scores, and a lot of his work involves breaking down
the musical themes associated with specific characters, locations, and ideas.
those themes are a huge part of modern film scoring, and the technical term for them is
leitmotif.
so… yeah.
leitmotifs, darkmotifs, you get it.
anyway this was just supposed to be a joke, and I intended to immediately forget about
it, but if you've seen the title of this video, you know that's not what happened.
but let's start with leitmotifs 'cause, you know, they exist.
like I said, these are motifs, or specific, recognizable musical ideas, that are used
to signify a character, place, or thing.
probably one of the most famous leitmotifs is this one (bang) from Jaws, where a simple
half-step line clearly evokes the character of the shark.
other examples include Star Wars's Force theme, (bang) and this bit from Hamilton (bang) that
lets you know that Burr is about to do some narrating.
leitmotifs are generally attributed to the late romantic composer Richard Wagner, who
used them to weave the stories of his operas into the music itself.
contrary to popular belief, Wagner didn't actually invent this technique, nor did he
come up with the name, but he popularized and systematized it, and they're all over
his work in a way that no composer had really done before.
so how about darkmotifs?
well, it's worth noting that the "leit" in leitmotif isn't actually related to the english
word light.
it translates roughly as "leading" or "guiding", so there's no etymological shortcut here.
we're just gonna have to make something up.
let's start simple: darkness is the absence of light, so maybe darkmotifs are just the
absence of leitmotifs?
like, maybe a darkmotif is any time there's not currently music playing that evokes specific
thematic material.
that seems kinda useless, though, so let's get more specific.
maybe it still needs to be a motif.
maybe a darkmotif is a specific, repeated musical idea within a film score that doesn't
represent anything that's happening on screen.
that doesn't seem great either, though: first of all, what's the point?
why would you actively want to avoid conveying narrative information in your score? and second,
odds are good that if you repeat the motif enough times that it becomes memorable, it'll
wind up coincidentally associating itself with something anyway.
the human brain loves connections.
but the most damning argument here is that we already have a word for motifs that aren't
associated with story elements: we call them motifs.
so ok, probably the best way to do this is to look at darkmotifs as a kind of leitmotif,
representing some sort of shift.
like, maybe a darkmotif is an altered version of a leitmotif used to represent a character's
absence.
so as we mentioned, this (bang) is the leitmotif for the shark in Jaws.
it's a low, ascending half-step figure played on the strings.
now imagine there's a beach scene, and behind it you hear a high, descending half-step played
on, say, a flute: (bang) ok, that's still a little spooky, but if we add some accompaniment...
(bang) I am now 100% convinced that the ocean around this beach is completely devoid of
sharks.
why you would want that in a movie about sharks attacking beaches is a pretty good question,
but I'm a theorist, not a screenwriter.
that sort of thing is above my paygrade.
we can do this to other things, too.
the Hamilton leitmotif (bang) is used to represent that Burr has some narrating to do, but what
would it mean if he walked center-stage, a spotlight appeared on him, and then you heard
this?
(bang) it's a similar shape but it doesn't actually resolve, perhaps implying that he's,
I don't know, at a loss for words?
That things are too complicated for him to explain?
Or maybe just that he's conflicted about what he's about to tell you.
it's hard to say for sure what it means when it doesn't actually happen anywhere in the
show, but these are the sorts of questions that a darkmotif could be asking.
still, though, it's not unusual for leitmotifs to develop and change throughout the course
of the film, so this feels tenuous.
I do have a better idea, though, and it has to do with the Force motif.
if you've seen the Last Jedi, you know that Luke's rejection of the Force is a pretty
important part of the story, and one way to capture that musically might be with like
a dark version of the classic Force theme.
now, that could just mean playing it in minor, but that's a pretty lazy way to make things
dark, and besides, it's already in minor, so instead we could try something like this:
(bang) it's not instantly recognizable but it has the same rhythm and mostly the same
shape, it's just that every time it tries to go above C, it gets pulled back down.
it can't get past that barrier, because Luke has cut himself off from the full potential
of the Force.
and then when he reunites with the Force to do big, dramatic things I won't spoil, you
could play both lines together (bang) to show him approaching it with his newfound wisdom.
now, I don't know if John Williams actually did anything like this in the Last Jedi soundtrack
'cause I've only seen the movie once and I haven't studied the score, but if he did,
that would be amazing.
but there's one example I do know of that perfectly encapsulates my idea of what a darkmotif
could be: The Ballad of the Goddess, from Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.
this is one of the main themes of the game, and in it, you hear this: (bang) now, that
may not sound like much, but if we drop the accompaniment, change the key, move it to
a different instrument, and play it backwards, we get this (bang) and if you grew up playing
the same video games I did, you'll immediately recognize that as Zelda's Lullaby. in fact,
the melody for the entire main section of the Ballad is just the Lullaby backwards,
because spoiler alert, the Goddess is Zelda.
now, when you first hear the song you don't actually know that yet, so they have to bury
the reference really deep to avoid ruining a major plot point, but Koji Kondo still sneaks
it in.
which leads me to my final answer: a darkmotif is a hidden leitmotif.
it's there on analysis but it's been manipulated so thoroughly that it would be unreasonable
to expect a listener to actually notice.
it encodes a reference the composer doesn't want you to actually get in the moment, but
if you come back later it can add new layers of meaning.
I don't know many examples of this, but I'm sure they exist, so if you know of any, or
have your own thoughts on what a darkmotif might be, let me know in the comments.
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