Rising Adventure Triads
Rising Adventure Triads
Today I’m looking at an awesome device that I found in Joel McNeely’s score for Return to Neverland. I used this device in a short fragment, which inspired a couple of bars either side.
The opening is just your typical huge tutti with an orchestration very similar to the starwars opening, with broadly-orchestrated call-and-answer counterpoint between high and low elements.
Then comes the “rising adventure triads” device which I took from McNeely’s score, where triads rise non-diatonically while they keep on resolving their sus4 suspensions. The effect is really fanciful and optimistic.
The last couple of bars use a nice device that I discovered in Williams’ score for Saving Private Ryan (and have since noticed all over the place), where you set up a dominant chord but leave the leading tone hanging; the music modulates up a major third, so where you expected the leading tone to resolve it becomes the fifth of the next chord. I associate that harmonic device to a sense of elation and it seems to work really well for that family movie adventure feel here.
Professionally-engraved version generously copied by Jimmy Lockett:
Thursday, 30 April 2009
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