Harvard University

Graduate Student, Music

Thesis Title: Reading Tonality Through Film: Transformational Hermeneutics and the Music of Hollywood

About

Frank Lehman is PhD candidate in Music Theory at Harvard University's department of Music. His research centers on the analysis of film music.

He uses traditional interpretative techniques along with a combination of neo-Riemannian theory, tonal space representation, and narrative theory to probe music that is eminently familiar, but surprisingly poorly understood. Film music not only benefits from this overdue analytic attention -- the various music theories that come in contact with it emerge conceptually clarified and methodologically enriched.

Film composers Frank specializes in include John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and James Horner.

See examples of dynamic music analysis created by Frank here:
*The Beatles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMBznIoH0sg
*Star Trek: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42Vzvbqciqg
*Schubert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ4jr_E-zHw

Additional areas of research include:
*Music aesthetics and philosophy (including the musical sublimity, apophenia)
*Wagnerian Opera
*Leitmotif and Transformation
*Lewinian and neo-Riemannian approaches to chromaticism
*Extended, late-, and post-tonal harmony
*The symphony in the 20th Century
*Schenkerian theory and its integration with other analytic systems.
*Musical Expressivity
*Music Cognition (particularly of atonal idioms)
*Music of Schubert

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