Abstract
Most filmgoers feel the power of film music and its ability to “tell the story,” though few are able to describe how that power works. Through close analysis of several uses of music in a variety of Hollywood films, this thesis provides insights into the nature and degree of how the emotional power of film music serves the narration. Using neoformalist film-studies methods combined with recent ideas in philosophy, film-music narratology, and fields that study the mind and brain, I will demonstrate film music’s ability to relay narrative information, showing that film music is able to function as a primary contributor to our comprehension of film narratives as it increases knowledgeability and communicativeness thereby facilitating the construction of the fabula. Through close analysis of music’s role in the narration process, I argue for the necessity of expanding the type of knowledge that the narration shares as well as reconceptualizing ways of sharing and receiving it. The results suggest that we rethink the nature of narration and of hypothetical spectators’ activities as they interact with a film’s stylistic system in their active construction the fabula. That film music “moves us” is not just figuratively true but literally true as the spectator through embodied cognition engages with the film’s stylistic system that “hijacks” the evolutionary dispositions that function to monitor physical, emotional and social changes to the environment, including the mediated environment.
Committee Chair
Colin Burnett
Committee Members
Ignacio Sánchez Prado Karen Skinner
Degree
Doctor of Liberal Arts (DLA)
Author's Department
Liberal Arts
Document Type
Thesis DLA
Date of Award
Spring 5-2025
Language
English (en)
Recommended Citation
Meyer, Eric, "Telling Melodies: Musical Agency in Narrative Film" (2025). Arts & Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 3642.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3642