Journal of Film Music 10.2 (2017) 7-48 Submitted: May 2019 ISSN (print) 1087-7142 https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.20810 Accepted: April 2021 ISSN (online) 1758-860X © Copyright The International Film Music Society, published by Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX. Tugging at Heartstrings: Bittersweet Harmonies in the Classic Hollywood Love Theme TOM SCHNELLER and TÁHIRIH MOTAZEDIAN Independent Scholar Vassar College wyckwyn@gmail.com tmotazedian@vassar.edu Abstract: The love theme is one of the central musicodramatic topics of classic Hollywood music but, thus far, little scholarly attention has been paid to the specific musical devices used by film composers to depict love. To the extent that musical analysis has entered the picture at all, it has tended to focus on the motivic level, despite the fact that much of the emotional alchemy of film music resides in its harmonic structure. This is particularly true for classic Hollywood love themes, which often draw on subtle chromatic inflections to weave their affec- tive spells. In this article, we will address two particular harmonic schemas associated with romance during the studio era: (1) the Heartstring schema, which involves the inflection of a major tonic by a chromatic chord usually centered on ♭ ̂ 6 , and (2) the downstep modulation, a variant of the circle-of-fifths sequence. Both schemas rely on the bittersweet frisson between major and minor modes, a tension that contributes significantly to the emotional punch still packed by the great love themes of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Keywords: harmonic schema; love themes; ♭ ̂ 6 ; minor iv; downstep modulation O n November 8, 1945, Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Spellbound opened in California. Among the spectators at the Leimert Theatre in South Los Angeles was a sixteen-year old pianist and composer named Jerry Goldsmith (Goldsmith n.d.). “I fell in love with Ingrid Bergman and I fell in love with Miklós Rózsa’s score,” Goldsmith later recalled. “I decided then I was going to marry Ingrid Bergman and I was going to write music for films. So half my dream came true” (Coggin 2014). Goldsmith went on to study with Rózsa at UCLA, and, like his colleague John Williams, would perpetuate the tradition of classic Hollywood music into the twenty-first century. Within that tradition, sweeping love themes like the one for Spellbound served as the melodic backbone of film music. As early as 1925, conductor Ernö Rapée noted that “the love theme is a very important part of the scoring as it is a constantly recurring theme in the average run of pictures and as a rule will impress your audience more than any other theme.” 1 The typical main title of the 1930s and ’40s featured the love theme, which was usually the centerpiece of the score (as is the case in Spellbound). Love themes were grist for the mill of commercial music publishers and record producers, who helped to ingrain them in the collective cultural consciousness of mid-twentieth-century Americans— much as Italian opera arias had been in nineteenth- century European culture. To name but a few, the love themes from Laura (David Raksin, 1944), On Green Dolphin Street (Bronislau Kaper, 1947), Unchained (Alex North, 1955), Picnic (George Duning, 1955), Friendly Persuasion (Dmitri Tiomkin, 1956), A Summer Place (Max Steiner, 1959), and Spartacus (Alex North, 1960) were adapted and transformed by jazz and pop artists and thus entered the bloodstream of American popular music. 1 Quoted in Cooke (2010, 23). ARTICLE