The Major Tritone Progression in Recent Hollywood Science Fiction Films

Abstract

In the 2002 film Treasure Planet, composer James Newton Howard accompanies the primary shot of the titular orb with an undulation between two major triads a tritone apart. I offer three approaches to understanding the appropriateness of this image/music pairing. First, I present several scenes from recent Hollywood films that conspicuously combine this triadic progression with settings of, or objects from, outer space. Second, I relay ways in which the intrinsic harmonic and voice-leading characteristics of this triadic progression invoke the concepts of great distance, ambiguity, and unfamiliarity. Third, I conclude with a more thorough study of Howard’s harmonic language in the score for Treasure Planet, suggesting that this progression and the scene it accompanies represents the culmination of musical and visual/narrative processes, respectively.