Key is one of the simplest building blocks of music and a central property of a work’s musical identity—we refer to “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C Minor,” not “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in Four Movements and 34 Minutes” or “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony With the Very Iconic Motive.” But for a variety of reasons, key has always been ignored as a significant parameter in film music. This talk will show how keys can tell stories in film. The concept of soundtrack is expanded beyond just original scoring to include pre-existing music and sound effects, which represents a paradigm shift in how we perceive films since sound effects aren’t normally heard as “music.” Studying the keys traversed in a film can reveal fascinating insights and hidden layers of narrative meaning, granting new ways to engage with our favorite films.

Táhirih Motazedian is an Associate Professor of Music at Vassar College.  Her book, Key Constellations: Interpreting Tonality in Film (University of California Press, 2023) was awarded the Society for Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar Book Award.  She has published on a variety of topics, including Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s politically explosive production of Wagner’s Die Walküre, the history and science behind the poignancy of the “heartstring schema” in film and nineteenth-century music, a radical new interpretation of Holst’s Planets as a fantasy of death, a psychological reading of the film Black Swan in which Tchaikovsky plays a phantasmagorical role in the downfall of a ballerina, and an analysis of Shostakovich’s unpopular second violin concerto as a quiet anthem of victory through perseverance.  Táhirih earned her PhD in music theory from Yale University.  Before that, she was a planetary scientist at NASA, working with lunar samples, solar samples, and serving as a Downlink Operations Lead for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.