Building on work by Robert Hatten (1994), Yonatin Malin (2010), Stephen Rumph (2012), and others, this paper proposes a theory of libretto reading anchored to the following proposition: unmarked poetic features are flexibly realized, while marked poetic elements elicit a specific set of musical responses. Such markedness correlations—conceptual lumps of multimedia material anchored to a marked feature in one component medium—serve as the theory’s basic unit of analysis, and are conceptualized as an associative chain moving from a marked poetic feature, through that feature’s marked effect or function, and arriving at an associated musical feature. The theory proposes that such markedness correlations were a core part of an opera composer’s musical vocabulary: as experienced composers flicked their eyes across a libretto, its marked elements catalyzed a chain of associations that, seemingly automatically, summoned a specific musical device to mind. Hence, the paper proposes a general theory of composer-libretto interactions, one that explains which compositional decisions were tightly constrained by poetic features and which were open to variation.

Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock had one of the most storied premieres in Broadway history, but what of its music? This talk analyzes three scenes from this WPA Federal Theatre Project show and discusses how musical choices reflect and intensify the meaning of the agitprop text. I examine:

• Musical topic and extramusical association in the “faculty room” scene, where our Brechtian oligarch (Mr. Mister), a university trustee, pressures the university President to conscript his students into military service for the sake of defending his factory;

• “Croon-Spoon,” which lampoons Mr. Mister’s adult children (Junior Mister and Sister Mister), who prat on about nothing of importance while their father works to imprison his union-organizing employees; and

• “The Cradle Will Rock” (title song), a revolutionary song sung by the head union organizer, and which upends tonal and formal norms in ways that seem at least as radical as its lyrics.

Film music scholars (e.g., Manvell and Huntley 1975, Gorbman 1987, Buhler and Neumeyer 2011), have theorized at length about the way music can fuse and shape images. Capuzzo (2004), Lehman (2013, 2018), and Murphy (2014a), among others, have productively applied and developed the process-based approach of David Lewin’s (1987) transformational theory, and specifically the Neo-Riemannian branch of this theory (Cohn 2004, 2012), to understand how harmonic progressions can contribute to the process. This paper presents a methodology, rooted in transformational theory, which combines the insights of Leonard Meyer (1956) and the approach of Steve Rings (2011), to understand interesting melodic and formal aspects of films. Through examples from associated films by Max Steiner, like Now Voyager, Casablanca, and Mildred Pierce, it presents a typology of melodic transformations that Steiner uses to thwart listener’s expectations in a way that shapes the underlying drama. It also illustrates how these transformations can bridge the ‘fantastical’ gap (Stilwell 2007) between the diegetic and non-diegetic as well as the real versus ideal (Altman 1987). Building on the piece-specific analytical work of Leinberger (1996, 2002, 2016), Daubney (2000), and Marks (2000), these findings interact in interesting ways with corpus-based studies of Steiner’s music (Yorgason and Lyon 2017, 2020), showing how these methodologies can inform one another. It also adds another potential tool to existing studies of smoothness and structure in multi-media (Motazedian 2023, Medina-Gray 2019).