Composers for screen media have long appreciated the power of an unwelcome musical detail—an awkward instrument, an ill-timed stinger, an unresolved chord—to disrupt a scene of amorous nature. Whether for purposes of melodrama, comedy, or worse, few storytelling tropes have the visceral oomph of the broken-off kiss, and never more so than when underscored by resourceful (and sadistic) composers. Hollywood composers learned their cruelest tricks from the late-Romantics, for whom stymieing desire was raised to an aesthetic principle. But film music’s particular brand of mood-killing draws as much from the innate temporal and editorial affordances of the medium as it does the psychosexual hang-ups of figures like Wagner or Tchaikovsky.

In this presentation, I examine how film composers generate and then ruin erotic tension. My focus falls on the musical parameter most able to channel—and frustrate—listener anticipation: the cadence. Working from theories of the expectation and the “contra-cadential style” (Huron 2006), desire in underscore (Buhler 2023), and studies of thematic/harmonic/cadential structuring of filmic expectation (Richards 2016, Lehman 2013), I devise a typology of ways that tonal/phrasal structure can go off the tracks to anti-romantic effect. Parameters examined include melodic continuity, orchestration, harmonic irresolution versus non-resolution and displacement, and motivic liquidation. The latter in particular is shown to pertain to the differentiation of genuinely romantic versus comic affects. I offer an extensive corpus of examples in screen media, drawn from a range of composers including Steiner, Goldsmith, Snow, and Barber. I conclude with an analysis of music by cinema’s most vindictive cadential obstructionist, John Williams, focusing on a set of star-crossed cadences in Star Wars series. The middle chapter of each trilogy features a scene of frustrated erotic tension coupled with leitmotivic incompletion. In each case, the artfulness of the post-cadential denial passage almost seems like an apology for the shamelessness of the foregoing musical blockage. Cadentially speaking, nothing perfect, nor authentic, is to be heard here in these scenes.

From a lifetime of watching movies and television, we all instinctively know that music plays an important role in filmic humor—but what is the precise nature of that role? By what means does music create humor in film? Many scholars have investigated musical humor in common-practice Western art music and recent studies have explored it within the filmic realm. But film music humor studies have focused on particular films and individual elements. This paper presents the first systematic taxonomy for categorizing all forms of music- and sound-based humor in film/television.

I divide sonic film humor into three broad categories: techniques that are mainly-audio, mainly-visual, and fully-audiovisual. With mainly-audio techniques, the humor exists primarily in the sonic realm, due to silly instrumentation, funny song lyrics, or musical antics in composition or performance (i.e. you could hear a recording without the visuals and it would still be funny). With mainly-visual techniques, the humor arises chiefly from the mise-en-scène or physical actions that accompany the music (i.e. you could watch the scene on mute and it would still be funny). With fully-audiovisual techniques, the humor is sonic-based but it is dependent on the filmic setting. The fully-audiovisual category (the focus of this paper) consists of fourteen different techniques through which music and sound can create humor in filmic settings. I posit that every type of sonic humor in cinema can be classified in terms of these categories and techniques.