Elliot Goldenthal's Final Fantasy: a Discussion on Mixed Harmonic and Orchestration Techniques Applied to Film Music

This research is based on an aesthetical-theorical analysis of Final Fantasy score giving an insight into the composer?s compositional methods applied to the screen. Film music, over the last thirty years, has taken many forms and gone in many directions that were not thought possible. One of the most interesting directions has been the mixing of contrasting atonal-tonal musical styles within the same score. This approach is an aspect of Postmodernism and has been used mainly in horror-fantasy films. Elliot Goldenthal´s concert music, with its mixing of languages (atonal-tonal) and dramatics, has found a successful way in scoring fantasy-horror movies like Alien III (Fincher, 1992), Sphere (Levinson, 1998) or Interview with the Vampire (Jordan, 1996). The autor discuses the composer?s approach in scoring for this genre of films, focussing on the mixed harmonic and instrumental techniques to match with the imagery of these films, blurring the lines between concert and film both music and composers.