"It Follows" (2014), written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. It chronicles the story of Jay, a college student who contracts a curse through sexual intercourse. The curse manifests itself as a human whom only the infected persons can see, always following at a walking pace, and determined to kill if it catches up. This thesis demonstrates the score's crucial role in establishing affect, setting, and character in a film with sparse dialogue and a silent monster. Moreover, the score creates a sense of the uncanny by complicating the binary between music and sound effect and fulfills the need to create dread without resorting to the loud or sudden sounds traditionally heard in horror films. The score's composer, Richard Vreeland, achieves this effect by drawing on both classical film scoring techniques as well as more modern horror scoring styles. It is this interaction between styles that enhances the viewers' experience of dread and horror in the film. This thesis analyzes how Vreeland's score for "It Follows" exploits the poetics of the fantastical gap, of the uncanny, and of musical semiosis. I primarily focus on the "Heels" theme and use of drones in "It Follows," tracing how these musical features blur the distinction between what is score and what is sound effect. I also examine the use of melodic themes in a primarily non-melodic score. By analyzing these elements, I show how Richard Vreeland uses both classical and modern scoring techniques to answer his own question: "Why is this scary? What could push that emotion even further?"

As a film composer, Bruce Broughton uses themes, motives, gestures, tropes, and other film composition devices; however, he is also able to develop them into compelling formal structures through the use of film composition techniques in his concert music. Traditional musical form is not necessarily applicable to film music. The film dictates the pacing and structure, whereas concert music allows for the creation of form and more complex musical development. Through his extensive experience composing in the film industry, Broughton instinctively uses his film composition techniques as a means to reach his audience with his concert music. He establishes a common ground through film score vernacular to draw the listener into a more sophisticated musical conversation. This is particularly evident in his extensive wind band catalogue. In this dissertation, I identify Bruce Broughton's film composition techniques and examine how he employs them to create a stand-alone form using those techniques in his wind band music. The film composition techniques that are examined include character association, character interaction, motivic snippets, programmatic associations, and musical tropes. These aspects are demonstrated as they influence form in three of his most frequently performed and highly acclaimed pieces for wind band: In the World of Spirits, Celebration, and Spacious Skies. Through the examination, Broughton's use of formal development through film composition devices is demonstrated.

The films of David Lynch are full of ambiguities that derive from his habitual distortion of time, inversion of characters, and creation of ironic, dreamlike worlds that are mired in crisis. While these ambiguities have been explored from numerous angles, scholars have only recently begun to closely examine music's role in Lynch's cinematic imagination. This dissertation explores the relationship between music and fantasy through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis where fantasy plays a crucial role in helping psychoanalytical subjects work through their psychical crises. In particular, I look at Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1996), and Mulholland Drive (2001), showing how Lynch employs music to manage and, in the case of Mulholland Drive, move beyond the particular crises of jouissance experienced by the Characters--and also the viewers. Before engaging in my analysis of Lynch's film music, however, I begin with an extended discussion of what Kevin Korsyn describes as the current crisis of music scholarship, examining how this crisis manifests itself in recent "postmodern" interpretations of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Few works are invested with as much cultural capital as this one and arguably the discourse around it exhibits the crisis more acutely than any other. Korsyn restricts his analysis to the fields of musicology and music theory, but I approach the crisis of music scholarship obliquely, through my Lacanian reading of Lynch's film music. This dissertation, then, has two goals. On one hand it attempts to examine music's role in Lynch's films, and on the other, it explores how Lynch's use of music might aid us in navigating and moving beyond the institutional crises of music scholarship. This Lynchian solution to our crisis provides a glimpse of what might lie beyond postmodernism, a new philosophical movement some are calling the "New Sincerity." This term covers several loosely related cultural or philosophical movements that have followed in the wake of postmodernism, the most notable being what Raoul Eshelman and Judith Butler refer to as "performatism." Finally, I return to Beethoven's Ninth to offer a second, performative reading, demonstrating how Lynch's use of music can be translated into current musical discourse. / text