ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the two films of the 1990s using popular music scores: Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting. In these films, the popular song scores may be viewed as 'postmodern', in that they decentre the role of the unique musical work, and draw upon discourses around the musical work such as style and celebrity. Compiling scores developed out of the necessity of using music to accompany film in its infancy, but the practice persisted and flourished in the silent film era. Film music scholars have adapted the term 'leitmotif', a term used to denote a motivic process in Richard Wagner's operas, for a similar process that occurs in the classic film score. Claudia Gorbman outlines significant functions for leitmotifs: the leitmotif must be associated with a cinematic object; leitmotifs must recur in order to evoke the memory of the viewer. The leitmotif takes on extra-musical properties through connotation, 'describing' traits of characters, and the emotional state or mood of a scene.
