ABSTRACT
During a film, musical or contextual transformations prompt audiences to reframe their interpretations of the music’s place within the narrative. This chapter expands upon the concepts of leitmotifs, topics, and conceptual blends in film music, focusing on instances where these undergo transformations that signify new dramatic conditions or plot developments. The chapter first examines scenarios where leitmotif variations align with affective or associative shifts in the storyworld, revealing the analogous realignment conveyed through the music. It then explores musical troping, a technique that involves the transmutation of unrelated topics, yielding expressive potential and highlighting plot dichotomies through metaphorical fusion. And last, it investigates the influence of song reconfigurations and contextual changes on interpretations of the music’s narrative significance within the film.
