ABSTRACT
The Neapolitan appears occasionally in the music of popular culture. The so-called Neapolitan chord made cameo appearances in the seventeenth century and debuted as a more central member of the harmonic cast in a type of opera centered in Naples in the first half of the eighteenth century. In the Neapolitan, the altered tone goes the way of all chromatic tones—undoubled, it moves in the direction of its inflection. In Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette,” it enhances the undertone of playful menace that perhaps induced renowned film director and producer Alfred Hitchcock to use the work as the theme song for a weekly television show in the 1960s. More film composer Danny Elfmann exploited the dark sound of the Neapolitan to create the oppressive atmosphere that shrouds the score to the first of the Batman movies.
