Potential Tonal Overthrows in The Hunger Games

A theme by James Newton Howard, called the “Panem National Anthem,” recurs in the first two Hunger Games movies. It can be heard most overtly during the tribute parade in the first movie; the opening of this music is transcribed below. It opens with a standard Hollywood musical cliché: a tonic triad (in this case, B major) flanking and firmly subordinating a different major triad (in this case, G major) whose root is four semitones below. This tonal-triadic scheme is so conventionalized in film music that, when two major triads whose roots are four semitones apart are adjacent, the triad with the root four semitones above is significantly more likely to be the tonal superior.

But not always. A few seconds later in the theme, this situation is reversed: following the B-major tonic triad is a D-sharp-major triad, whose root is four semitones above. Yet this reversal of fortune is fleeting: B as tonic persists. These two moments – what I transcribed as the first and third measures – have something else in common, perhaps by design, perhaps by chance: the triad with its root four semitones above puts the fifth of the triad in the melody (F# in m. 1, A# in m. 3), and the triad with its root four semitones below puts the root of the triad in the melody (G in m. 1, B in m. 3).

This melodic-harmonic correspondence permits a kind of two-sided musical game in which each moment can be crossbred with the other. On the one side, the following recomposition depicts how the fleeting D sharp (respelled as E flat) could oust B as tonic, using B-major’s own tactics of clichéd subjugation and thematic banner-waving.

On the opposite side, the following recomposition depicts how G could turn the tables on B by permanently transforming B into the selfsame fugitive insurrectionist that D sharp briefly was.