Carter Burwell's Musical Accuracy in The Chamber

Perhaps the most appreciated part of The Chamber, a film adaptation of the John Grisham novel by the same name that was widely released in theaters exactly twenty years ago today, was the musical score by Carter Burwell. One of the parts of Burwell's score that I especially appreciate is the music that accompanies the end of an impassioned closing argument (around 1:09:00) that young lawyer Adam Hall (Chris O'Donnell) is making in court on behalf of his client and grandfather Sam Cayhall (Gene Hackman), who is scheduled to be executed for a racially motivated murder.

The musical content is quite straightforward: it is in E-flat major, the harmonies alternate back and forth between an E-flat major triad and a G-minor triad, the melody rises do-re-mi three times, and the texture thickens and dynamics rise gradually over the course of the cue. The tonal-harmonic aspects involve what I have called a "loss gesture" and have written about here and here and demonstrated here.

But that's not what I especially appreciate. The "loss gesture" works well when a listener well perceives the transition from one triad to another. The soundtrack is dominated by Chris O'Donnell's dialogue. What I admire is how Burwell's harmonic changes find holes in the dialogue. He finds not only big holes in between sentences, of course, but also two smaller holes within sentences: the 0.8-second hole between "It's a tragedy that" and "has destroyed three lives already," and the even smaller 0.4-second hole between "He was" and "raised by his family and this state to become the man that he became."

Below is a transcription of the music and the dialogue that notates time exactly proportional to space. (Sts. = strings, Brs. = brass, +W.W. = woodwinds are added.) The holes are indicated with enclosures whose color matches the description above.