Music Provides a Personality Analysis using Successive Octaves

After being closed for approximately nine months for renovations, the General George Patton Museum of Leadership in Fort Knox, Kentucky reopens today. Many movies and television programs have explored the WWII general as a subject, but the most well-known is the 1970 film Patton with George C. Scott in the title role. Jerry Goldsmith's musical score for this film earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Score. Goldsmith's score incorporates three distinctive musical ideas. One features a recording of two trumpets playing parallel perfect fourths in a triplet rhythm, which is then fed into an Echoplex, creating continuous and fading repetitions. While this idea is essentially a fanfaric motive, extended through reiteration, the other two ideas are bona fide themes: a spirited march and a slower-moving chorale. As Goldsmith explained in a 2002 interview, these three ideas represent different aspects of Patton's personality. The fanfare represents “the archaic part of [Patton], the historical, the intellectual part of him,” and the echo effect in particular reflects Patton's belief in reincarnation. More obviously, the march represents Patton's military side, and the chorale his religious faith.

In the interview, Goldsmith shared that he fashioned these three ideas “so that all three could be played simultaneously or individually or one or two at a time.” Given the fanfare's harmonic simplicity, its combination with either the march or the chorale is relatively straightforward. However, the merger of the march and chorale themes, which occurs both during the movie's main title and during the movie proper, requires more craft. The score below shows the two themes, how Goldsmith combines them in counterpoint, and the harmonic intervals that frame their contrapuntal interaction. (This music is transcribed in 6/8 (instead of, say, 12/8, or in 4/4 with triplets) to aid in its comparison to another famous simultaneity of two themes I will discuss on this blog a year from now.)

The fact that both themes basically arpeggiate tonic harmony for the first six of each eight-measure phrase (and dominant harmony for the last two) facilitates well-formed counterpoint. However, something about the combination contravenes classical tonal practice: measures 3 and 4 include successive octaves, as highlighted. This would be quite unusual to find in music from Bach to Brahms. One could interpret this succession as either faulty counterpoint, or counterpoint that has shaken off the shackles of classical rules. Or one's interpretation could instead espouse the idea that successive octaves undermine the autonomy of lines; therefore, the successive octaves in measures 3 and 4 subtly bring the march and chorale themes into a closer affinity with one another. This is consistent with Patton's biography, according to historyonthenet.com: "To Patton, prayer was a 'force multiplier'—when combined with or employed by a combat force, it substantially increases the effectiveness of human efforts and enhances the odds of victory. In this sense, prayer was no different from training, leadership, technology, or firepower."