Charlie Chaplin´s The Lion´s case and the Polytonality

The Lion's Case from 1928 The Circus (despite original was a silent movie a score of Gunter Kochan was added in 1969), here like in my older Charlie Chaplin scene Easy Street I use Polytonality or best said Bitonality to recreate a mood of hilarious humor beside a cartoon scoring style that point out several movements and actions. Like I said in my older post Polytonality or Bitonality have been used extensively by composers since Igor Stravinsky used it in his score for the Ballet Petrushka, but if we want to look for the origins of use of this technique to express feelings of humor, we have I think to look Mozart's musical joke where the genius of Salzburg use some wrong notes to generate laugh in the audience, the French composer Darius Milhaud was an important exponent of this technique, but with different approaches.

This is a topic that can generates many musicologist discussions and disagreements, but this is not the scope of this post but point out the marvelous potential of expressiveness that this compositional technique gives us to create not only funny cartoon moods, but an incredible amount of artistic possibilities like in the beginning of the third act of the Puccini's last opera Turandot where we can hear a very beautiful exotic sonority that moves so deeply . I hope you enjoy this score version of the scene of the lion's case from The Circus.

Charlie Chaplin Easy Street Film Score Practice

I want to share with you this short piece written as an exercise of film scoring. I picked some scenes from the marvelous silent short film Easy Street by Charlie Chaplin and wanted to handle it in a cartooning fashion in order to accentuate the humorous mood. In this work I used Polytonality , but in contrapuntal sense, more than in harmonic way. Since Mozart musical jokes, Polytonality has been used to express a variety of feelings and moods in ballet, opera, concert music and of course in films. Igor Stravinsky Petrushka is an important example, Giacomo Puccini uses it in Turandot and many others important composers too. In films this technique has been used to add a specific taste in a punctual situation rather than as a main method of composition for an entire score, there are exceptions to this rule of course.

I hope you like this short example and feel free to leave your comments.