Innumerable musical "dialects" have been imported into film music, but a few are perhaps indigenous to the genre. One of these dialects began during the "Golden Age" as a strain of nineteenth-century chromatic harmony, but it soon bore the impact from a number of cinematic factors, including the brevity and intermittency of cues, the immediacy of narrative association, and the rise of popular song on the soundtrack. One of the strain's reaction to the impact of these competing factors was to employ only those tonal embellishments from nineteenth-century chromatic harmony which are both highly representative yet highly compact; such brevity and idiosyncrasy would also facilitate concise semantic association. I argue that these embellishments include foreground chromatic neighbor-note motions and their resultant triadic harmonizations, of which the latter are akin to what Ernst Kurth called "absolute progressions."
This study encompasses the scores from over one hundred popular American films dating from 1980 to the end of the century, in which this chromatic dialect is significantly employed. The data collected exhibit three trends: 1) only a subset of the possible chromatic neighbor-note motions and absolute triadic progressions are used regularly 2) absolute progressions are chained together using a limited set of syntactical "rewriting rules" 3) both motions and progressions have consistent, albeit broad, semantic correlates. A presentation of this study includes an extensive inventory of transcribed musical passages from recent film scores that exemplify the syntactic patterns of the dialect, and a couple short video collages that demonstrate the dialect's semantic consistency.