Sensing Evil: A Trailer Formula from an Ethnomusicological Perspective

Trailer music libraries are one of the most fascinating surrogates of contemporary mainstream genre codes. Collections of music cues, these libraries, can be conceived as the modern counterpart of a Kinothek, albeit organized according to the canons of today’s language, and with industrial rationality. From the musical perspective, the trailer establishes itself as a true index of spectacular loci, rhetorical regions to which – the trailer tells us – the movie promises to belong. Trailer libraries resort to a complex set of formulaic conventions as a means through which the “coming attraction” negotiates its own genre belonging. The same set of formulaic conventions can be seen at work also in opening credits and studio logos. Concrete examples will be provided: 1) on the dialectic between film and genres, where the formula works on the axis of the transtextual multiplicities establishing a bond between the film and its paratexts; 2) on the intratextual axis, where the formula maintains functional relations with the dramatic structure of the movie. A deeper reason guides the selection of the key terms so far used: formula, formulaic. Through the brief analysis of an ethnographic case – where trailer formulas are adapted within festive rituals of the traditional pattern – I will consider formulaic in film music from the methodological perspective of oral-tradition studies. Classic oral theory suggested a fundamental connection between formula and oral composition (Parry and Lord), where the formulaic is a means to preserve cultural knowledge across time (classic epic as a formulaic encyclopedia of a civilization’s political, religious, ethical and moral knowledge (Ong, Havelock). The musical formulaic can thus be read as part of the new dimensions of the secondary orality nurtured by the media. Musical formulas – those of trailers, logos, titles – contribute to building the acoustic (moral, ethical, political) space of contemporary global audiovisual culture. Ethnographically conceived as interpersonal systems of reference (Schweinitz) trailer formulas can be entry points for understanding the cultural stereotypes crystallized in the formula and their glocal receptions/intercultural translations.