John Williams - Home Alone - "House Theme" - In Depth Analysis

Welcome to the first part of Score Analysis where we take apart small sections of famous film scores and have an in depth look at them.

Today, we start according to season with the score for Home Alone. Personally, this score has been incredibly influential for me and I remember as a kid sitting in front of the TV and recording the score cues on casette tape when the movie was on.

From my earliest attempts at writing music to this date I have been particularly fascinated by what I would call "The House" theme which opens the movie. It is this small, mischiveous Celeste theme that appears in the opening credits (see above) and in the movie when the house itself is the focus of the storytelling. It basically consist of two parts, one starting at 0:24 and the other starting at 0:43 in the video above. Today, I want to focus only on the first part as this already gives us enough to chew on.

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/home-alone-house-theme/s-X02XnWsb2RT

The playback is very slow on purpose to let all the details sink in that race by when you listen to it at original speed. Also from bar13 onwards the instrumentation changes drastically but definitely is part of the theme.

Structure

Let's look at the grand structure first. We have a 16 bar theme that if we divide it into groups of 2 bars we could say has a structure of ABACADEF. We could say that the theme consist of three melodic waves and a conclusion. The development within the theme is a textbook example of a great melodic arc, you can see that with every wave (bar 3/4 vs 7/8 vs 10/11) the melodic arc grows higher with the conclusion from bar 13 wrapping the theme up nicely. So in spite of the rather static structure from the A part, there is a considerable development in the theme.

Rhythm

The economy of the use of rhythm of this example is remarkable. Essentially, the majority of the theme consists of eights with a few groups of sixteenths. This in itself is a rather limited amount of rhythmic material, however Williams manages to use these to the maximum. There is a tremendous danger with such a limited rhythmical variety to run into the problem of overusing rhythmical motifs to a degree where they become static. However, again if you compare 3/4, 7/8, 11/12 with each other, every time there is a change in rhythm, particularly how he places the 16th groups in the bars. This variety keeps the rhythm interesting. A special focus should be laid on bar 8, which is the only moment in the theme that comes to a rest for a quarter note. It's definitely no coincidence that this happens exactly at the half point of the theme as it helps to clearly telegraph the larger structure of the theme. Another special case is the melodic rest at the downbeats of 13/14 which in itself creates so much new rhythmic variety by this so called "tension rest" that it remains very interesting for our ear.

Intervals

I'm a big fan of intervallic concepts as you might have noticed if you're following my writings for a while. An intervallic concept is to use the quality of a certain interval as a structural element of a musical idea. Now this theme clearly has a specific task to create this mischievious quality that is more or less the big theme of the movie and of course there are certain musical devices that over musical history have been associated with these sort of emotional qualities. This would mainly be tritones, more recently minor ninths and in general chromatic motions including false relations (or cross relations). And of course, Williams uses them all.

Here are some examples where they happen either in (close) succession or simultanously:

Chromatic motion: 

Minor ninths:

Tritones:

Harmony

This is in my opinion the most fascinating part of that theme. You see that I used some chord symbols on the example which however are absolutely not the only way you could write them. 

The harmony in the A-Part (bars 1/2, 5/6 and 9/10) is very clear, it definitely spans up a Dm chord with the occasional flat 6th of Bb which still clearly outlines a Dm.

However, in bars 3/4, 7/8 and 11/12, the harmony is incredibly ambivalent. We effecively only have two voices sounding simultanously which definitely don't provide enough information to make a clear statement on which chord is meant. So we need to deal with trying to figure out what harmony is implied. This means we also need to "interpolate" notes that are actually not sounding. In fact, even the harmonic rhythm in these bars is rather unclear, theoretically we could also say that the chord changes on every eighth note. So the chord symbols I used above are approximations of how I understand and hear the harmony. I was fiddling around with it quite a bit and am still on the fence about some chords (E.g the Ab7(/Bb) in bar 3) but here's the harmony that is implied in my musical mind which follows the chord symbols above.

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/home-alone-house-theme-implied-harmony/s-ZrTC3x8JyXJ

You don't have to agree with me on this as you could hear that completely differently. However, there are a few spots where in my opinion a very clear harmonic progression is implied:

Here are the chords that I am pretty sure of:

Bar 3: A7/D - this makes harmonic sense as it is cadential harmony over a pedal point alternating to the dominant

Bar 4 second half: This Db7/Cb is pretty unambiguous as well considering the pitches that are actually played. It would again make sense as it on the one hand has this mischiveous chromatic movement to the following Dm and also serves pretty well as a dominant placeholder.

Bar 8: The harmony here is pretty clear as it defnitely ends on the dominant of A and the preceding notes pretty clearly imply a chain of dominants before that (B being the Dominant of E being the Dominant of A). This cadential harmony would make a lot of sense here and listening to it several times, I personally hear this very clear cadence there.

Bar 11/12:  The Bb and E chord in that sequence are pretty clear. With again this conceptual tritone step from the E to the following Bbm in bar 13. 

It is not that all the other chord symbols are just a guess here but the tune simply leaves us in the dark about what is actually meant here as it could be seen in many differemt ways. This is musically extremely smart as it is the perfect translation of what Williams was intending here - to create a feeling of uncertainty and mischief. Particularly fascinating is how he hammers home the harmony in the first 2 bars of every section with clearly outlining a static Dm and then every time it feels like that certainty drifts off into harmonic "wonderland" before finding its way back to Dm. And yet, in spite of all that chromaticism he throws at us we never feel alienated as he manages to take us by the hand by some rather clear cadential pillars that give us orientation and additonally leading us back to the tonic center.

Particularly the chords that aren't clearly outlined or implied through cadence are pretty fascinating as you could probably also see them as chromatic "colours" thrown in, rather than trying to understand them as chords. Also, due to the considerably higher speed of the original cue, it might be arguable that many of these notes don't develop the importance of needing a harmonic justification in our perception but rather feeling like passing by.

One more thing that I want to mention is how "unlinear" some of the left hand motion is, eg. 3/4 and 11/12. It almost feels like the left hand is throwing in random notes. This is of course intentional as it supports that feeling of disorientation in these moments.

Orchestration

Apart from the Celeste part, there is some omnious additional material in the orchestra with low strings, violin harmonics etc. that support that emotional feeling. However, analyzing that in detail would expand this article too much so we will keep in depth orchestration analysis for another part.

The Nutcracker

I of course need to mention the elephant in the room with many people claiming that "Home Alone" essentially is a ripoff of Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky. There are considerable similarities of course and particularly this cue clearly is inspired by The Sugar Plum Fairy Dance.

There is an excellent video by Sideways which debunks this whole thing and touches on many other important subjects regarding film music which I can only recommend.

However, I want to make a little side-by-side comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV1qLYukTH8

There is a slightly different emotional premise going on here with the Sugar Plum Fairy being not a mischievious cue as the Home Alone opening, so it has a certain quality of "mysteriousness" but not quite as extreme as Williams chose to go. With instrumentation, rhythmical ideas and overall tone being rather alike, there are some striking differences.

With Tchaikovsky's example we are in a way clearer harmonic world, just by the fact that all chords are spelled out completely. Tchaikovsky focuses on chromaticism as well with the chords moving chromatically. However he bases a lot of his harmonic world on the quality of diminished chords. This rather unfunctional chromatic motion was quite "adventurous" at the times when this was written. In comparison to Williams however this seems incredibly tame. It is easy to look at it from a perspective almost 150 years later and say this but purely objectively, one has to say that Williams' approach is considerably more imaginative than pushing diminshed chords around. It feels like an update of the idea adjusted to the "dissonance tolerance" of a 20th century audience.

Of course, everybody has their own degree of tolerance of what they would consider to be a "ripoff". From my point of view, Williams took the emotional essence (again watch the video by Sideways linked above) and gave it a new, rather imaginative spin. 

If you enjoyed these sort of in depth analysis articles, please let me know either in the comments below or via private message so I can decide whether to include more of such articles in the future.