Hold Up, Cushfuddled Made That Video?? Cushfuddled, The RISD Alum Who Made Warriors: Twin Shadows, An

Hold up, cushfuddled made that video?? Cushfuddled, the RISD alum who made Warriors: Twin Shadows, an absolute masterpiece of a comic in terms of visual storytelling? Well THAT gave me whiplash to find out Like cushfuddled, I'm an artist, not a musicologist-- but I love looking at the scores for my favorite games and movies, and for Frozen, it was a special kind of musical fixation. So I've been putting off watching that video.

I made leitmotif compilations combing every animated feature and even the Broadway musical. Comparatively observing where the Frozen musics use themes and how. What I learned from doing that is, the way Frozen uses its leitmotifs, it's like the equivalent of consistent writing for music.

The goal is for those leitmotifs to be recognizable, and you can hear callbacks all throughout the film. (Sorcery shows up very often of course, which makes sense given how many magical duels are going down, and how often it's used to represent Elsa.)

But there's also PLENTY new recognizable leitmotifs which F2 introduces-- the spirits all share one (G#, G, E) in addition to each having their own unique one. More on this.

And concerning Atohallan's kulning / Dies irae, it actually does show up a lot, just not in a form that would be glaringly obvious to the audience.

The notes in the siren call are F# F, F# D#. As characters are moving through the mist, or find the ship, you get little inklings of the spirits' theme (that G#GE I mentioned, though sometimes it's transposed to something like E E♭ C or has a few notes changed to sound dissonant and create tension). The general formula though is: a root note, followed by a half-step down, and then three semitones down from that.

The relation of the siren call is that it's a resolved form of this dissonance. The first two notes will have the same relationship as in the spirits' theme but it ends with D#, completing the chord. Almost like Ahtohallan is a higher power presiding over the spirits...

There's a special leitmotif which plays whenever Elsa performs "the next step" in her journey (i.e. taming a spirit). This one begins F# E C. I'm pretty sure anyone who has watched the film can hear the moment when Elsa gets on Nokk's back and there's that triumphant swell of strings as she rides toward the glacier. That same motif plays again when she stops the flood. THAT'S THE ONE I'm talking about. That's beautiful! That's so beautiful actually!

And guess what! It's designed to resolve the spirits' themes (or at the very least Nokk's), and then it leads into Show Yourself, which is itself a resolution of the main theme which all the spirits share

Saying the music is bad because it's not putting up more glaring road signs about the siren's call... takes away the artfulness? It's intelligently written. It's also so fun to catch bits of other songs in parts of the score. The Epilogue does a really good job of weaving them all together, especially with how many new ideas are musically introduced with old ones.

If they're talking about the songs being unmemorable, there are entire videos dedicated to how wonderful SY and TNRT are. But even When I'm Older, which the thumbnail suggests they're using as the butt, messes with the playful instrumentation that Olaf is always known for. His musical entrances are a bit less cohesive, but they always sound like someone tripping up a set of stairs. He has a jazzy showtune feel to all of his songs (When Everything Falls Apart, from the Broadway musical, is so fun) and When I'm Older, I would argue, incorporates that instrumentation at center stage. So if anything they should not be couching their argument in that song, because it uses glaring instrumental choices that make sense for Olaf.

And if anyone who's actually good at music theory wants to articulate better on anything I’ve said, feel free-- I'm going back into hermitage while I try to survive finals

I feel I have to write something about this video critique on Christophe Beck's score of F2, especially since I'm mentioned favorably in the video description. The creator (cushfuddled on Tumblr) had a chat with me a while back on the Frozen 2 soundtrack, as they were creating this video.

Unfortunately, this video gave me great pain as I watched. I couldn't finish it and stopped at about 30minutes.

This is an opinion video, so, we can agree to disagree. The creator did tell me in Tumblr chat that they didn't like the F2 soundtrack, so, fair warning, but I was not prepared for the level of criticism in the video.

The creator said that the score of the film is not memorable - I totally disagree. I could play any of the themes from the score right now on the piano for you, even 5 years after the movie was released. The creator also set a 3 question quiz testing the listener on whether they could identify which 3 out of 12 excerpts of music was from F2, trying to "prove" that the music of F2 is forgettable and unrecognizable - well, I got all 3 questions correct. Easily.

The creator made a big deal about composer Christophe Beck not being "allowed" by Disney to use the 4-note "siren" call in his score because its use had to be reserved for the moments in the plot that the siren calls to Elsa. This is sort of true, Beck has mentioned this in interviews but I don't see the problem. He wasn't "banned" by Disney per se, it's mutual discussions between the filmmakers and the composer about what is best for the film and Beck is just doing his job and what a damn fine job he did!

This is not a personal attack on the creator, it's just my opinions. Agree to disagree, I'm not one to start online wars. The creator did mention me favorably in the description. I do recognize that I am on the other end of the spectrum in that I'm hyper fixated on the music, am a musician myself and I memorize and internalize music effortlessly, and most of all, I LOVE THE SCORE.