Abstract When Paul Revere published a broadside memorializing the 1770 Boston Massacre, he borrowed artwork that had been loaned to him by Henry Pelham, the young half-brother to the American painter John Singleton Copley. In spite of the fame of that broadside image in the history of the American Revolution, virtually no attention has been paid to the poem Revere printed on the broadside. This article analyzes the character, prosody, and verbal imagery of that poetry and its antecedents, including poems by the African-born enslaved Boston poet Phillis Wheatley, and suggests a previously unsuspected musical background in the form of the ballad tune “Fortune my foe” that was famous in both Britain and America.
Abstract Recent studies claim that a progression of two major triads a minor third apart, perhaps with additional specifications, often accompanies heroism in American movies of the past seventy-five years. However, unlike the progression of two minor triads a major third apart and its frequent association with malevolence and darkness, these studies offer no nineteenth-century precedent for this signification. The conclusion of Liszt’s symphonic poem Les préludes contains two instances each of this heroic progression: flat-VII-V and flat-VI-IV. Moreover, these final measures correspond to the final line and the only reference to heroism of the Lamartine-inspired prefatory text that accompanied the initial publication of the work. Both the radio program The Lone Ranger (1933–56) and the movie serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940) feature these final measures as cliffhanger music. Each serves as an important precedent for subsequent Hollywood harmonic heroics. The use of flat-VII-V in The Lone Ranger is ten years before the earliest published example of this succession in a western film. Flash Gordon’s use of flat-VII-V anticipates its reappearance in the Main Theme for Star Wars , a film heavily modeled on Flash Gordon , and its use of flat-VI-IV anticipates its reappearance throughout the Marvel and DC universes, movie serials themselves. When considering flat-VII-V and flat-VI-IV as different tonal orientations of a directed harmonic progression, the conclusion of Les préludes also anticipates another tonally multifarious theme that accompanies heroism throughout the Star Wars franchise.
