The Late Duke: Ellington's and Strayhorn's Music for Anatomy of a Murder Considered

Abstract

The music for the 1959 film and sound track album Anatomy of a Murder presents a comprehensive account of important features of the later, i.e. post-Newport, oeuvre of the Duke Ellington Orchestra and its two composers. With its distinctive orchestration, imaginative formal design, use of thematic transformation as a means of musical growth, unity in the midst of compositional collaboration, advances in the handling of tonality, harmony, and dissonance, exploitation of the “suite” ideal as a compositional form, and adherence to the coloristic “Ellington Effect,” Anatomy's music affords a great comprehension of what Ellington, Strayhorn, and the orchestra were about in a richly productive later period for the band. This paper considers Anatomy's music from various perspectives with the aim of arguing successfully for its compositional merits. The sound track album and Ellington and Strayhorn manuscripts serve as the corpus for the study. Rather than addressing particular aspects of film scoring, concern lies instead with exploring structure, features, and relationships within the music itself. By virtue of its analysis and conclusions the article strives to substantiate Anatomy of a Murder as a compositional and critical success. Investigation of features such as closely allied themes, inventive harmonic vocabulary, particularistic scoring techniques coupled with economy of orchestration, and aptness of the music as a suite reveals much about Ellington's and Strayhorn's artistic success with this score. An exploration of the successful collaboration in this work between the two composers is also offered; so are observations on Anatomy as a reflection of musical characteristics of the latter-day Ellington output.