The Lion King

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Recommended: Essay on the production of the lion king

For the Final paper I decide to take four of the major songs on The Lion King soundtrack and compared it to the broadway musical; in terms of the musical melody, rhythm and harmony. The Lion King a children's version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with the use of it secular music and strong Africanism, it has become one of the most influential stories. There is a lot of difference when it comes to the soundtrack and the on Broadway musical even if the story is the same. They may be the same songs written, however the texture, harmony, instruments, melodies and syllables of the songs are predominantly different when compare to each other.
Starting with the most influential song in the whole film “The circle of Life”, written by Tim Rice, music by Sir Elton John, performed by Carmen Twillie with African vocals provided by Lebo M and the South African Chorus; arrange and produced by Hans Zimmer .The most notable difference is the fact that in the movie the song starts off a dominate male voice.Yet shifts to voice of a softer female show the perfect combination of polyphony(two or more parts sung or played simultaneously) textures, due to the fact that while the female voice is playing in the foreground at the same time in the background the chorus is singing at an equal prolific harmony and rhythm. Whereas in the broadway musical, it is a actually the opposite: the music is not as subtle as the film. There are a lot of strong heterophony ( multiple voice singing a melodic line, but simultaneous melodic variants between the singers) going on through out the beginning of the song, then proceeds to a more polyphony with the chorus dropping of in to a lower and softer tone, bring out the main voice to a larger scale. Not only is the music di...

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... Yet, what brings the song to together is the melismatic “one syllable sung to several notes” range of “ee”. Without out the combination of these two syllable the song would be flat and not have the strong affect of the Zulu people. Another item that makes this a very strong song is accompaniment of the Zulu dances on the stage performing the act of a hunt, as they use their leg to stomp on the floor as a representation of an African Drum.
In conclusion The Lion King is one of the most prolific stories with an excellent soundtrack that most of the songs were written by Sir Elton John and Tim Rice, arranged by Hans Zimmer and Mark Mancina. A lot of the instrumental composure was done by Hans Zimmer, whereas Elton John did a lot of the music and sand in most of them. Both Zimmer and Mancina are known composers that have working on a lot of soundtrack for Disney movies.

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