Medievalism Goes Commercial

Many of the extant analytical models for music in advertising used in academia build off of the work of David Huron and Nicholas Cook. Their work, along with many other studies, have laid a solid framework for examining music in a single advertisement. This chapter explores the usefulness of register theory as a methodology for meta-analysis, exploring conceptual relationships between multiple advertisements using the same music. To that end, the chapter postulates the register of “epic” as a conceptual space to draw connections between recent uses of “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana and “Sunrise” from Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra in contemporary multimedia. Building on the application of cognitive pragmatics to music laid out in works by Lawrence Zbikowski and register theory of Michael Long, the chapter offers analyses of advertisements for a variety of companies, including Hershey’s, Domino’s, and Walgreens, among others. In each case the chapter explores how these various advertisements use existing music to tap into cultural myths of romanticized pasts and idealized futures, related to each other through the idea of epic, and in the process aims to show how register theory can offer a meta-conceptual space for analyzing multimedia objects that are inherently intertextual.