Linguistic semantics as a vehicle for a semantics of music
Relevant excerpt only:
Consider all film, cartoon and video game industry – Tom and
Jerry who play Strauss or Liszt mock-ups, Elmer Fudd who ‘kills the vabit’
to Wagner’s Valkyre, Grieg’s Peer Gynt in Muppet Show,
Lawrence of Arabia in a James Bond movie11, James Bond in numerous satirical
cartoons, the Terminator theme when a video game character says 'I’ll
be back', and the hilarious Simpsons. In this series, the composers Danny
Elfman and Alf Clausen masterfully use numerous musical contexts known to the
American audience to create stunning satire: from horror themes, over the American
anthem, to the Simpsons theme itself, which has built its own denotation
in the fifteen years of the series on the air, and has been used to create a
meta-satire in more than one episode.
[Described as "memetic evolution"]