What Makes Themes Memorable?

One of the many jobs of a composer is to make the music for their film memorable. But what can composers do to make their music memorable? Well, I decided to look at some examples of really memorable themes and try to find patterns. This may prove to be more challenging than I'd like, but I'll take a stab at it anyways.

The first step is to find some examples of memorable music, which might be the easiest part of this. I went to a friend of mine and played some film music for him without telling him the movie and asked him if he knew what it was from. All of the scores were ones that I, as a film score nerd, would probably know. I then looked at the examples of ones that he recognized, especially the "obvious" ones and saw the patterns in them. Here's what I could come up with.

Repetition
This one is kind of obvious. The music that was repeated a lot in the movie it was in tended to be easier to recognize. The really fast recognitions were pieces like Hedwig's Theme or the theme from Finding Nemo, both of which are hear often throughout their themes.. On the other hand, the really slow realisations were pieces like Rey's Theme from Star Wars, Time from Inception, and Your Father Would Be Proud from Rogue One. This, however, does not appear to be a constant factor.

Uniqueness
The music that wasn't very similar to many other movies were the easiest to be recognized. I noticed that music by John Williams was easily mistaken with other pieces, specifically other scores by him as well. For example, my friend thought music from Hook was from Harry Potter, and music from E.T. was confused with music from Harry Potter as well. On the other hand, Hans Zimmer's music was never confused with anything else. Again, this never really seemed like it was true for all music.

Fast Build
Pieces that didn't take a long time to get to the real juice of the song were also easy to recognize. The really big one was Hedwig's Theme. John Williams wastes literally no time to start the song, opening with the iconic notes as played by a celesta. This piece took less than one second to be recognized by our volunteer. Other music that has a fast build, like Monster's Inc., was easy to be recognized. Still, this third factor didn't help in making all of the pieces more recognizable.

John Williams scoring Harry Potter, the most easily recognized score. Courtesy of Wikia

In general, it seems like repetition, uniqueness, and a fast build all help in making themes more memorable. However, some pieces with all of these things were still not easily recognized. So then, what does make a theme memorable? Something... Unexplainable, especially by me. The only underlying factor that I've found in every single piece is that it certainly helps to have a musical ear. As a musician, I find that it's much easier for me to recognize scores than it is for a "normal" person.

Either way, I can't find any "formula" for a memorable theme. I'll soon be reviewing some of the scores that I found were particularly memorable, especially the ones found on my list of top five film scores. Until then, keep listening to more film scores.

My Favorite Film Scores

I kind of knew that one of these days, I'd have to make a list of my favorite film scores. Really, the only hard part about this is deciding which ones! I have so many scores that I adore, and wanted to put tons on the list... But still, I've decided to think of my favorites that come to mind first. Buckle in for a terribly made list of my five favorite film scores.

I tried not to just pick movies that won Academy Awards, but I'm not sure how well I succeeded there.

5) Finding Nemo
Right of the bat, a film from one of my all time favorite composers, Thomas Newman. The emotion that he is able to draw from the movie is incredible, particularly in the case of the leitmotif for Nemo and Marlin. It's one of the few scores that I've heard live, and that may be what pushed it onto this list.

4) Up
Yeah, another Pixar movie... Another one of my favorite composers, Michael Giacchino wrote the music for this one. A perfect example of how you don't need a violin solo in a minor key to create sadness, the music from Up is able to make it onto this list.

3) E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Finally, a John Williams movie on this list. Took a while didn't it? Either way, this score is one of my all time favorites, yet I still never want my symphony director to tell me we're playing it. The score is one of the first ones that I really noticed how much the music helped the movie along. The light yet triumphant theme of the movie is really one to remember. Can you imagine Elliott flying in his bike with E.T. WITHOUT Williams' music? Exactly, and that's while this score made it onto the list.

2) Star Wars: A New Hope
Oh dear, I don't know how I managed to find something better than this score. I may just be in a bad mood today, but this iconic score did not make it to the top of the list. However, there are still a lot of reasons for why it's this high on the list. For starters, it's music by John Williams, so it must be good. After that, it has leitmotifs... Which are great. Finally, I would argue that this score revolutionized film music. Those are some of the great reasons why this movie made it to number two.

Honorable Mention
I may not have mentioned this, but this was a really hard list to make because of all the great scores there are. For that reason, I've decided to add one very honorable mention.

Schindler's List
If you've ever watched this film, you know why I couldn't leave out this score. The pairing of John Williams composing and Itzhak Perlman as a violin soloist is a match made in heaven. I'm currently playing the famous violin solo from the movie, so it came to my mind sooner than a lot of other movies did. Either way, this score definitely deserves to be mentioned.

Such an Honorable Mention I added a picture. Courtesy of IMDb

1) Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings
Now that I'm this far, I'm almost ashamed of putting this as number one. But as a total fanboy of leitmotifs, there's nothing better in my opinion than Howard Shore's score for this movie. I talked about this film score in a previous post, so I won't go into much more detail about it here. But no matter what, the leitmotifs of this movie are why it's number one on this list.

That was a rather lengthy post, but it really needed to be done. In the near future, I'll probably do a review of one of the movies on that list. But until then, keep listening to more film scores.

Goals... and how bad they're going.

In a post from long ago, I stated that I wanted to write forty some posts by June. That of course, won't happen. I also said that a wanted about a third of those posts to be reviews. That's even less likely to happen. As it turns out, it's pretty difficult to review a film score. First, you have to know the movie inside and out. Then, you need to know the music inside and out. Personally, I like to get a rough transcription of some of the leitmotifs and themes from the movie as well, making my life that much harder. For that reason, I'll probably start leaning towards the majority of my posts being about writing film scores instead of specific film scores themselves.

On the bright side, I'm getting kind of close to the goal I set for composing. If you remember, I wanted to have written four different pieces of music by June. That counts both film scores and absolute music of any genre. Since that post was written, I've written three pieces in my spare time. Two were film scores for student films, both of which were totally out of my comfort zone. 

The first was something that took me a span of about thirty hours of work. It was a horror movie, and the music was something that I put together in GarageBand with almost twenty different tracks. I had just gotten a new keyboard to do it on, which was a blast to work on.

The second took me much less time because it needed much less music. It was a spoof on a Bear Grylls kind of nature show. I worked with the same director as the other film, and he wanted African Tribal music. Ironically, I used Chinese drums instead of African Tribal drums. After I messed with the EQ levels for a while, I was able to design a sound that really fit what the director wanted.

The third piece I've done so far was a piano/violin duet. It came out with a lot of emotion, which is something that I was really looking for. Because I have limited piano experience, it's a fairly easy part for the piano, but it's rather difficult for the violin. I wrote it in Eb Major, which is a key I've honestly never really worked in before. Here's a picture of the piano part that I recorded on GarageBand with a MIDI Keyboard...

Yeah... That's a really easy piano part...

Finally, I'm going to be starting the score for another film in about three weeks. It's for a movie that a friend and I wrote and are currently in production of. I feel like I'll be able to get a really powerful score out of it, and will finally be able to add in some live recording as well. I've already begun working on some themes (leitmotifs) that should add a lot to the movie. I'll only have about five school days to get the music done, so anything that I can do to get an early start is crucial.

Anywho, that's basically how all of the goals that I've set have been going, and a quick update on a project that I've been working on. I'll see you again in three weeks when all four compositions are done!