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.