Too Many Themes

The concept of associating a theme with a character in a movie is probably one of the strongest and also most well known properties of film music. In fact, this scoring approach has become so well known that it almost feels like the default for film music. It seems like each relevant character or situation or maybe even location in the movie should be associated with a theme as all these iconic film scores we know and admire have done.

A common problem with learning film composers is that they see this approach as "what needs to be done" instead of questioning the function behind it. It is of course beneficial for the music and the concept behind it to create and use structural elements that occur several times and develop over time as this will give the music a sort of consequence but smilarly, the use of a theme should serve a function in the movie. Is its presence needed or beneficial to understand or connect the story? If your only justification to have a theme is to have a structural element in the music, this is not justification enough to have it.

In fact, this whole concept often gets stretched way out of proportion by learning composers where sometimes a 15 minute short film gets overloaded with themes for every character often only appearing once. While this does of course not make a whole lot of sense in a musical or structural way, it often also doesn't make a lot of sense in a stylistic way.

The excessive use of themes is very present in our imagination of film music as most musical pieces that are well known are character themes from scores. But we should be aware that movies with a multitude of themes are usually multi-part sagas of epic proportions like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings etc. where the score has the time to establish these properly but even more where the overal feeling of the movie is more "operatic".

If you look at other genres like for instance Dramas, you will hardly find a multitude of themes and even less so in more recent times.

It is essential to understand that themes are only one possibility to introduce structure to music. There are a lot more like textures, harmonic language, instrumentation, sounds or even just "nonfunctional" (as in not linked to a certain thing) motifs.

Not every character needs a theme and overloading a score with too many themes will fragment your music in a way that it hardly feels cohesive. So before you start throwing themes at everything in your score, really ask yourself if the movie does need them and if not, what other musical elements you can find to connect the music in a larger context.