Welcome back to Scoring for Films by Vito Lo Re and Fabrizio Campanelli; What lies beneath the theme in pieces... We’re often asked why there are no longer the big themes of the past in today’s cinema, and today we’ll partly answer that... We’ll take a little step back in time and see how in recent decades, it’s become more and more difficult to find visual space to place a long, beautiful theme. Many years ago, I wanted to collaborate with a director; he sent me the screenplay, I wrote a theme— without having seen any footage—he told me: "The theme is beautiful, but frankly, in this film, I wouldn't know where to put it." Because there simply was no space; I was young and inexperienced, maybe I should have been more accommodating and... I took it well... In today’s cinema, more and more we see the use of fragments of music: a limited number of notes that, however, have the advantage of being very versatile, right?

A thematic cell—like the ones we analyzed in Blade Runner or Once Upon a Time in America— can have its own autonomy, a strong identity; we also saw it with the three notes from “All Quiet on the Western Front.” These notes can constitute the expressive, central core, the identity, the theme, which can be used not only in a tight and fast form but this core can also be expanded. Yes, what in counterpoint is called diminution or augmentation: you take a cell and then you expand or reduce the value of the notes. Let’s start with Tim Burton’s "Batman" These few notes we’ll hear them in all possible ways: tighter, faster, wider, more distant... Yes, but if you don’t know it, you’d never notice that that theme is actually... this one There, it’s the same notes! The character is maintained but its grammar changes and its meaning but the intervals are the same.

If before we had something expanded, mysterious, that made us enter perfectly into Batman’s world... here we have adventure, action, the hero. This theme, in our minds, starts to become like the voice of an entity: a being that lives through different situations, different states. Yes, this concept of identity is extremely important: the soundtrack often runs the risk of being very fragmented. If it doesn’t have something that ties it together, it risks being disjointed, and lacking its own identity. So, it’s crucial that some kind of sound element or thematic element or an interval acts as glue to make the soundtrack coherent and organic.

This kind of thematic construction is a modern and contemporary approach. That is, starting from a very small core, but very powerful, very strong, very evocative, and exploding it into all the situations where that core finds itself emotionally, dynamically in the scene. If you will, it’s the exact opposite path compared to what we analyzed in Morricone’s great themes. We start from something small to reach the broader narrative arc, where Morricone taught us how to build a theme across a wide arc, over many bars, and then maybe, going in reverse, to isolate its elements, here in the main title we immediately get the notes we’re interested in and then we hear them right away, very fast, telling a different kind of dynamic. In the kind of cinema made in recent decades, precisely because of the narrative style, it’s rare to have space for a big theme, so if you manage to have an identifying fragment of a situation, of a character, and then manage to use it across all the various sequences in the film, you'll have a glue, something that makes the whole score rational and cohesive. But you also need to be a bit careful, because the fewer the notes, the higher the chance there is of encountering similarities or something already used by another composer.

But speaking of Batman again, even in Zimmer’s Batman, do you remember that theme with just two notes, played by the horns?... What comes to the rescue? Orchestration, that is, how we develop those notes and the identity we give them; and if there were any similarities in the single notes, then they disappear once placed in an orchestral context. Minority Report (2002) film with music by John Williams in which even good old Johnny (who can still afford long themes…) knows when to use the fragment, right? This soundtrack has some elements a bit different from what we’d expect. Even earlier, with "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," he used the famous five notes...

it was a sort of predecessor to this approach, Not that John Williams hasn’t also given us very fast themes like the one in "Catch Me If You Can"... Here what intrigues us is this thematic use based on brevity, repetition, and speed. We’re in the spider-robots scene where they’re hunting down the fugitive Tom Cruise. When these spider-robots set out to do their job, this fragment starts playing: two bars in total. What sustains the evolution of this cell? Harmonic progression.

The key changes. So the spider theme takes us from the external point of view, remember the change in points of view that we talked about in the other video, and the moment we shift back to the protagonist’s point of view— as if we were in his place—the thematic tension is the one we heard, from this very fast, highly repetitive core, and we see the notes entrusted to the brass and the violas. And guys, by the way, playing with the brass at that speed, those repeated notes... with that level of precision, you need super musicians. What interests us is the smallness of the cells present in the theme. It's just two bars.

There's no need to come up with some huge idea... This is perfectly concise, it follows the action, it helps the viewing. It tells what it needs to to tell. So it’s perfect. And we stay in the same year, 2002, because we have another beautiful film, Signs, by Shyamalan, starring Mel Gibson. The composer is James Newton Howard, who scored all of Shyamalan’s films, except for the low-budget one...

Here too we have the same mechanism: the thematic construction through rapid succession of notes. And a repetition that creates the basis for identity, and also the semantic aspect connected to mystery. Shyamalan always hints at something we don’t openly see, so this mystery is the foundation of what we’re about to hear. Harp and piano play this ostinato. Underneath—you won’t believe it—an empty fifth… and the alternation between C major and C minor. With a minimal and elegant fragment, we get a beautiful effect of mystery—with harmonics too—but really, here too, very little material… But what I find particularly interesting in this piece is not its use in this scene, but in the next one.

So, here’s a scene of worry, of tension, with him running at full speed, the camera moving through the cornfield, and here the music could have been much more tense. Much more scaring, right? Instead—what incredible elegance! And how beautifully it connects the outside to the inside... Exactly, because what we’re seeing is the mysterious world surrounding our protagonists, which doesn’t change between the inside of the house and the outside. Mel Gibson ran away from something we don’t see, he comes into the house and says nothing about what happened.

That’s why there wasn’t intense music before. We can attribute the tension to an inner anxiety coming from the speed of the note succession, which is nonetheless placed within a sort of thematic stillness. The theme is, at the same time, static and dynamic. It’s dynamic because the anxiety is clearly generated by the motion, the quick succession of sounds we hear, but its repetition and overall moderate flow keep it in the realm of unexpressed threat. If the threat were explicit, we’d have definitely a score of action, a much more explosive music. But here, the threat is unspoken and so it remains within the realm of doubt.

The doubt is generated by these two parallel tracks: the moderate speed of the successive notes and their repetition. So in conclusion, if you’re composing music for a film today, it’s likely the director will ask for something more fragmented. But keep in mind that not all directors have musical skills or the ability to tell you: “I want it like this, or like that.” So it’s likely that in today’s world, if you do something like this, you’ll match his taste. The important thing is to find that strong core of identity... it can be just two notes, but they must work. That’s a slightly more complicated issue.

Maybe we’ll cover that in another episode. See you next time.