Episode 05: Name That Tune

This is a podcast episode about composing thematic music for films. The host discusses what makes a theme timeless and how to create striking features in melodies. He suggests that timeless music is digestible and concise, with some repetition. He also talks about the importance of association and how presenting a theme with a character helps make it memorable. The host gives examples of striking features in melodies, such as angular movement and accented tones. He emphasizes the value of repetition and transposition in creating a memorable theme. Hello, this is Karl Irwin, and this is Spotting Cues, a podcast for the amateur and hobbyist film score composer. On the last episode, we were looking at scoring to dialogue sequences, and how to approach that in an understated way, when, what kind of material to use, when to use it, what is the timing of such sort of scoring, and what kind of service we're trying to provide in that sort of situation. We're going to go the opposite direction here, and we're going to go to the more overt kind of scoring, and this is thematic composition, composing themes. I remember a conversation I had with my uncle, who is an amateur and hobbyist musician himself. He's actually a software engineer, but he plays guitar, plays banjo, and we had a conversation a number of years ago where he asked me the question, he says, what makes a theme, a song, particularly like a song that you might know, like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, something like that, what makes it timeless? What is it about certain songs and themes that make them timeless? And I had to think about it for a little bit, and I think, I mean, the obvious answer to me was, you know, repetition, obviously. If something's repeated over and over and over again, historically, it becomes known and becomes what we call a household sound, household name, household sound, right? But I don't think that's merely it. I think there's a lot more to it than that. After pondering it for a while, I think I've come up with a few observations I can make. This isn't going to be the exhaustive answer on this, but it's an important question because it can be very helpful in determining how to compose thematic music for picture, for film. Obviously, the thematic material in a movie, in a picture, is part of its identity, and that needs to be done right. If you want to, you know, you want to get the identity right, and you want to get the identity such that it has that timeless quality to really support the picture, not just in the moment, but in the long term, right? A lot of people, you think of a major, will think of a major movie that they know, and one of the things that pops in their mind when they think about the movie isn't particularly a scene or the plot, but in many cases, you think about the music. You think about the theme music that might go with a particular character or with an important element of the picture, some kind of thematic material. So it's important to get this right. Here's what I've come down to. Here's just a few suggestions. There's a bit of my theory on thematic music, and this is how I think whenever I need to compose thematic music. So first of all, I think the attributes of kind of timeless music is, number one, that it is digestible. It's concise in construction. Now, I don't want to say it's a bite size, really. It's not easy listening, necessarily, but it is digestible. It is something that is, it is easily understood. It is concise. It is to the point. It is not, it, I've been in situations where I walk out of a movie or away from a musical performance where there might be a contemporary piece being performed, and I could not hum that tune to you, you know, seconds after I've heard it. It just, it doesn't stick. I think one element that helps with that is if it is concise in its construction, right? So it's digestible, concise. And there's some repetition in the elements involved. We talk about knowing a tune over time because it gets repeated culturally, but here we're talking about a small, concise fragment of musical grammar that gets some kind of repetition. It might not be exact. It might have transposition. It might have other elements to it that do change or fluctuate, but major elements of that tight little piece of grammar do get repeated. There's some repetition involved. So these are, I think, two major components of that digestible aspect. The second one I want to talk about is association. Whenever you have a theme, particularly in film, the fact that it has association helps it to be timeless. When you think of a major, larger-than-life character from film and the theme music that goes with that character, it is the presentation of that character that does help you to remember the music and helps make that music timeless. Now, that's not something we can do a lot about. That has a lot more to do with the things that are outside of our control, but it is worth mentioning. But here is something we can use to our advantage. This is the third element, the third attribute, and that is striking features that this concise construction, this repeated bit of grammar that is set into a form, it has some striking features. So let me lay out a theory of striking features here. When you think about visual identity, you know, like a person, people, you can think about, well, what is it about a face that makes, you know, someone pretty? What is it about a face that makes them beautiful, which is different from pretty, right? What is it about a face that makes them a little odd or unusual? What is it about a face that makes them downright ugly, right? A face only, you know, their mother could love. It seems strange to think of it in this way, but I think these are really important. And I think in every case, we're dealing with the concept of striking features, striking features, accented features that either fit or don't fit into a particular kind of understanding. It's about proportion, you know, facial proportions, and something that falls outside of kind of that mean equilibrium of normal and plainness. What are the striking features? Think about this like aesthetically with a sports car. What is it aesthetically that makes a sports car a sports car? We're not talking about what's under the hood. We're talking about what it looks like. It's going to be its striking features. That's what we're dealing with. So when you're dealing in music and you want to make a theme that really stands out and takes on some of that timeless quality, I think you can reason that most timeless melodies have striking features to them. They're not smooth. Contrary to popular understanding, when writing music, you don't necessarily want your melody to be very smooth. When you think of a tune like Happy Birthday, that's a very difficult tune to sing even though everybody sings it. It's got large leaps and jumps. It's got striking features. And I think this is something that when done intentionally can make a melody quite timeless. So rather than thinking smooth in scale you like, you want to be thinking about interval leaps and jumps. How often, how far, and what intervals you use will then take that, those striking features and then apply a meaning to them in terms of pretty versus beautiful versus odd versus ugly versus scary versus tense versus whatever. And as we talked about in the last episode, obviously interval relationships, the relationship between two notes and certainly chord qualities and the relationship between two chords in motion in Western music, they tend to have some kind of emotional value to them. And it's good to keep a list or a key of what these things mean so that you can draw upon them and choose exactly what intervals you're going to be using. So let's look at this in terms of actual composition. We'll do some examples here. We haven't been doing this very much. We've been mostly talking theoretically. But we'll do some examples. Being a podcast, we're not going to be looking particularly at music, but we'll listen to some music here. And this is not, you know, a best work situation. This is just a little exercise just to demonstrate a few ideas and then you can take this and run with it. So melodically, melodically speaking, when we're dealing with a theme, we're dealing with a melody. Right. So melodically speaking, a striking feature, I think, is angular movement, angular movement. That is to add some kind of shift in direction and add a larger space or gap or interval at which that direction goes. I think most timeless themes incorporate angular movement. There is usually some kind of turn that gives it a striking feature that can be recalled. You know, when I meet, if I meet a guy on the street and I say, hi, my name's Carl. And he says, hi, my name's Bob. And I look at his name or I look at his face and I shake his hand and I say, hi, Bob, it's nice to meet you. I would note as I'm saying his name and looking at his face that Bob's got a big nose. That's a striking feature. And I associate that with the name and therefore I recall it. We're thinking the same way in terms of angular motion. The interval change, the change of direction and the distance at which the jump is happening is that striking feature. And again, you can do more or less of this. I think if you do a lot of striking features, it becomes very difficult to really nail down and recall and remember. However, if there are just a couple of concise striking features, then it becomes an identity that can be recalled. OK, so angular movement, I think, matters. Accented tones is a second, I think, striking feature. That is to say that a tone within the pitch collection is accented in some way. And I don't mean in terms of loudness or softness, but probably with relationship to its relationship to chord tones. Is it part of the chord? Is it an anticipation of suspension? Is it a non-chord tone? What's the situation? Is it a non-chord tone that then resolves? That's another issue, too. So accented tones, angular movement, accented tones. These are things we're thinking about. And then something we already mentioned is the repetition of these ideas. These ideas being repeated, maybe in transposition, diatonic transposition or chromatic transposition, whatever the case may be, whatever works for the kind of music. But that we're repeating these little bits of grammar, the striking feature that we've identified and established. It gets some amount of repetition in the form that really kind of drills it into the mind. The reason why this works is that if you do something one time, it's not clear whether it was intended. But if you do the same thing again a second time and certainly a third time, now it becomes something that is absolutely understood as intentional. So the repetition that we do with these striking features makes them intentional. And that intentionality, I think, is something that just helps to support its recollection in the ear and the mind of a listener after they've heard it. Let's apply this to an example. So in this example, we're going to just work in the key of C very quickly. Here's the scale. That is our modality, just simple. It's going to be diatonic. We're not going to do any kind of modal borrowing, chord borrowing or any kind of chromaticism. We'll just keep this diatonic. And we're not going to be thinking very much about functional harmony specifically. We may do things just intuitively here in terms of functional harmony. Our real concern is going to be about just the cadence, the end point of the final phrase. Whenever we get there, we're going to want to kind of button this up and get a nice, clean diatonic cadence going. So that'll be our one stipulation in terms of our thinking ahead of the functional harmony. Otherwise, we're just going to pick some intervals that kind of work good together and serve the roles that we're trying to do in terms of creating striking features. By the way, I think this is a great way to work. I think that if you start with functional harmony at the onset, you probably will have a harder time creating striking features. I recommend being super reductive, getting away from theoretical constructs, apart from your overall universe palette of modality. You know, what key are you in apart from that or what scale you're going to be using? And that might be an exotic one apart from those kind of fundamental ideas. I think it's better not to really think too hard about functional harmony until you get further down the road. So let's let's just come up with a pitch collection here. So we'll just have a root tone on C and then above that, we'll put together, you know, six or seven notes. So how about this? OK, so that's our pitch collection and it's all tight, it's all tight together, a couple of leaps by a third, moving up and then coming back down at a seven to one kind of end to it, that kind of cadential end. OK, what we want to do is we want to add some of these striking features. So let's try this first. Let's add a leap so that whenever it turns direction, it's going to turn in a wider leap. I'm going to take the the third and the fourth notes and I'm going to move them up just a little bit further so that we get a larger leap. So we're going to jump up to the sixth, which is a non-chord toned root position, and then we'll have that resolve down to the five and then we'll jump way down to the seven so that we get kind of this big, we'll have one leap before the fourth note and then one big leap after the fifth note coming back down. And that sounds like this. OK, let's take this a little bit further and we're going to take this striking feature, this leap, and we're going to accentuate it maybe by giving it some length. So when we jump up to the higher note, the high note that we've we've moved up, let's extend that and make it longer. In order to do this, we'll add a rhythm. Well, we'll speed up the couple of notes right before it so that we can land on that note and accentuate that non-chord tone. And then we'll bring it down, resolving to the fifth, and then we'll take this down to the seventh. And another thing we're going to do is we're going to create another accentuation. Rather than resolving back to the one at the very end, we're just going to end on the seventh. Our goal here is that we're going to take this little piece, this two measure idea of just a few notes, and we're going to repeat it in transposition. And one way to make it so that it does want to go somewhere is that if it's left somewhat unresolved. So rather than resolve it, we'll just remove that root tone and we'll accentuate the non-chord tone after the big leap down. So we have a few tight notes, a big leap up, a resolution by step, and then a big leap down, and we'll end on that note. And that sounds like this. OK, let's let's do one more thing here. Let's start thinking harmonically. So all I have is a root tone playing underneath. We have an accentuation at the very end, which kind of implies maybe a five chord. If you're thinking about harmony, you've got the fifth and then you've got the seventh there. So let's try this. Let's add a bass movement on the second measure that not only accentuates, keeps that accentuation of the last note as a non-chord tone, but maybe accentuates that resolution to the fifth. So let's get off the one chord. And instead of using a five, let's put let's put the root note for the four. So we're just using very basic diatonic harmony. These are pop chord kinds of ideas. It's not even a chord. We're just looking at the bass note. So this will accentuate the resolution from the sixth down to the five and really make it stand out. So we have a small group of notes, a leap up, a striking feature, changing direction and going up in a larger leap, a resolution down, but into a non-chord tone because the bass is going to move and then down again, a big leap down to the seventh, which still remains a non-chord tone. And that sounds like this. OK, let's try to flesh this out a little bit more, I'm just going to add some I'll add the fifth to these chords or these root notes just to give us a little bit more body in the bass. We're not giving them chord qualities per se, but I'll just add a fifth above each note, maybe an octave below to kind of give a little bit more weight in the bass. And maybe that will lead us in the direction of what we want to do down the road. And then I'm going to add a little bit of a simple harmony to the melody above it. So as a couple of notes underneath, maybe on the resting positions or on the moving lines, moving parts so that we can get a little bit of harmonic value. And again, I'm just picking intervals. I'm not really thinking in terms of harmony related to the bass notes. These are separated by space. So we can sort of noodle around and try to find some harmonies that sound interesting, even if they're not necessarily part of the chord qualities in the bass. And that can help to drive what we do next as well. Again, striking features is what we're after. So we're not necessarily trying to make things extremely smooth. We want them to sound pleasing. We want them to sound inevitable. Our choices, we want our choices to be inevitable. But we don't necessarily want them to be smooth. We want them to be striking. That's what we're going for. So let's let's listen here. And maybe it would sound like this. OK, and now for the last little bit here, what we're going to do is we're going to repeat this idea, this two measure idea, and we're going to add some diatonic transposition. We'll just maybe it'll go up a couple of steps on repetition and then we'll do a kind of a formal end to this. So that will take a part, just part of the pitch collection, maybe the first half of it. And we'll create a descending transposition that brings us down to a recap or restatement of the idea that will then end on the root tone to give us some finality to the phrase. And what we'll do is we'll just transpose our bass notes as we see fit and maybe create a walking sort of bass motion that just feels intuitively correct. Again, not really thinking about functional harmony specifically, but just thinking about what kinds of note pairings work, what seems to work. We can flesh out the harmony down the road in terms of a functional harmony. But what we're doing is we're composing. We're not doing theoretical analysis. We're writing music. So we're really choosing notes that seem to feel right and fit. Now, if you were doing this in a film, this would be related to the characterization that you're trying to portray or the situation. You would be choosing chords and chord groupings, like I said, that that sort of portray the emotion you're going for. Or you would be using interval changes or melodic changes that fit the emotion that you're going for in terms of Western music for this type of music in particular. But here we're just writing a very generic theme that has striking features. So that might sound like this. So this is really starting to come together and we have it's not it's not clean. I want you to remember this polishing is something you do at the end. Polishing is something you do after you've painted the ceramic doll. You've painted it. You put a coating of clear on the outside and then you polish it. We're not polishing anything just yet. We're just trying to put together a very basic rudimentary structure. We're not worried about voice leading. We're not worried about the rules. We're really never worried about the rules, quite frankly. We're writing music. In terms of theoretical analysis, we take from history what people have tended to do. And from that, we develop guidelines that we create. By that, we create what we think of as rules, right, to recreate that particular period kind of music. That is not our concern. We're not worried about voice leading just yet. When we get into orchestration and we flesh this out, we'll think about those ideas, which is our next step. So let's put this into a string orchestra. And what we'll do is we'll put a little bit of an introductory couple bars on it. We'll flesh out some inner voicing. So we'll have some inner motion, just a little bit of kind of movement. Not much, but maybe going to suspended notes on those middle chord tones and then coming back again, particularly in the viola, maybe in the celli a little bit. And we will do some dynamic change. Let's add some dynamic contrast so that we have some more musical sort of flair to this. There'll be some swelling and some dissipation, some expressive adjustments. Maybe we'll put a couple of holds in there, a couple of places where we'll kind of pause for a moment to extend out the longer notes. We'll just make this more musical and we'll add a few additional chord tones to flesh out the harmonies a little bit more. And again, we're looking at the melody. We're thinking about the theme. We're thinking about the making a timeless sort of iconic theme that has these attributes of striking features. Leaps and jumps, none or tonal, accented tonal qualities, tones that stand out for some reason, maybe because they're outside of the chord tones or they're placed at maybe unusual places on purpose so that it will be noticed. And this is what we come up with. So this is just a simple little exercise, and you can see a couple of very intentional decisions can take you a very, very long way. If those intentional decisions are based on, you know, historical observation, you know, what makes what makes melodies timeless? I think it's their striking features. That's my theory anyway. It's the striking features. So if you want to write music that has that sort of quality, I say go for the striking features. Again, leaps, creating angular movement of some sort. It's how much you do is up to you. And I think this really can apply. In my experience, I know and I found that this can apply to any kind of modality. You can be in an exotic scale. You can really be in any kind of harmonic situation or no harmonic situation at all. You might have just a scale that might be a drone sort of scale, like bagpipes or something like that. But if you add changes that are angular and you do it sparingly enough so that that striking feature can be recalled, I think you're on the path to making a really, really good theme that will help to create identity for the picture rather than relying on the picture for its identity, help to actually establish an identity at a musical level. So those are my thoughts on this subject. I do want to take a moment here to let you know that I have an X account, formerly known as Twitter, put up. So it's under the podcast name. You can find it under Spotting Cues on X. You can subscribe there. And please feel free to leave me recommendations, message me, let me know if there's something you want me to discuss or something you want to hear about or continue the conversation. If there's something that you heard on the podcast that you want to talk about, get the conversation going over there and I'd be happy to respond to you. So with that, these are my ideas. Best of luck with this and happy composing.