This Reminds Me of That

[JTN 2,047]

Don’t you just hate it when listening to a score, you recognize - or think you recognize - another theme from another score? I guess it comes with the territory of having heard too many scores. But sometimes one wishes that they could just enjoy a score for what it is, without hearing anything into it, or having to compare it to other scores that came before it. 
 

Do you get this feeling when you listen to film music? Do you get it a lot? And if so, can you always tell what melody/theme of which score that melody/theme reminds you of?

[Richard Penna 3,695]

All the flipping time and it can take hours to work out what it is...

 

The Archimedes theme from DoD reminds me of something else but for the life of me I can't work out what it is.

[GerateWohl 4,373]

Calling it hate is too strong.

 

And one thing that I dislike much much more, than a movie theme reminding me of another theme is, if I listen to a score and the music is just meandering across chords in the simpliest ossible way (e.g. something like a C-E-G-E-C-E-G-E-C-E-G-E ostinato) and there is no theme, no melody at all, no interesting textures, just these chords, sometimes even just getting repeated after the third chord change. Maybe even just tonica, subdominant, dominant, tonica plus no melody. The blandness of such music makes me agressive. That is why I have such a problem with Hans Zimmer's music. He often does something like that.

[JTN 2,047]

1 hour ago, Richard Penna said:

All the flipping time and it can take hours to work out what it is...

Sometimes even days (for me). And it's so very annoying, because when you almost got it, then you don't and it can be so frustrating. And I also hate it because it means that another composer wrote a similar theme just like it, just earlier, so this composer has either plagiarised it or unconsciously copied it. 

 

But what's worse is when you immediately know that you've heard this theme before, and you know in what score. And when a composer copies himself, e. g. James Horner in The Perfect Storm copies Braveheart, and you instantly recognize the theme and it turns you off. 

[Richard Penna 3,695]

One of McCreary's RoP themes starts off exactly the same as one of Elfman's Spidey themes. It works great but I'm always thinking of Spidey when I hear it.

[GerateWohl 4,373]

Over time it can also work the other way around. I remember, that in one theme from Williams' Hook in the beginning I clearly heard the love theme from Jane Eyre, but in the meantime I don't hear it anymore and I forgot which theme it was. So, these similarity kick in extremely when you first hear a piece. The longer you listen to it, the more you can manage to see it as something of its own and forget about these references, that you recognized in the beginning.

[JTN 2,047]

1 hour ago, Richard Penna said:

One of McCreary's RoP themes starts off exactly the same as one of Elfman's Spidey themes. It works great but I'm always thinking of Spidey when I hear it.

That sucks. I wonder if these things happen because the composer thinks he can get away with it or because the number of melodies and chord progressions are finite and sooner or later there are no more melodies or certain amount of notes to signal certain emotions that a scene requires. 
But if you use the same notes, you can still play with the tempo, like JW does in his themes for Home Alone and Hook that begin with the same two notes, only different tempo.

[Bespin 8,484]

I, on the contrary, believe that it's a great joy to be able to remember a piece of music that we've enjoyed when listening to a new one. It is connected to our memory but also to our emotions. It is also enjoyable to see that the same original idea can be developed so differently and even evolve throughout the ages. Everything is nothing but transformation and emotion.

[Edmilson 7,473]

Personally, I don't see as a problem at all. Nor as a sign of a composer getting lazy or something. I just think it's fascinating to see when composers find similar solutions to score scenes from wildly different movies. Like The Conspirators in JFK and Dennis Steals the Embryos in Jurassic Park, or The Intersection Scene from War of the Worlds on Indy 4 (and 5).

 

Or the Ludlow motif, which began its life in an action monster movie and eventually found its way into a historical epic (The Patriot), a fantasy adventure for kids (HP 1), a dark sci-fi thriller (Minority Report) and, of course, the Star Wars sequels.

 

Others may hate it, but I just think it's fascinating.

[Tom 4,673]

I was amazed how much the opening of the new Scherzo for Motorcycle arrangements sounds like Wagner.  

[Holko 9,532]

1 hour ago, Tom said:

I was amazed how much the opening of the new Scherzo for Motorcycle arrangements sounds like Wagner.  

Well, it is the Nazi theme...

[Nick1Ø66 4,722]

On 3/1/2024 at 10:07 AM, JTW said:

Don’t you just hate it when listening to a score, you recognize - or think you recognize - another theme from another score?

 

Well every John Barry score reminds me of every John Barry score. I don't hate it.

 

 

[Jurassic Shark 12,091]

1 hour ago, Nick1Ø66 said:

 

Pretty much happens whenever I listen to any John Barry score. And I don't hate it, I love it.

 

That theme is by Monty Norman. 

[ThePenitentMan1 744]

When watching my Star Trek DVDs, after the Desilu I.D. plays, there's an additional logo that sounds almost exactly like Star Wars.  It's burned into my mind; I can't hear the Desilu I.D. without my mind filling in that gap.  It irks me to no end.

[Faleel 5,360]

3 hours ago, ThePenitentMan1 said:

When watching my Star Trek DVDs, after the Desilu I.D. plays, there's an additional logo that sounds almost exactly like Star Wars.  It's burned into my mind; I can't hear the Desilu I.D. without my mind filling in that gap.  It irks me to no end.

Paramount logo?

[JTN 2,047]

Especially with scores by former RCP composers one can easily hear what they contributed to major HZ scores. 

Another thought: What if all the original ideas have already been used? What if there are no more possibilites, because all the great themes and melodies have already been written, and thus in every new theme we’re hearing another, previously written theme?

[GerateWohl 4,373]

2 hours ago, JTW said:

Another thought: What if all the original ideas have already been used? What if there are no more possibilites, because all the great themes and melodies have already been written, and thus in every new theme we’re hearing another, previously written theme?

With this argument you could also claim, why still write books. All that can be said by words has been said. All slogans have been formulated. But still people come up with new things.

 

And even if this would be the case (which isn't) then still people could come up with more original things than they often actually do. If you analyze Williams' themes like Helena's Theme or Rey's Theme you for sure could find a lot of snippets and motifs and themes in classical music and other music, that somehow sound similar, but still these are great themes on their own and much better than anything else created in the past 10 years.

[JTN 2,047]

2 hours ago, GerateWohl said:

With this argument you could also claim, why still write books.

Absolutely different thing. 

 

2 hours ago, GerateWohl said:

All that can be said by words has been said.

Not true. 

 

I was asking these things, not stating them. Asking  - not rhetorically - means that one doesn't know the answers, but is interested in other people's answers. 

[GerateWohl 4,373]

28 minutes ago, JTW said:

I was asking these things, not stating them. Asking  - not rhetorically - means that one doesn't know the answers, but is interested in other people's answers. 

iI got that. I didn't take that as your position. I was just answering in the sense, if someone claimed that argument, what would be my position against it. Doesn't make sense?

[JTN 2,047]

2 hours ago, GerateWohl said:

Doesn't make sense?

It does. It's just when you wrote "with this argument you could also claim" and not "one could claim", I thought that you meant it specifically for me, not in a general sense. I got you, and I agree with a lot of things you're saying, although I don't think that you... I mean, one can compare music to literature.

 

I've found a New Scientist article that might shed some light on this question:

"Composer Sergei Prokofiev, famed for his melodies, gave an answer to this question, which was posed by a reader of Pioneer magazine in 1939.

He started with the analogy of chess, calculating that by the white player’s fourth move, there are 60 million possible variants. There are also 257 variations to choose from in a short tune of eight notes, he said, which offers around 6 billion possibilities. Out of these, a composer might be able to find something melodious. Add in different note lengths, rhythm and harmony, and the 6 billion are multiplied still more.

He added that some melodies once thought to be appealing are not considered so today, and vice versa. He concluded that “we need not be afraid that there will come a time when all melody will have been exhausted and we shall be obliged to repeat old tunes”."

https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg25233601-000-could-we-run-out-of-musical-note-combinations-to-create-new-melodies/