Of leitmotifs

I miss catchy themes in recent entertainment industry. As far as I can tell, the latest truly memorable themes have been in the early Harry Potter movies, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the first and second Pirates of the Caribbean movies. That's some early 00s stuff, and I can't remember many more since then. Only now and then there are some movies with one or other melodical soundtracks, but overall I feel there's been no real effort bringing songs that make you hum around for days.

I even started to think that perhaps the audience doesn't actually want it anymore. Maybe everybody got sick of it. But then HBO released Game of Thrones and now I know that's bullshit. The opening theme of this series is simple and catchy, and, as far as I can see, everybody seems excited about it. It's been really a while since I've seen people reimagining songs through metal and violin and 8bit versions, or even mashups of all these versions altogether.

I hear the leitmotif technique roots from opera composer Richard Wagner, which must set John Williams as a Wagnerian composer, then, because leitmotifing is just what makes him one of my favorite composers of all time, as he has an astounding ability to craft memorable themes for every single thing, and using these themes in critical moments to keep the audience under his spell. Star Wars is one of my all-time favorite series exactly because of that, the masterful use of leitmotifs by John Williams. Also lightsabers and awesome starships, of course. But the gentle whisper of the theme of the Force can send a chill down the spine of someone who's aknowledged with its meaning. For example, there's a scene in episode IV when Luke watches the binary sunset and thinks that there might more to his life than working in that farm in the middle of nowhere. Oh wait, you don't really know what he thinks, you only listen to that melody, and you can understand the character through it. And boy, what a great scene it is exactly because of that. You can show a lot through music, things that don't need to be told with actual words. Show, don't tell, the axiom of art.

And you don't have to have a movie or a game or a play to make use of musical themes. One of the greatest accomplishments in the using of themes that I can tell lies in the album Remedy Lane, by Pain of Salvation. There you find a love song, This Heart of Mine, with a very clear melody in its later chorus. And after that you have a depressive, melancholic song called Undertow. When the instrumental section of this song starts, if you pay attention, you can recognize that love theme, though brutaly distorted. It's all about this little melody played with a lot of tremolo-ing. The greatest thing about it is that you don't really need this logical analysis to understand the pain it conveys.

So that's why I really miss musicians exploring all the possibilities that music themes can have. The using of easily recognizable melodies as a symbolization of characters, places, events, feelings, ideas, or just anything, should be a technique of utmost importance for any storyteller.

Come to think of it, I have themes of my own. They're what I've been calling Hymns. Let me see if I can explore all the possilibilities that music themes can have.