Thematic Development Quotes

One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.

So I prefer to do the entire music for a film. And when I'm doing the background score, I can weave the whole film together in terms of themes and songs for a good cinematic feel.

The thing I don't want to do as a film composer is reiterate. I prefer to subtextualize or to underline rather than to say, 'This is what you should be feeling.'

There are moments when you feel trapped, ill at ease. A year later the same feeling can turn out to be the theme of a book.

It is hard work composing a song for a film and showing it to makers: 50% of the tune remains the same, and the remaining 50% is changed to suit the script.

On 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' I must insist that the sounds of the instrumentation are crucial to reflect what the movie should convey in terms of energy and emotion. It's not just the melody or the tune.

If I'm soloing, I usually try to start with a theme, which will often stem from the blues.

I often have a theme in mind when I'm starting. I know that I want everything to be in a world of, say, evolution, or guilt.

Proust, my big inspiration for 'Goon Squad,' uses music a lot in his novel, both in terms of plot and structure. I liked the idea of doing the same thing, which is one reason I structured 'Goon Squad' as a record album, with an A side and a B side, that's built around the contrasting sounds of the individual numbers in it.

Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another theme, incorporating it, somehow trying to work their way all together to a meaning of some kind, or at least a conclusion.

What I love with 'Game of Thrones' is, every season, I get to continue to develop the existing themes; every season, I also get to write new themes.

My feeling has always been if you entertain people, they give you permission to do more on a thematic or character level.

Sometime I write a song off a central idea, instead of emotion.

The beauty of a main title is that you establish your main theme and maybe a bit of your secondary theme. You plant the seed that you're going to go water later in the score. And so, having that removed just made it so much more difficult.

I like to make songs that are based on concepts.

You're always going to write and draw inspiration from things that you're feeling, things that you've felt. It's kind of impossible not to unless you're writing a song and there's an exact scenario that you're trying to write a song for.

The idea of just improvising and riffing can sometimes be at the expense of story.

The trouble is that when you read criticisms about the other films that I've made you get the impression that they're all about themes, or problems, or ideas. But those are actually things that develop out of characters, out of images and out of other things. These more abstract things develop while working on the material, and out of it. It's not a theoretical exercise from the outset.

Each piece I tell stands on its own, and then it all ties together. It segues from story to story, and then I wrap it up - like three-piece movements in a symphony.

The nature of the contrapuntal experience is that every note has to have a past and a future on the horizontal plane.

But it wasn't just a technical approach towards the piano, studying the music for this film was also a way of approaching the soul of the film, because the film is really about the soul of Schubert and the soul of Bach.

I think change is happening in ways we can't anticipate yet because the whole generation of viewers who are viewing films - film may not be the appropriate word in years to come. I'm excited about the possibility of new types of storytelling; that to me is less daunting. I'm excited by how we'll evolve with those formats thematically, tonally and in narrative.

I wrote the poems in Charms Against Lightning one by one, over almost a decade, and I did not write them toward any theme or narrative. But once I really got serious about putting together a book, I began to see that in fact there were themes across the poems, if only because my own obsessions had brought me back time and again to the same ground. I realized that any ordering of the poems would determine how those themes developed over the manuscript, and how the collection's dramatic conflicts were resolved.

If one wants to go on living, one must evolve. Before, when we composed, we would start by a series of music themes. Once created, we would hire writers and lyricists to make up the text and the story line. I was the first to do this backwards with 'Man of La Mancha.'

I like writing a body of music that has a cohesive, emotional thread through it.