The Limitations of Film Scoring - Character Themes

The biggest problem in composing themes in film is the short amount of time the composer has to establish a theme for the audience to recognise and get across the point that they are trying to make through the music.

When we are looking at character themes we are looking at complex pieces of musical composition. Brown.R.S. 1994 points out the theory that music doesn't just reveal feelings of love, passion etc. for someone but puts us (the audience) into that individuals position to be directly presented emotive information through our understanding, grasp and knowledge of those feelings without having them put through someone else in front of us. Basically the thought that we understand the emotion evoked through the music we hear directly and not though the character on screen pushing those emotions onto us.

So how can such complex ideas be limited to mere seconds of musical composition?
Of course there are many techniques in composing both in the contemporary world as well as the classical. We look at Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, Colour and Instrumentation as our tools of creation. We can add dissonance, atonality, polytonality, bitonality, modal and chromatic melodic writing amongst other tools to add tension, drama and individuality to a piece. But that doesn't answer the question of how we evoke intense feelings within such a short space of time.

Brown goes on to explain the use of classical compositional style within character themes. That themes can be trimmed into motifs, invention of appropriate rhythms and finding convincing harmonic contexts for the material that won't even see the traditional eight bar phrase found in songwriting.
Brown goes on to say great musical themes can be written without a traditional melody. Instead relying strongly on the instruments used, the harmony created and the rhythmic colour. In contrast to this however some of the best and most recognisable character themes are lone, three note melodies on a single instrument.

So once again we ask; How can we evoke a powerful emotional response in our viewers that is truly believable to the characters on screen through a single theme?

So far through my reading and researching of this there is no correct answer. There seems to be no formulaic approach to writing a character theme. Some are influenced by one thing, others by something completely different, it seems to come down to the individual composer, their knowledge of musical theory and practice, their knowledge of the film they are scoring for and their own personal relationship with the music they are creating with the theme they are getting across. I will continue to study this area to see if I come across a tight pattern to theme scoring, how we establish something huge in a minuscule period of time, until then it is my own knowledge of character narrative, music and how music is made that will aid me in my own compositions of character themes.