The 16th rhythm is just everywhere! It's just over and over and over and over!
If I had to name one thing that beginning composers
do not do enough of, it's repeat their ideas.
I think a lot of people are afraid of being boring, and they think if they
repeat their ideas too much that people are going to zone out or stop listening.
But really, repetition is the key to a better piece of music.
It makes it easier to develop and work with your ideas,
your listener is able to follow what you're doing, and you're giving your piece an overall identity.
If you keep changing your ideas too quickly
and too often it doesn't feel like it's developing and reaching new exciting places.
Instead it feels like it's wandering and it's like you don't really know
what the point is, or where you're trying to go.
In this video I'm going to show you four classic themes by John Williams and how he
uses repetition, much more than you might even think, to create a cohesive interesting theme.
Hey guys, welcome back to my channel.
My name is Ryan.
I'm a composer for film, TV, and video games, and this is where I like to talk about,
and figure out, and work out how writing music actually works.
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composition, all that good stuff, please remember to subscribe.
So the first theme I want to look at is Hedwig's theme from Harry Potter.
So the basic idea for the theme is right here.
Usually we say that a theme has a two bar basic idea.
Because of the meter and the tempo,
this is just expanded double that so it's a four bar basic idea.
But if you look at the overall shape, it's still functioning the same way
the basic idea for a period or a sentence would function.
And the main idea here has two licks, or two motives, that are going to be reused.
One is this [music].
And the other is the [music].
These two different parts are going to make up
everything else that we see in the rest of this theme.
And if you listen to the original track, it's going to be heard in
accompaniment parts, and b themes, and all sorts of other places.
But these two licks are going to drive pretty much everything else going forward.
So the first time we hear it we have this [music].
And then we match that with what we call a contrasting idea [music[.
But if you look at it, it's not that contrasting because
although the harmony contrasts, and instead of going up it goes down, that rhythm is identical.
These bars and these bars have the exact same rhythm.
This is even copy paste the same bar.
It's even the same pitches.
The only thing that's different here is instead of going
up a fifth like he was here, he's going up a third.
And then down a fifth instead of where here he went down a step.
So the rhythm and the contour is exactly the same.
Our ear recognizes that.
We hear contour and rhythm much more than we hear the specific intervals.
So if you're keeping the overall shape the same but changing those little pitches and those exact
intervals, that's a way to be repeating without actually just copy pasting and being too boring.
So now when we come back in bar nine to repeat the basic idea, we can see the
first two bars of it are exactly the same as how we started at the beginning of the piece.
These two bars and these two bars are identical.
Except in this case, because we're going to be driving towards a cadence and driving
towards some sort of ending, this time he reaches towards a climax and a high pitch for the theme,
which he then comes down from until we reach our climax.
This A# is a nice little diversion but if you look at the top we can actually see [music].
And there's just a few little dips under, here and there, but overall there's a pretty
simple shape just going from our high point descending back into our tonic of the E.
The other thing to notice about this is we have lick one's motive rhythm here,
exactly how it was before, and we also have this happening here.
So we have it here, and then it repeats here, and then it repeats here.
So we have lick one one, two, three, four times and we have motive two one, two,
three, four, five, six times, just glancing at it.
It's a lot of repetition.
There's very few notes here, if any...
I don't think there's any notes here actually that don't participate in some way
with either this rhythm or with this rhythm.
Everything is covered under those two motives.
Even when he goes off to new climaxes.
Even when he has a cadence.
Everything is part of repeating those shapes and those rhythms.
So let's listen to the whole theme.
Next let's look at the theme from Indiana Jones.
So this is a very familiar theme and part of what makes it so familiar and
catchy is this rhythm and how often this rhythm is repeated.
It really gets in our ears.
So obviously this is our main opening basic lick, and this is our whole basic idea.
This here gets repeated within the basic idea itself, just down a step.
And this little dotted eighth sixteenth pattern we have here comes back again and again and again.
We can see it here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.
So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,
ten times just in this first statement of the theme.
Then this whole eight bar theme repeats with a slightly different ending.
And the b theme even uses this lick as well.
So this dotted eighth sixteenth rhythm is just everywhere.
It's just over and over and over and over.
People who are afraid of being boring by reusing things
should look at this as a great example of "No, you keep using that identifying thing."
Because that's how people know this is Indiana Jones.
If you heard just the first four notes of this lick in any other context
you'd know it was a reference to Indiana Jones and you would get it.
And it's that repetition that is helping you know that, that you can really identify
"Where does this come from? Where do I know this? Oh yeah, it's the Indiana Jones theme."
So the only difference for most of these is where it starts.
So this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one are all the rising step up step up.
Exact same contour, they're just starting on a different pitch.
The only time it breaks is after we've heard it many, many, many times
is here now we're going up a sixth and we're outlining an arpeggio.
Other than that it's exactly the same everywhere you hear it.
So let's listen to the whole thing.
And you don't get sick of it.
Nobody is bothered or annoyed by that rhythm happening over and over and over.
It's what keeps it interesting.
Kind of counter-intuitively, by having that same lick, and in just slightly different ways,
it's more interesting to listen to.
If you kept changing it and changing it and changing it we kind of disengage.
We can't really follow, like, this doesn't have anything to do with anything i've just heard.
I don't know where we're going with this and we'll tune it out.
The next one I have is Princess Leia's theme, and this is another example where
he has two different motives that repeat in different ways throughout the theme.
So you can see in Princess Leia's theme we have two licks.
We have this rising sixth in the beginning,
and then we have this little kind of arch 16th figure.
Everything else in this theme is based on those two licks
That's our basic idea.
When we repeat that basic idea we start in the exact same way with motive number one,
and motive number two just reaches to a slightly higher point.
But it's very easy for us to hear, "Oh yeah that's the same thing, it's just a little higher."
The contour is the same, the...
Even the intervals are the same as far as going up seconds and down seconds.
We really recognize it.
When we get to this point where he's going into the continuation [music].
This time he actually does an octave instead of a sixth, but as I said
before the actual interval is less important than the shape and it's very clear to us.
This is the third time we're hearing this lick.
It's very familiar and now it's just reaching to new heights.
I think in some ways maybe think of it as if you had a different actor
coming in to play your character many, many, many times throughout your movie.
It would be really disturbing, and really confusing and hard to follow.
And so that's what's happening if you're taking your lick and you're changing it too much.
All of a sudden you're just giving it to a completely different person.
And sometimes people are gonna be like "Wait,
who is that? Do I know them? Is this even the main character?"
It's these subtle little changes that you're taking your main character
into maybe a different costume, or maybe entering a new scene, but it's still the main character.
So in this case this [music] is still our main character even if it's [music].
Everything about it, to that little pickup, to the rising high leap is, oh and the repetition
on that top note, tells us "OK. This is the same character. I'm still following what this is."
And it's the same thing with the second motive as well.
This is the first time it's a little different.
Instead of repeating this note on the second time it comes down,
it's such a slight difference that you don't even really notice it unless you're thinking about it.
And then that becomes the new norm as we come here on a lower pitch but it's
the new way to say the thing, and then here it's the new way to say the thing.
The only thing that doesn't come directly from these motives might be the lead in to the cadence
here, this kind of repeat of that idea where these come up, but I think it's pretty obvious.
You can see that that and that have a lot in common, its just the direction has been flipped.
It's still 16th notes, it's still stepwise movement.
I don't think you could really argue that those are not coming from the same original motive.
So again, there's just so much repetition here.
And then the last one I want to look at is the Schindler's List theme.
So here again we have another theme where there's two motives that are kind of driving
everything that comes after it.
In some cases the variations are pushed a little
further than some of the other ones I think we've looked at.
But we can see even just starting, our first motive is these fifths right here.
Which comes back exactly here.
Comes back pretty close here and here and here.
So one, two, three, four, five times in our theme without doing anything more
drastic than just, like, a slight pitch higher, slight pitch lower.
You know, five times just doing that.
And then our second idea is this one here.
Right here and we can see that that one changes a little bit.
It's descending from a high point down to a low point.
The next time we hear it it's crunched in.
So the shape is still the same, it's still going down,
it's still on these eighth notes, but instead of the wider [music] it has now become [music].
And every time after that.
This one turns.
I think it's pretty easy to follow that this is a pretty close cousin to this.
So I've talked about in another video where people
just develop their ideas so far, so far, so quickly away from where they started.
You can see here it's much more followable if it's much more subtle.
So here we had going down [music] becomes [music].
It's so close that we get it, we can follow it.
But it's also that when he does that slight variation it's not then that he's now going
to bury that one, and that's going to change into something else into something else.
He's going to come back to where he had it before.
So it's repeat so... other than this little variation ,here
we get back to our descending seconds, we get back to our descending seconds.
So the variations are happening within the piece but they're not leading us astray.
They're not just helping us wander into foreign places that we don't know how we got into.
What I will look at is this lick which I think is kind of interesting.
I would argue that this is, in a lot of ways, a variation on this lick right here.
Because of the repeated note on beats one and two and these the leap down.
We don't actually get that quite as much anywhere else.
So it's it's a bit of a stretch, it's a bit of a farther variation
but is still to my ear very obviously related.
Especially because of that repeated note and because of the leap down and back up.
I feel like that's still a pretty close cousin to where we were.
This one too is slightly stretched.
It's slightly pushed, where the pattern doesn't quite match.
But again we're on this two beat eighth notes the whole time,
under a single bow phrasing here again.
I's again that idea that it's not too far away.
It is some variation.
So this one, in a funny way, this one has the most variation of all
the other themes we've looked at and it still has hardly any variation at all.
It's still everything here is just so obviously part of the same piece.
It's all part of the same original ideas just changing, you know, an interval here or there.
Changing a shape slightly but not drastically.
It's not like all of a sudden this was with staccato notes
and 16th notes and an arpeggio pattern in, you know, an open voicing.
Everything is still pretty darn close.
DS of the whole piece I would maybe argue that, you know, bar two and the first part of bar
four are a little different and everything else just belongs to that first bar.
And like I said, saying those don't belong is a bit of a stretch because
even those are pretty close so let's listen to this whole thing
So I didn't really cherry pick these examples or plan on using
these examples when I had this idea for the video.
It was pretty clearly just, you know, "Oh I know John Williams is going to do this well.
Does he do it on this theme? Yes. Does he do it on this theme? Yes."
It really wasn't hard.
I could probably find you 200 more examples of themes he's written
that use this repetition idea just so tight-knit.
Keeping those same ideas consistently throughout the theme and in most cases
then throughout the transitions, throughout the B sections, the codas, the intros.
Everything is just so often repeated.
Someday i'll do a whole video on Duel of the Fates from Phantom
Menace because the repetition in that thing is just crazy.
Every single idea, from the ostinato to the melody to the epic choir parts,
all come from a single root source and it's just super effective.
It's an awesome track.
And obviously it's not just John Williams who does this so well,
but his examples are familiar and they're very accessible and easy to listen to.
So I like to use them.
So please let me know in the comments about your writing.
Do you repeat your ideas enough?
Do you feel like you're afraid of being boring and you're looking for ways to overcome that?
I'd like to hear from you and I'll see you next time!