For centuries mankind has been writing, reading, and finding inspiration from stories. From childhood, stories have been a major part of our development. We begged our parents to read stories to us. We acted out stories with our siblings and friends. We discovered authors who wrote stories that "spoke" to something within us. These experiences are common to every one of us and helped us discover, in sense, who we are. Why do stories intrigue us?
One reason stories are so intriguing is that they have a unique ability to communicate experiences to which we can all relate: good versus evil, coming of age, a journey, conquering a monster, searching for treasure, rags to riches.
Another reason is that stories have characters that possess identifiable behavior. We recognize the hero, the villain, the mentor, the threshold guardian, etc. by their actions and words. In other words, we are introduced to the archetypes.
As children, we instinctively knew how to portray the hero and the villain in our playing. We knew heros were ultimately good and villains were ultimately bad. As we matured, we learned to recognize plot and character archetypes in classic literature, and eventually were able to see them in our own lives. Stories are important because in them we discover that we experience these plot archetypes and are these character archetypes. We learned to make the connection from the allegorical and metaphorical events and charchters to the real experiences and real people in our individual lives.
Throughout history, new mediums through which stories are told have been invented. From oral to written to performed, the delivery methods of stories have made the connections to experiences and characters more tactile. The most effective of these mediums to accomplish this has been film. In a film, we can see and hear a character, settings, costumes, expressions, and emotions. One of the most powerful dimensions of using film to tell stories is music. Not only can we see and hear archetypes in a film, they are now adorned with musical themes that encapsulate their innate characteristics. We only need to hear a villain's theme to know he's the villain. The same is true for the hero and the mentor.
Classic literature is teeming with heroes, and villains, and mentors, and threshold guardians, and companions, and shapeshifters, etc.. Each of them, in their respective stories, behaves according to the manner of the particular archetype upon which the character is based. In a film, as well as opera, music provides another dimension to the process of correctly identifying an archetypal character. It too must possess the characteristics of the archetype to which it is attached.
This leads to a very interesting observation. Just as we are innately able to recognize a literary archetype in any story by their words and actions, we also have an innate sense of how music should behave in order to correctly portray the archetypal character for which it is composed. The result is the formation of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, textural, formal, and expressive musical archetypes. Film composers from the past to the present use strikingly similar musical structures made from the aforementioned list of elements to compose their themes for these archetypes.
As you watch films, look for the archetypes and listen closely to their themes. You will discover these musical structures as well.