Themes, motifs, and leitmotifs

Before you begin composing, we need to come up with some parameters to compose around. Themes, motifs, and leitmotifs are tools for coming up with musical ideas. They can help us to understand the meaning of scenes and define the qualities we want our music to have.

If you've taken a writing or film critiquing course, you may already be familiar with the terms themes, motifs, and leitmotifs. However, there could be many interpretations of these terms depending on who is teaching, and these terms are usually not used in a musical context. In the context of our discussion, we'll define these terms as follows:

Motif

A motif is a fragmentary musical idea that cannot represent something concrete in a narrative. It's a group or phrase of notes that convey an idea. It's the smallest amount of music you can make meaningful. As you replay this group of notes at different points throughout the narrative, the motif will come to mean...