Film Music and Emotional Extremes

Scenes and situations that are emotionally hardly bearable (major characters dieing, catastrophic plot twists, portrayal of gruesome psychic or physical violence, fatal decisions etc.) need special attention from the musical side. The tendency to double the emotion in the music usually feels very disturbing and annoying.

Successfully working scenes in such emotoinal extremes usually tend to be very sparesly scored if not even left in complete musical silence. The attempt to make these scenes more dramatic by pouring music over it usually doesn’t work as it will tend to make the scene feel less “real”. It sometimes also work to work with very archaic structures in such scenes, e.g. percussive effects or very raw instrumental textures. But your general tendency should be to be rather avoid any elaborate scoring in such situations.