Composer Tell-Tale Trademarks

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I love catching a little musical phrase that a composer unconsciously has stolen from an earlier film. I just heard a phrase from James Horner’s "Something Wicked This Way Comes" that’s directly lifted from "Star Trek II."

I don’t have a musical background but I certainly know when a score is by a specific composer, there’ll be certain "go to" orchestrations, favorite ways of suggesting suspense or romance or epic action.

For the sheer volume of scores produced by a sought-after composer, it’s rare to find one whose scores are impossible to identify.