YOUR Favorite Film Scores

Listen Up: Seminars on Music is a weekly gathering of music lovers every Wednesday morning, hosted by AZMF’s Resident Artist, Josh Condon.  Each session combines music history, analysis, active listening, and discussion, designed to enhance your listening experience and overall music appreciation.  Listen Up covers all genres, emphasizing our common humanity across all musical styles!  Coffee provided.

For this session of Listen Up, we turn the spotlight on you—your taste, your memories, and the film scores that have stayed with you long after the screen fades to black. We’re collecting your favorite movie soundtracks—specifically original film scores—and building a session shaped entirely by participant submissions.

What makes a film score unforgettable? Is it a soaring orchestral theme that defines a hero, a subtle motif that signals danger, or a texture that quietly builds an entire world around the story? From the bold, instantly recognizable themes of composers like John Williams to the atmospheric soundscapes of Hans Zimmer or the intimate emotional writing of Hildur Guðnadóttir, film music shapes how we experience every moment on screen—often without us even realizing it.

Send your favorites to josh@azmusicfest.org, and during the session we’ll listen together and dig into what makes each piece work. We’ll explore how composers use melody, harmony, rhythm, and orchestration to bring characters to life, heighten emotion, and create immersive cinematic worlds. Whether your pick is iconic, obscure, classic, or contemporary, it will help guide our conversation and deepen our collective understanding of how music tells stories in film.