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Leitmotif

A rise of a fourth repeated twice from a starting note and then the starting note held for longer may be known, but (until very recently) not from where. A coworker once responded with a correct response, sort of a waa waa waaaah, as it turned out they also knew the theme.

The music has been claimed to be genre defining "oh, that's what a Western should sound like" despite not really being a Western, or rather an anti-Western evolution of the genre, one that more or less outcompeted the original around the time the Hays Code was relaxed. However, I have mostly no idea what Westerns sounded like before Ennio Morricone put his thumb on the scale, just as I don't know where I learned the (opening to the) theme from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" (1966).

The theme is developed, so there are variations during the call and response—AB, AB', A'B'', etc—that someone with only a passing knowledge of the theme would not reproduce, or accidentally if they try to spice up the A and B parts on their own. The A' notation means you have a theme A previously identified but it has been changed somehow, usually by tweaking a note or the rhythm, so the change is denoted A', or similar to that A thing prior, but different. This helps chunk the stream of notes into identifiable units of analysis. There can be a risk of overanalysis, where you aren't really enjoying or much listening to the music, but are rather digesting it into time signatures and whatnot. Spending too much time with a theme might be as bad as too little.