[GerateWohl]

Interesting topic. Especially because I would slice criteria for good score differently. I wouldn’t call my criteria catalogue complete but there are some things that I can already formulate.

Elevation
A good score elevates the action on screen. What do I mean by that? This goes maybe hand in hand with your emotion criterion. A good score makes the action on screen larger than life. It contributes to the aestetics of the film as an audio visual experience and in good cases it makes the whole more than the sum of its parts.
That is part of my trouble with Hans Zimmer. I have special memories of movies scored by him where I felt raþher distracted by his score and that it pulled it rather down than elevating it.

Style
I would say, I have a quite distinct musical taste. It happens rarely that I hear a score and think, I really don’t like that music but it serves the picture well. I really have to like the music as itself to call a score a good score. And the score is for me a crucial part of the movie experience. If I don’t like the score, I can still like the movie. But then it is a good movie with a bad score.

Balance
I really like a good wall-to-wall score. But there are also movies which are especially good, because the, have hardly any score. A clever ommission of music can have quite impressive effects. It must feel balanced. By the way, another thing that annoys me with some of Zimmer’s work. I find that especially intrusive in some Nolan movies like The Dark Knite Rises or, yes, the widely praised Interstellar where the omnipresent pulsing music managed to annoy me in some places.

I think, that’s it for now. If a fourth criterion comes to my mind, I will add it.