[Nick Zwar]

Indeed, that’s why I said that we would recognize film scores as film scores most of the time, because we are familiar with film scores, and how film scores are usually constructed. I never said film scores don’t sound like film scores. They usually do. What I am saying is that you cannot identify film music on a micro-level of compositional technique, there is not a single musical “device” used that is unique to film music, there is not a block of bars where you can reliably say “that’s film music”. You can only identify film scores contextually or on a macro level (when you get the “whole picture”, so to speak).
Take a piece like “Toccata & Dreamscapes” from Final Fantasy. That’s a “complete” composition into itself, it has a strong musical unity and coherence that you could just drop it into a concert of (modern) 20th/21th century classical music program (you would not even have to change the title) and it would work as a concert piece, even though it’s an excerpt from a film score. And take the “Adagio” from Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celasta and claim it’s a track from a suspense/horror film score, and people would recognize it as such. Obviously, Kubrick famously sought so himself and used it prominently as underscore in THE SHINING.
So it’s important to note that I am not saying there is no difference between film music and any other type of music, I am merely saying that the difference between film music and any other type of music is the same as the difference between ballet music and any other type of music, or a tone poem and any other type of music, and so on… We can all distinguish these different types of compositions, but the differences between them are contextual, there is no direct difference in any compositional technique or device only found in one but not the other, only that certain elements/tropes/elements tend to be more pronounced or more frequently used in one form that another. Film music tends to have shorter cues, film music tends to juxtapose and mix different elements more frequently even within a single cue, etc, but these are all just tendencies, not hard fenced borders. We recognize the patterns (that’s what I mean by contextual), but it’s not as if the music on a micro-level per se is different than any other music. All of it is music first, constructed from the same building blocks.