less is more

You don't want to creat a veil between the audience and the characters by playing something too loud or being obvious. You want to support the energy and the tension in the room.

Quite often, music is going to carry the message so the challenge is not to try to figure out how to poke through, but how to complement it in a way that makes it better.

What tends to produce a powerful sound sequence is figuring out how to gracefully pass the ball back and forth from one instrument to another, rathen than using all of your arsenal of weapons firing all at the same time.