Show of Force
Some years ago my friend Allison Adato, an editor at Entertainment Weekly books, asked me to contribute a piece about John Williams to a Star Wars anniversary guide (timed to the release of The Force Awakens). I crowed about this cool gig in this space before and included a brief excerpt of the piece, but as the whole of it doesn't seem to be online, I'm posting the entire piece I wrote below. (My formative-album replay piece on the whole original soundtrack record is here.)
When Star Wars opened in May, 1977, enthralled fans left theaters wanting, somehow, to carry its magic home with them. Yet in an epic exit-through-the-gift-shop failure, officially licensed toys and other tie-ins wouldn’t hit stores for months, missing Halloween and even Christmas. But John Williams’ old-school orchestral soundtrack LP hit stores and the Billboard Top 10 by the summer (along with Meco’s kitschy disco version of the film’s theme), making it one of the first Star Wars souvenirs fans could cling to.
Even before they had the record, though, anyone who’d seen the film was likely to have memorable bits of Williams’ hummable score lodged in their heads. After all, who needs a plastic-and-rubber-band Darth Vader mask when, with a flashlight and some construction paper, you could march into mock battle armed with that menacing, minor-key Imperial Attack tune: Dun-dun-dun, DA-da-dun-DA-da-dun!
Until then, John Williams was best known for reducing the stealthy horror of a great white shark to two ominous notes. Steven Spielberg once recounted the first time he heard Williams tap out the main theme for 1975’s Jaws on the piano this way: “I said, ‘That’s all?’ He said, ‘I really think that’s all you need.’”
For the space saga that Spielberg’s pal George Lucas was planning, Williams brought more notes and bigger tunes, in a conscious throwback to the sweeping old Hollywood film scores of the likes Max Steiner (Gone With the Wind) and Miklos Rosza (Ben Hur). But the effect of Williams’ Star Wars score was at least as indelible as that iconic Jaws theme, in part because the composer used the 19th-century operatic technique of the leitmotif—repeated musical themes that correspond to specific characters and story themes.
Think of the film’s official anthem, also popularly called “Luke’s theme.” This octave-spanning tune in wholesome B-flat major, which accompanies every film’s opening expositional scrawl as a sort of formal overture, is irresistibly stirring not only for its leap-frogging melody but for what that melody leaps over: a harmony built partly from a “quartal” chord, so-called because it’s essentially a stack of fanfare-like fourth intervals (the opening notes of “Taps” or the Wedding March are fourths), and a restless rhythm in the underscoring that alternates off-beat bursts of syncopation with an even-keeled march, keeping this otherwise straightforward processional on its toes.
Of course, it’s only fitting that a Manichean saga of good and evil also has a shadow theme—something both more evocative and more slippery in its implications. What eventually would be known as the “Force theme” first memorably surges forth in the original 1977 film as Luke gazes ponderingly at a double sunset on Tattooine; it is later fitfully applied to scenes in which the reclusive Jedi master, Obi-Wan, warily reveals his ancient secrets to his young charge. By the second movie, The Empire Strikes Back, it has a more disciplined use: It stands for both the grave responsibility and terrible power of the Force, that yin-yang energy with which even this saga’s heroes—especially the heroes—must struggle.
What gives this secondary but far stickier theme its absurdly heart-tugging potency? Like the main Star Wars theme, it’s got some fanfare mojo, opening with a stalwart fourth that could be a quote from “Taps,” except that it’s in a sobering minor key. But here that minor key has a bracing rather than a downbeat effect, suggesting not mourning or danger but seriousness of purpose; that it is met at every turn by hopeful major chords, like shafts of light in a dark corridor, makes it feel like a struggle worth seeing through.
These two leitmotifs, and a half dozen others, are entwined like DNA strands throughout the six Star Wars films to date. The October trailer for The Force Awakens, for which Williams composed a new score, unsurprisingly given its title, leans noticeably on the Force theme, without a trace of the main theme.
By now Williams’s work on these films is a kind of living legacy: He has served his share of franchises, from Indiana Jones to Jurassic Park to Harry Potter (though only the first three films). But his unique connection to George Lucas’s vision makes it possible to think of his Star Wars music as one large body of work, like Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations or Wagner’s Ring cycle. Arguably, his scores have been more artistically consistent than the films themselves. And while it’s always fun to play “name that influence,” particularly with the original 1977 soundtrack (go ahead, Google Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War,” Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Kings Row film theme, and the “Sacrifice” introduction of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”), the operatic music of Star Wars soars above such petty second-guessing, a Force unto itself.
When Star Wars opened in May, 1977, enthralled fans left theaters wanting, somehow, to carry its magic home with them. Yet in an epic exit-through-the-gift-shop failure, officially licensed toys and other tie-ins wouldn’t hit stores for months, missing Halloween and even Christmas. But John Williams’ old-school orchestral soundtrack LP hit stores and the Billboard Top 10 by the summer (along with Meco’s kitschy disco version of the film’s theme), making it one of the first Star Wars souvenirs fans could cling to.
Even before they had the record, though, anyone who’d seen the film was likely to have memorable bits of Williams’ hummable score lodged in their heads. After all, who needs a plastic-and-rubber-band Darth Vader mask when, with a flashlight and some construction paper, you could march into mock battle armed with that menacing, minor-key Imperial Attack tune: Dun-dun-dun, DA-da-dun-DA-da-dun!
Until then, John Williams was best known for reducing the stealthy horror of a great white shark to two ominous notes. Steven Spielberg once recounted the first time he heard Williams tap out the main theme for 1975’s Jaws on the piano this way: “I said, ‘That’s all?’ He said, ‘I really think that’s all you need.’”
For the space saga that Spielberg’s pal George Lucas was planning, Williams brought more notes and bigger tunes, in a conscious throwback to the sweeping old Hollywood film scores of the likes Max Steiner (Gone With the Wind) and Miklos Rosza (Ben Hur). But the effect of Williams’ Star Wars score was at least as indelible as that iconic Jaws theme, in part because the composer used the 19th-century operatic technique of the leitmotif—repeated musical themes that correspond to specific characters and story themes.
Think of the film’s official anthem, also popularly called “Luke’s theme.” This octave-spanning tune in wholesome B-flat major, which accompanies every film’s opening expositional scrawl as a sort of formal overture, is irresistibly stirring not only for its leap-frogging melody but for what that melody leaps over: a harmony built partly from a “quartal” chord, so-called because it’s essentially a stack of fanfare-like fourth intervals (the opening notes of “Taps” or the Wedding March are fourths), and a restless rhythm in the underscoring that alternates off-beat bursts of syncopation with an even-keeled march, keeping this otherwise straightforward processional on its toes.
Of course, it’s only fitting that a Manichean saga of good and evil also has a shadow theme—something both more evocative and more slippery in its implications. What eventually would be known as the “Force theme” first memorably surges forth in the original 1977 film as Luke gazes ponderingly at a double sunset on Tattooine; it is later fitfully applied to scenes in which the reclusive Jedi master, Obi-Wan, warily reveals his ancient secrets to his young charge. By the second movie, The Empire Strikes Back, it has a more disciplined use: It stands for both the grave responsibility and terrible power of the Force, that yin-yang energy with which even this saga’s heroes—especially the heroes—must struggle.
What gives this secondary but far stickier theme its absurdly heart-tugging potency? Like the main Star Wars theme, it’s got some fanfare mojo, opening with a stalwart fourth that could be a quote from “Taps,” except that it’s in a sobering minor key. But here that minor key has a bracing rather than a downbeat effect, suggesting not mourning or danger but seriousness of purpose; that it is met at every turn by hopeful major chords, like shafts of light in a dark corridor, makes it feel like a struggle worth seeing through.
These two leitmotifs, and a half dozen others, are entwined like DNA strands throughout the six Star Wars films to date. The October trailer for The Force Awakens, for which Williams composed a new score, unsurprisingly given its title, leans noticeably on the Force theme, without a trace of the main theme.
By now Williams’s work on these films is a kind of living legacy: He has served his share of franchises, from Indiana Jones to Jurassic Park to Harry Potter (though only the first three films). But his unique connection to George Lucas’s vision makes it possible to think of his Star Wars music as one large body of work, like Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations or Wagner’s Ring cycle. Arguably, his scores have been more artistically consistent than the films themselves. And while it’s always fun to play “name that influence,” particularly with the original 1977 soundtrack (go ahead, Google Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War,” Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Kings Row film theme, and the “Sacrifice” introduction of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”), the operatic music of Star Wars soars above such petty second-guessing, a Force unto itself.
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