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Honestly, it seems there may simply have been too many flubs to catch them all. There's enough blame to go around — at the Vienna players, for their unfamiliarity with a lot of the music (if you've ever seen E.T., how does an entire section of violins accidentally launch into the climactic flying theme statement in cut time??), and at JW himself. It takes nothing away from his legacy to note that his powers as a conductor have diminished with age, and his steadiness in tempos has…relaxed. We got what we got — a document of one of the world's great living composers at 88 years old parachuting in to conduct an orchestra he'd never worked with before on limited rehearsal and pickup time. The critiques don't take anything away from the historic nature of the occasion or the amazing live experience that people had there. And the same time, if we're to take Williams seriously as a composer, holding his recordings to the same standards as "serious" composers is fair game. I just wish that orchestras like Vienna and Berlin had taken an interest in trying to establish a performing relationship with him earlier in his career. Given how pivotal his relationships with ensembles and individual performers have been to his choices in concert writing, it's tempting to think about what he might have written for one of those orchestras if he had become a regular guest artist starting even a decade ago.

I'm no audio engineer, but I would think the problem is in the Fourier transform. Audio processing depends on being able to go back and forth between time domain and frequency domain (e.g. taking a waveform, converting it to frequency space so you can isolate certain frequencies and remove artifacts, then reconverting to a waveform). If you represent a waveform as a superposition of frequencies, and then throw away some of those frequencies—even if they're inaudible ones—you're throwing away information you need to reconstruct the waveform and losing some fine detail that you'll never get back.

I took it more to be Alex Ross' opinion. He's a critic, he's allowed to have them, and he's written a lot about Hermann in the past. Just want to add my congrats to Frank and Emilio!

To me, those trumpet lines in the hyperspace cue always sounded too…busy, for lack of a better word, to be Williams. Seemed more like Powell to me—especially the second one, and the way it modulates. But the more pared down version from the Flying with Chewie cue that @crocodile posted sounds more like Williams to me—maybe the hyperspace version was Powell's variation on it.

If we’re including clips of JW playing music that is not his own, at Tanglewood in 2013 (I think?) he accompanied Audra MacDonald, just the two of them, on As Time Goes By. This is the only YouTube clip I can find, and it’s not great quality, but it was electric live (I was there ).

I love it and it's great, but at the same time, I can't help but think it's basically JW's response to JJ saying, "So we put Jedi Steps in the temp track…can you do that again, but different?"

I heard JW saying "It's fake!" which to me is even funnier.

"A love theme in Star Wars? No. I have never done that, and how do you do it?"

Okay, I'll bite. I would actually be curious (morbidly?) to hear a Giacchino Indy score. His MOH stuff was Indy-lite and still had some of his best-developed themes and one-off action motifs. It's not so much that I think he could recapture that—his voice has departed so much from that—but I would be interested to see if and how he might revisit or engage with that style from his early material.

I love how JW brings back that little Desperation-related action ostinato from TLJ at 1:23 of They Will Come, right before that big statement of the Resistance march. Depending on how you look at it, this could count as the only bit of thematic material original to TLJ that reprises in TROS, no? EDIT: Just checked Frank's list and I see in the footnotes he counts it as an evolution of the Tension motif from TFA.

Entirely fair! I didn't mean to call into question anyone's personal readings of it. In fact, I hardly find it romantic at all. All I meant was, JW's stated intent that it's a literal representation of sex is quite clear to me—complete with the "torrid climax" and post-coital descending triplets. And to be honest, for that reason, it's never roused much emotion in me. I always thought of it as essentially a concert-piece-length dirty joke, completely at odds with Leia as a character—an anachronistic theme that defined her primarily as a sex object. No wonder he says he felt bad about it and was always apologizing to Carrie Fisher for it.

To be honest, I don't know how you can listen to the concert arrangement of Leia's theme and not think it's a love theme—or at least, a sex theme. In a way, I think JW may have written Rey's theme with this in mind, wanting to make amends of sorts. I think he mentioned in that interview with Tavis Smiley that he specifically wrote it to not suggest a love theme in any way.

IndieWire is posting their annual series of anonymous interviews with Oscar voters. The first one (reportedly from the directors branch) is probably representative of where most Academy members are:

I think it’s true that people tend to overestimate their ability to distinguish low bitrate stuff relative to their equipment. But having said that, with all the Chi-fi audio gear these days, very transparent audiophile setups are more affordable and available to more people than ever. Even mainstream stuff like AirPods, Beats, and Sony are improving rapidly, and in turn, more people feel comfortable dropping several hundred bucks on a pair of cans. In that environment, 192 kbps does seem like a shabby way to release anything.

Thanks for posting this! Wow, love the tempo. Fastest I can recall hearing Williams taking it in recent years! Interesting too to see where he and the orchestra are not quite in sync, like the rallentando at 0:49.

Surely it is—likely not to the film, but the actual historical events, right? We know JW doesn't watch many films. Plus he would have been eight years old at the time of the actual events—maybe he even remembers them! I distinctly recall that line, "They're not a navy—they're just…people!" and rolling my eyes and saying out loud in the theater, "Oh Jesus, it's Dunkirk."

Sorry to revive this old point but I’ve just seen the movie for the first time and this stuck out at me as one of my favorite moments of score. Temped or not, it is indeed an excellent fit, and makes it something of a “First Order confessions” theme—in TFA out of shame and fear of rejection, and in TROS from a place of soulful bonding and shared identity. The perfect music for a lovely moment.

Love the Homeward Bound main theme. It's all very 90s Disney, but very well constructed. The chords in that descending figure (like 2:36) kinda feels like something JW would do, (e.g. Somewhere in My Memory). I've always been curious to hear what Bruce Broughton would have done for Home Alone.

Yeah, that one chord though in TROS at 1:27 does sound like something Giacchino would do. None of the rest of it does to me, though. Dejah’s theme doesn’t sound like Williams at all to me, either. It sounds directly pulled from his endless well of LOST love themes.

I have not seen the film (errr I guess spoilers are fair game now in all threads not labeled spoiler free?). But my first thought was that the ROS theme (the first one in the cue) is a loose development of Rey’s chimes, representing her growth as a character. The way it modulates upward reminds me of how the chimes modulate up in the development section of Rey’s theme. And the placement of this theme at the end of The Rise of Skywalker cue directly echoes the very-similarly orchestrated finales of TFA and TLJ that feature Rey’s chimes. The similarities are not as one-to-one as in, say, the Imperial March and Anakin’s theme, so you could argue it’s just a coincidence. But it’s the only thing that makes sense to me right now. The trio theme also makes sense to me as the “trio theme” because it sounds so much like a synthesis of Rey’s theme (the main melody) and Poe/Finn’s theme. Williams has that uncanny ability to write themes that have the effect of evoking other themes without cribbing them entirely, and this one definitely does that for me.

Haven't seen the film yet, but that really stuck out at me on the album. Almost Thomas Newman-y. Are there any other times that solo piano appears in a Star Wars film, carrying the melody like that? (There's that piano riff when the walkers appear on Hoth, but that was cut from the film.) Only other time I can think of is Leia's theme on piano in TLJ credits, but that's a pretty meta statement.

Yeah, I get that. There are times when it crosses into that sickly sweet territory that doesn't do much for me. (BFG was pretty much that all the way through for me.) It's certainly the kind of thing that's well within JW. There's certainly much more interesting material throughout the sequel trilogy. And maybe I'll feel differently about this once I see the film, but…for being the material that sends off the entire series, it's a bit of an emotional wash. It doesn't approach the bittersweet, lump-in-your-throat finales of E.T. or, say, the Journey to the Grey Havens. Or even War Horse, or Attack of the Clones. (That may just be because Abrams didn't give JW much to work with…) Still, I think it's a beautiful addition to the Star Wars canon of soaring string concert suites, alongside Leia's theme, Han Solo and the Princess, and Luke and Leia. By the way, does anyone else hear something that sounds like static or a something crinkly at 3:49?

Nice, I will. For now, I’ve programmed Anthem of Evil and The Rise of Skywalker in the middle of @Jay’s chronological playlist—after Destiny of a Jedi and before Battle of the Resistance. That way they serve as a sort of Intermission/Entr’act, like the concert suites in the ‘97 special edition releases. It’s a similar effect, with RoS fading out and then then the blast of Battle of the Resistance. And I like the narrative effect, with BotR serving as an act 2 (or disc 2) opener. if you like that sort of thing, I also have The Rebellion is Reborn in between The Sacred Jedi Texts and right before Rey’s Journey in my TLJ playlist, and for TFA, Rey’s Theme and MotR after The Abduction and before Han and Leia.

I still think most Gia’s best-crafted themes are from his MOH days. I adore stuff like the Allied Assault theme or Fjords of Norway. I quite liked Jyn’s theme, too, though. The Imperial Suite and the Hope theme make me cringe.

I think this is where I have to stop reading this thread. I can't wait to come back to it when the film comes out in Korea…in two and a half weeks.