Ludwig

My guess is that, as @Falstaft points out, the note is at the bottom of the instrumental choir. What lies on top of it is the plain C major triad in root position, something that's hammered into students of classical ear-training studies. This kind of chord - the major 7th - really comes more out of jazz. It's quite uncommon in classical music, so much so that it's not a part of our ear-training studies, where, in terms of 7th chords, we instead focus on dominant 7ths, diminished 7ths, half-diminished 7ths, and minor 7ths. When I taught this stuff, I'm sure if I gave an ear test on this chord, even many top students would say was a plain C major chord, not because there's something wrong with their ears, but because of their training and what they "expect" to hear based on what they're taught. So I'm sure you're not alone! I don't really have a solution except to say try playing it at the piano, both with and without the 7th and after a while, you'll develop that intangible "feel" for the major 7th chord and be able to recognize it even if you don't know which notes are where. Aha! That makes a lot of sense, @Falstaft. I'd bet good money that's what he meant. Look @Disco Stu, you've helped us (probably) solve an age-old riddle in Williams lore!

Deeply saddening news. More about his genius... A certain quote from Morricone has fascinated me ever since I came across it. In a course by Italian musicologist Sergio Miceli in which Morricone took part (what a dream that surely was!), talking about themes, Morricone said: It is truly a genius who on the one hand had such low regard for themes yet on the other wrote themes so deeply moving that they betray a deep understanding of their inner workings.

Funny thing is, I don't hear any of Rey's theme in this alternate. There are, however, some slight similarities to March of the Resistance. The melody starting the theme's 2nd half (0:19-0:20 in Pando's mockup) begins with the same notes as the march's 2nd half. If we wanted to push the similarity further, you could say the opening of the theme is somewhat similar too, starting from the tonic note and rising up to the fifth of the scale, complete with a sharp going back up to the fifth note of the scale again (this is the thing @Tom was talking about before in another thread). And hey, even the first three notes of the theme are the same notes in a different rhythm. Also, the 8 bars of this version are also structured the same way as March of the Resistance's first 8 bars: 2 bars - Main idea 2 bars - Main idea slightly varied 2 bars - Faster chord changes 2 bars - Cadence I mention this because this kind of structure (which in music is called a "sentence" for the non-theorists here) has been, despite the march's example, rare for Williams for many decades now, so the connection rather stands out. Even so, though this looks like a lot of evidence, I wouldn't read too much into it. I think this theme has much more to do with a kind of "misterioso" sound Williams likes to invoke. In fact, I'd say this theme has more than a shade of the mystery-laden Unicorn's theme from Tintin in both the contour of the tonic chord and the use of his favored Hungarian minor for elements of mystery. One of the things I admire most about Williams is his ability to clothe cues in an entirely different musical wardrobe, so to speak. It very much looks like he was asked to simply write something in an entirely different vein for this version, so he complied, and instead of producing a reworking of what we know as Rey's theme, produced something wildly different in almost every way!

Textbooks don't usually get into these kinds of stylistic details. I looked in several harmony and counterpoint books just now but to no avail. The music speaks better for itself. Take, for one famous example, Chopin's Prelude in A below. All the dotted figures except the last are half steps (as in March of the Resistance), and Chopin sometimes uses notes outside the scale to do that. For those who don't read music, it's always the 2nd and 3rd notes in of each phrase in the recording below.

Ok, I get what you mean. The A# sounds like it shouldn't be there. If you're hearing it as out of place, it's likely because you're expecting the melody to sound a plain old A there and stay in the key of E minor, which has been going for the last bar and a half. But Williams also will often write a melody that uses only uses notes from a major or minor scale while the harmony ventures outside it (e.g., Luke's theme, Force theme, Raiders march). So I can understand where you're coming from. For me, I hear that note as derived from the down-up (or what's called a neighbour-note) figure that starts the fourth bar in your example above. And I think what makes that figure really distinctive is that the down-up motion is within a half step, or semitone. Almost every statement of the figure is within a semitone: the very first one, the one in the middle of bar 5, the one starting bar 6, the two in the middle of bar 9, and almost every statement in the B section as well (from bar 11). This use of notes outside a scale to match a semitone interval in a motive is something that is exceedingly common in music from the classical and romantic periods in particular. March of the Resistance has more of a conservative rather than more radical 19th-century feel to it, even if it is molded in Williams' own style (i.e., something more akin to, say, Dvorak than Wagner): both the melody and harmony stay in a single key for its opening 8 bars (unusual for Williams), the theme uses harmonic minor with the raised 7th degree (also unusual for Williams), and the melody is fashioned in a 4+4 structure (so common for Williams!), so it makes sense that it follows 19th-century melodic conventions as well.

Could you pinpoint this note more precisely? What number note would it be if you count them from the start of the melody?

I'd still say the same thing today, because I think what he took from Ivanhoe were broad strokes: the use of a quartal fanfare as an intro and the kind of orchestration for the theme proper. I see that I noticed back then as well that the motivic content is quite different between Luke's A and B sections. I think this new oral information from Williams that you've found now explains this nicely. True. Yes, you're of course right that memory can be fallible even for important things (and Williams has certainly misremembered before). In this case, I think when he said he wasn't shown the crawl, he was talking about the static "a long time ago" card since he did mention the "in a place far away" (!) line, he just referred to it confusingly as a crawl. So I wouldn't say he's misremembering in that sense. I don't think there's any way to know for sure, but I'd bet that he's correct in this case. Otherwise, we'd have to say his story is completely wrong - that he wrote the main title before the Throne Room and that the B section just happens to be more closely related to the latter even though it was composed with Luke's theme. That's why I say the motives are important - that the A and B sections are so closely related (even beginning both sections with the same rhythm and contour) bear out Williams' anecdotal evidence that he composed that music for the Throne Room rather than the main title. As with much of the history of Williams' scores, we may never know for sure how they came to be, but I for one am convinced that he's remembered right with this one.

I think, though, that the Dvorak was the model for the big Force theme statement in the Throne Room and not necessarily the (what we call) "Throne Room theme" that follows. Williams himself says (in The Making of Star Wars - also in the Anthology CD liner notes) that it was like the Elgar tune to "Land of Hope and Glory": There's no way to tell that given what we know. Honestly, I think the strongest corroborating evidence (and personally I think it's quite strong) is the motivic connections between the two sections of the Throne Room melody. It's a fundamental ingredient to the traditional rounded binary ABA form (which both the Throne Room and Luke's theme are in), despite many textbooks emphasizing a B section's contrast. And I'd sooner believe Williams with something that would be very important to him in the throes of composing the score like the order in which he wrote cues rather than, a specific wording of the title scroll, which, from a compositional point of view, doesn't really matter.

Indeed! I've just been going over the score of the Throne Room again, looking through that B section. Traditionally, B sections are not completely different from their A sections, but more like developments of them. So you're bound to find an A section's motives, or developments of them, in a B section. Here's what I noticed about the Throne Room (see music below). The B section's main two-bar figure is based on the A section in both the rhythm (the small change of the dotted rhythm being a small variant) and the contour (shown by the arrows, which show both the A and B section's directions of the notes). Then there's the climax of the B section (the second-last bar shown), which uses the exact same rhythm as in the A section opening (shown by the double-headed arrows and brackets). What's interesting, though, is that the B section's second bar starts with a triplet, just as the A section of Luke's theme does, so there is a connection to that theme as well, which may be why he thought of this B section as appropriate for that theme as well. But I'm still reeling from Williams' statement that this music was written for the Throne Room then applied to Luke's theme. The motivic connections between the Throne Room A and B really seem to confirm that.

I trust Williams on this, but for it to fully make sense, there may be a missing detail or two that explains things more fully. The (second) question he was asked was "what inspired you to write the main theme of Star Wars" and I think he interprets this as "what inspired you to write the main title of Star Wars". Otherwise his answer seems to say that he wrote Luke's theme as one of the last things in the score, which can't possibly be true. That's fascinating that he says the B section of Luke's theme is really the B section of the Throne Room when it seems the other way around! That B section is also used in the statement of Luke's theme (in full ABA form) in Chasm Crossfire, when Luke swings across with Leia on the Death Star. So assuming Williams is recalling accurately, that would mean that he wrote the Throne Room first then decided that it's B section would be Luke's B section, whether he wrote Chasm Crossfire next or the main title. The point is that he wrote that music for the Throne Room first, and when it came time to write the main title, he imported the B section then arranged the A section of Luke's theme into that context rather than composed it then and there. Also interesting that he wrote the main title's opening blast in response to music he had already written for (presumably) the Battle of Yavin. That the blast provides a measured balance with a musical highlight of the score is I think another reason why it works so well as an introduction to the film.

Great work to all involved! I liked Frank's point near the end that Williams' old-fashioned style of scoring has not been derailed by the more sound-designy, athematic-type scores that have become increasingly prevalent since the 1990s. And Doug added that that's partially because Williams has found ways of including so many different styles of music in his scores rather than shelve what is considered "old-fashioned" and stick fairly exclusively to newer trends. It goes to show that one of Williams' most valuable assets is in his innovative synthesis of styles to form a distinctive voice, rather than an innovation in the raw sounds themselves as is sought more in current film and especially classical concert music. And it was great to hear that many other active composers, conductors, performers cite Williams as one of their influences today. With the work that flourishes around Williams' music, it seems assured that it will continue to live on in many ways beyond the films themselves.

And the saga's first actual love theme! (No, really.)

One thing I noticed is the music as the heroes approach the cliff and see the Death Star wreckage. The harmony follows a pattern @Falstaft identified in a musicology blog post a couple of years ago for TLJ. It's a pattern of keys rising by 5ths, the most spectacular instance he cited being that in "Escape" from TLJ's OST, which goes on for a full minute! The pattern is notable because going up by 5ths has long been associated with rising tension in the classical world (just as the opposite, moving down by 5ths, has been associated with the opposite - a resolving effect). So Williams seems to be using the harmonic device to build tension or suspense, which certainly fits the bill in the old Death Star scene, as it's the moment of its discovery by the gang. In the music, it's those eerie minor chords we hear after the first bit of twisted string lines. They go F#m - C#m - G#m to form the pattern of rising 5ths. Notice the brass melody rises up through a minor chord as well (C# - E - G#) to double the effect of it being an "aha!" moment:

Ah, no. Just that we're at the end of the Williams-style SW score and that given that the style can't really be duplicated that it will become more appreciated for that reason. There are no other film music dinosaurs like him!

That's not to say that what he and other older composers incorporated into their music can't be broken down and reassembled into something new and engaging by another composer down the line. Indeed, that's precisely what Williams himself did in creating his Star Wars style. It wasn't Steiner or Korngold, but that kind of music informed by the newer musical currents of jazz and modernism in particular. Besides, Hollywood is now so bent on nostalgia trips that old-fashioned-type scores are bound to remain an option again and again, if refracted through the lens of the whatever the current trends may be.