Loert

Any chance someone made any Piano transcriptions of tracks from the score?
thanks

I'm so grateful to you, Thor, and to several other members of this community for help with research, rare recordings and ephemera, and just general kibitzing and commiserating. I fully recognize that I'm living several people's lifelong dream—because it was certainly mine—and I don't take that for granted. Nor could I have done it without help.
 
It's amazing what joining this forum did for my life and future work those twenty years ago...

Post of the year!

Fitting that we'll only ever get the OST rearrangement of your original intentions!

I'm relieved the cat is finally out of the bag!
 
I've been e-mail-communicating with Tim for at least a year (maybe two?) regarding this project, and I've given some assistance and some discussions for other issues where I've been unable to assist. But I've been sworn to secrecy all along!
 
I'm (obviously) very much looking forward to this project. As some of you know, I was working on a similar book project myself, but for various reasons that will take too much self-absorbed time to go into here, it fell through. So when Tim contacted me, I was only glad to pass on the baton. My own John Williams book project is not dead, but it will take on a different -- more personal -- form now if it ever comes into fruition. It will NOT be the be-all, end-all biography book that I had originally planned, but that THIS will hopefully be.
 
Looking forward to the release date in a couple of years!

It wouldn't surprise me if when you opened the book it was just that story typed out a gazillion times (kind of like this:)

That’s awesome! I don’t know if you heard, but I know a good, little heard anecdote for you to include about Schindler’s List and dead composers…

William (Ros)s… 🤔

Can you guarantee it wasn't William Ross?

I'm not going to lie—I was excitedly curious how quickly this news would hit JWFan!
 
For those who don't know me, I've been writing about film music and interviewing composers (and directors and actors) professionally for the past decade. Besides the many liner notes, I also write articles and create radio stories for mainstream news outlets like the L.A. Times and NPR. I teach a film music history course at USC. And I've been a card-carrying member of this site since 2003.
 
I won't divulge too much just yet, because it's still a little early, but I was excited to finally make it public that this book is happening. I've been working on it for three years now, and I've interviewed approximately 150 people. The big kahuna, of course, is John Williams. I plan to share the story of how that happened one day, but not yet.

Thanks for your excitement! I can promise you that there are many things (stories, facts, quotes) in this book you have never heard...
 
Tim

I guess we'll buy books if we can't buy CDs anymore! 

Apparently Tim Greiving has just announced the first English biography on John Williams, to be released in 2025:
 
https://timgreiving.com/john-williams-in-his-adventure-on-earth/

Remember that John Williams used to be a jazz musician. (Read up on jazz harmony, I am sure it will blow your mind )
 
P.S. Welcome to the forums!
 
EDIT: I should also say that the Neptune movement from Holst's "The Planets" uses harmony in a very similar way, and that was likely an inspiration for the specific segment you mentioned.
 
For example, measure 3 here:
 

 
That's a G# minor chord (piano 2) over an A minor chord (piano 1), which has a very similar relationship to the C Major over Db Major chord in your example.
In the Holst example, one can explain the "clash" by saying that the G# minor chord is acting as a suspension. But what someone like John Williams would do is take that clash and make it a sonority of its own (and indeed, Holst does the same thing later in the piece).

Funny, I've spent the past couple days writing about exactly this magical passage you've brought up, @AGiambra! Williams's harmonic vocabulary is incredibly rich, and progressions like you mention do not always lend themselves to "explanations" in a standard, functionally tonal sense. Which is not to say they're constructed in an arbitrary way at all!
 
The harmonic weirdness doesn't end with the C|Db chord either! Immediately afterwards, you get C|A and finally C|Eaug. And then the section with the iconic piccolo solo, which is a *tiny* bit more explicable -- basically, a prolonged C(b6) chord, with the piccolo suggesting a C-mixolydian(b6) scale.
 
These augmented chord complexes--and the scales that go along with them (wholetone, hexatonic, mix-b6)--have a fair bit of history in suggesting ~~cosmic~~ states. To offer just a little bit more for you to explore, check out Vaughan Williams's Sinfonia Antartica, the eerie textures and harmonic effects of which I imagine were in Williams's ear  -- and certainly Jerry Goldsmith's a few years later in the sublime ST:TMP!.
 
 
I also suspect you'll find the introduction to Schreker's Die Gezeichneten up your alley:
 

Falstaft, thank you for Sinfonia Antartica.  I will definitely listen to this several times.  As I listen for the first time right now, I hear what you are talking about, the eerie textures and harmonic effects.  And thanks to Jurassic Shark for explaining how the Db Maj7 chord can contain a C major within it.
 
I am so glad I discovered this forum.  There is so much to learn and I can tell that I am among friends with finely tuned ears.  I look forward to future discussions.

First of all, thanks for the welcome.  And thanks for the informative replies.  I recently purchased the sheet music for the Star Wars Suite simply because I had to know what chord was playing in Measure 62.  It is the strangest chord and yet it sounds so beautiful and otherwordly.  It's basically a Db major seventh chord (Db, F,Ab and C) but then Williams has the flutes up on top playing C and E.  It's that high E, clashing with the F being played by the lower instruments, that makes the chord sound so weird.  I just love the sound of it.
 
Thanks for your responses.  It really helped me understand what is going on.
 
Yes, I am familiar by the way with Holst's The Planets.  I heard this many years ago when I was in my teens (actually way more than many years ago).  And I am familiar with the passages in Star Wars that borrow from it.  I've read that some people are upset because they feel Williams copied from Holst but I am pretty confident that this was actually a salute to Holst by Williams.  There is nothing wrong with referencing another work; it makes sense since both Star Wars and The Planets share the same subject matter (space, the universe, the planets).

Remember that John Williams used to be a jazz musician. (Read up on jazz harmony, I am sure it will blow your mind )
 
P.S. Welcome to the forums!
 
EDIT: I should also say that the Neptune movement from Holst's "The Planets" uses harmony in a very similar way, and that was likely an inspiration for the specific segment you mentioned.
 
For example, measure 3 here:
 

 
That's a G# minor chord (piano 2) over an A minor chord (piano 1), which has a very similar relationship to the C Major over Db Major chord in your example.
In the Holst example, one can explain the "clash" by saying that the G# minor chord is acting as a suspension. But what someone like John Williams would do is take that clash and make it a sonority of its own (and indeed, Holst does the same thing later in the piece).

Yes, welcome and this is a favorite topic of many of us here.  Basically, how did he know to do that thing he did.  This particular instance is a very famous "spacey" example and is a space cliche (time honored tradition).  He's immediately setting the location of distant, mysterious location using musical tropes of polytonality just like others did before every time they wanted to evoke the same thing.  The lesson here is that JW didn't invent this but studied this.  Many other works do this exact same thing as Loert points out.  Holst's Planets which you absolutely must study but also Vaughan Williams Sinfonia Antarctica which similarly referenced this vernacular.  Major up high and minor a half step above down below is suggestive of mysteries expansiveness.  In Holst, Neptune uses E minor in the trumpets and G# major in the trombones.  This works because it's tonally unsettling.  You have E, G, B, G#, C, D# (everything's a half step off) this minor second is unsettling but separated in tonal space just feels otherworldly.  We can even dive in to this deeper by showing that dissonances separated are more pleasing.  Of course, JW knew this.  He wasn't looking for harshness but for ambiguity...setting the stage most succinctly.  Every great artist looks to say the most with the least words.  JW did so musically in the example you are asking about. 

Remember that John Williams used to be a jazz musician. (Read up on jazz harmony, I am sure it will blow your mind )
 
P.S. Welcome to the forums!
 
EDIT: I should also say that the Neptune movement from Holst's "The Planets" uses harmony in a very similar way, and that was likely an inspiration for the specific segment you mentioned.
 
For example, measure 3 here:
 

 
That's a G# minor chord (piano 2) over an A minor chord (piano 1), which has a very similar relationship to the C Major over Db Major chord in your example.
In the Holst example, one can explain the "clash" by saying that the G# minor chord is acting as a suspension. But what someone like John Williams would do is take that clash and make it a sonority of its own (and indeed, Holst does the same thing later in the piece).

Had some fun putting this together...though took a lot longer than I was expecting.
 
 

It's an uber-lightweight version of all those things
 
I like it in parts, but it does still feel like a clumsy collection of suggestions rather than score with a compelling identity, especially given the material it's working with.
 
Although Trinity mostly plays like a really poor man's Shaker Loops, the all-too-brief musically adventurous moments tease a ballsier score that could have been...
 
 
Anyway, I'd rather listen to the Oppenheimer opera:
 
 
 

I believe David. W. Collins called this "a pop-oriented sense of phrasing," or something to that effect. I believe it was in comparing The Little People Work with The Rite of Spring, and JW's more immediate and identifiable sense of melody. But he does that for the movies. His concert works are full of more abstract melodic concepts favored by other art music composers.
 
Film music, in which the identity of the music may only have a few seconds to establish itself, must be more clear and direct in voice. Like an establishing shot in Star Wars. JW is a master of this.

Mockup of the beginning of The Imperial March