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I’ll be hearing it tonight from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, along with every other cue in the film!

Great job, John Williams Rescheduling Crew! Now do Chicago!

I love this theme! Such an overachieving piece. I still wish (against logic) that it had appeared in some form in the final (or penultimate?) Harry Potter film at the appropriate time. My favorite rendition is when the solo trumpet plays it to recall Dobby’s formative years in California…

I always pictured the lost alternate titles being a major-key tweaking of the Force theme, or else something totally different and perfect. I agree that the Flag Parade is way too deliberately Ben-Hur and not science-fiction enough for a title crawl in a Star Wars movie. While we’re on the subject (sort of), the main blast of “The Submarine” would play pretty great over any set of opening titles, including the prequels (minus, of course, the “beans, bacon, whiskey and lard” section). Shame it didn’t get to shine that way in the source material…

@King Mark's theory is mine as well. I don't think Williams is capable of restraining himself from writing a full concert piece. If we're super-lucky, he might have done the multiple-cues route as with Solo, but then we're butting up against the limits of what he could reasonably have recorded in one session in February.

@Jay, can you give an example of a spot on the Solo OST where you felt the sound quality was particularly bad? I'm continuing to try to claw my way toward better discernment of these matters.

Yeah, I heard that credit, too, and wrote it off as a mistake.

Is ASM under contract to only wear DG colors now?

It's not on Spotify in the Central Time Zone yet, either, but thanks for the preview! It's just a single release of the second movement, right?

Oh, yes, of course! Brilliant! @Tom, from your lips to Kathleen Kennedy's ears! This might be the most promising setting, timewise, of any Disney Star Wars production. I mean, almost anybody could show up! That's why building up the Vader/Kenobi "rematch" is weak tea if you ask me. There's so much more to play with here!

Bravo to all. That was a who’s who of nearly the entire top tier of composers. And Zimmer and Giacchino, you cowards. What could you possibly have to lose at this point?

Technically this show has a link to Filoni world through Deborah Chow, but I agree it's probably safe from the Ludwig sound. That trailer is remarkably literate in its deployment of prequel-era themes, some of which sound newly recorded, right? "Korah, ratama" is clearly old, but didn't some of the "Duel of the Fates" stuff and even some of the "Battle of the Heroes" renditions sound original? Either way, the scorescape of this trailer gives me hope for the artful use of Williams' music. This was better than the sequel trailers in that regard!

That would be awesome, but I think the age of unpredictable encores (read: encores that weren't written between '77 and '82) are over.

Also, it must be said that the NSO has an unbelievable logo. Not as artful as the LSO, but so clever!

Wow, for all the Geisha recordings I thought I was aware of, I’m not super-familiar with this arrangement. Does anyone know a recorded version of this concert suite? By the way, two pieces in, I’d buy a Blu-Ray of this concert in a heartbeat. And for the record, I think the updated concert ending to TFA is a masterstroke. It’s like Williams reached Giacchino levels of fanboy glee for thirty seconds.

Bad ideas make for bad themes. By the way, why no fathiers in the end title suite?

Wow, so is that only available on the literal soundtrack of the film, i.e. not on any album releases? I wonder how many moments like that exist in the original Star Wars trilogy. Normally when a release like The Eiger Sanction or The Fury includes film and album versions, the differences mostly escape me, since I'm not intimately familiar with the cues from years of watching, listening, and gaming. (Who knows how much sooner I could have appreciated "Top of the World" if there'd been an Eiger Sanction 64? ) But with Star Wars, it would be a totally different story. Now I have another reason to root for a Matessino Star Wars release: I might finally understand micro-edits!

Can anyone point to the first known micro-edit? Was this something that only came around with digital recording? But no, if it happened on "The Desert Chase," then that can't be. Was Ken Wannberg snipping tape reels in the '70s and '80s to eliminate ten-second bursts of music?

If I could get smacked by a radioactive baton and develop a JWFan superpower, the ability to discern micro-edits is the first one I'd pick. And "Pursuit of the Falcon" is both an awesome scene and an awesome track. I'd love to see @TheUlyssesian breathe new life into it like he did for these three! Those sync points were a revelation.

This is a major hidden gem. Every few months I rediscover its existence and smile.

Well, yeah, to the extent that they deviate from the established Star Wars sound, which many fans hold in higher esteem than the inherent brilliance of a cue in isolation. "Flying With Chewie" is a great Powell cue, but if I played it for you in total ignorance of Solo you might have a hard time pegging it as a Star Wars cue—at least the last minute or so, which is what I was remembering when I made the comment. The first half does have some solid Star Wars sound mixed in with some brilliant Powell-isms—much like the rest of the score—but some of that comes from the insertion of Williams' theme. That's all fair. I was trying to be more comprehensive by accounting for Pope in my post after writing the rest of it. He's the one of those four that probably has the least legitimate claim to a shot at Obi-Wan, given the nature of his prior involvement with Williams and Star Wars, vis-à-vis the other three.

Someone needs to re-record the entire Clone Wars and Rebels scores with a proper orchestra so I can judge them properly. I don’t have the requisite imagination to translate that portable-cassette-player-quality sound to what was in Kiner’s head when he wrote them. It’s one of the greatest tragedies in Star Wars scoring, IMHO.

That’s the issue. R1 is a poor man’s Williams, but that’s not always an insult, particularly to a Williams fan who recognizes that a poor man’s Williams is still an approximation of something he loves. (It was also composed in three weeks and is not a fair representation of Gia’s best work in any context.) Pope has worked so extensively with Williams that some of his orchestral style has unquestionably bled into many JWFans’ concept of the “Williams sound.” But he’s never had anything like a Star Wars gig. Ross is clearly capable of being a middle-class man’s Williams (see Chamber of Secrets), but he had the incalculable advantage there of working with actual Williams, who was cranking out new themes left and right for him to play with. For that matter, so did Powell. Williams wrote him a multi-part corker of a theme that he referenced in basically every cue of Solo. There’s no telling how the score might have sounded—and how we might have subsequently reacted—without the Maestro making him a heck of a feather bed to sleep on. I would have been a lot less forgiving of a cue like “Flying With Chewie” (at least in the pre-Göransson salad days) if I didn’t have more glorious renditions of an adventurous new Williams theme waiting six measures away. I’m not knocking Powell’s score overall; it’s brilliant. I’m just saying the percentage of its success (particularly to Williams fans) that’s due to the quality and prevalence of Williams’ theme is unknowable. Basically, we have two composers who have lingered in the back rooms of Hollywood for decades and are hard to assess, an accomplished but lesser composer known for adoring and emulating Williams who rushed to adopt Williams’ exact style in an unforgiving timeframe with inferior themes, and an accomplished but very different composer who had access to—and the humility to liberally use—a dynamite new theme from Williams himself. There’s no settling this question.

Yes, please! I could easily imagine Williams approving Howard, who is one of the few left who can make an orchestra sing like the Maestro. He’s also gone down some kooky paths when directors have asked him to, but he absolutely has the goods. Staying in the Williams mold would bring out the best in him. I wouldn’t mind seeing Debney get a shot, either, or Don Davis, or David Arnold, or even Joseph Trapanese, who did some great work on the live-action Lady and the Tramp and showed some love in a podcast interview for the lavish, old-school arrangements he got to record on “Bella Notte.” Remember, we don’t know how many other composers secretly have a Williams side they’re dying to indulge but haven’t yet for lack of an opportunity from blinkered directors and producers…

It would be amazing if he did this, but it’s been 42 years since he actually did, right? Obviously I’m hoping for a totally original JW theme, but there are some great possibilities for reimaginings of things here, too, and if it’s Powell, you know he’s game for it. Imagine some tragic, reminiscent renderings of BotH on soft woodwinds, maybe even some references to Anakin’s theme or “Across the Stars” in some oblique or transformed state. From what I understand, the Disney-era Vader comics have dealt with some sort of quixotic attempt by Vader to resurrect Padmé. Maybe this will be a two-hander about these two broken warriors picking up the pieces of their respective pasts, with opportunities for all sorts of prequel music to come back in. What a lesson in gratitude the last decade has been for JWFans! We have it so good.