aviazn

I don’t think Solo would have been elligible even if it had been submitted on time. You can try to weasel your way around some of those disqualifying criteria, but with Powell clearly being the sole “submitting composer”, I think there’s too much Williams in it for him to be elligible.

I think it’s some of the things you mentioned that make it seem more “generic”—the orchestration being not particularly dense and the lack of a lot of harmonic motion in the main theme, especially, gave me a first impression that it sounded like someone else’s take on Star Wars music. In that sense, it’s more within the realm of what many other film composers would be capable of producing if asked to deliver Star Warsian music. If I’m being honest, if you played the first 15 seconds for me and told me that it was a generic demo track from an aspiring film composer’s personal website, I’d have believed you. Nevertheless, I agree with everyone who’s said this is an unexpected treat, and how lucky we are to be getting new and revisited JW Star Wars music at such a rate.

I admit, I quite enjoy Tyler’s package for Formula 1. It’s probably just because I now associate it with F1, one of my favorite things in the world, but what can I say? It’s my favorite thing of his that he’s done since Children of Dune.

Reposting this excerpt from a New Yorker piece by Russell Platt, which which I agree wholeheartedly. Even if Williams' influence isn't heard in classical new music in terms of his gestures or techniques, the level of accessibility to which so many composers aspire these days is undoubtedly influenced by his music:

One of my favorite JW piano performances. Listened to it on the Tanglewood lawn under a perfectly clear summer night sky. Just magical. Continued here:

Not only is it a fabulous arrangement, but I think it’s reached the pop culture saturation point where it is the definitive arrangement, the one most people think of when (if) they think of Anything Goes. Not sure if this has been posted before but there was this neat nugget in an old interview with the Dancing With the Stars music director:

This was unseen by me, but apparently, during last night's Sunday Night Football game, in the middle of the Packers and Aaron Rodgers' 20-point second half comeback against the Bears, lead commentator Al Michaels compared Rodgers to John Williams. Nice to see the appreciation from his NBC colleagues.

Love this clip from that ESB documentary—not for the actual performance, but the extroverted way he manages the LSO in rehearsal. Like trying to make a high school band behave. "Alright here it is, gents. Settle down boys." Seeing him work to keep them in line, it's a little bit easier to imagine him getting truly exasperated and walking off the stage in a huff over discipline issues, as in the famous Boston Pops meltdown. It's also fun to see the total command and efficiency he displays in rehearsing it on the sound stage—managing the brass section's endurance, working a particular bar and using it also to set levels at the same time.

Completely agree with this. TBH War of the Worlds is my favorite Spielberg film since E.T.

The melodic contour does remind me of the sample from the Mad Men theme.

Yes, if we can count that restatement of the theme—which of course comes before the "soft harp ending" proper—then it's no contest to me. Otherwise, I'd go with The Last Jedi, with its two harp lines—or at least, it's mixed that way, on opposite ends of the stage. I love the unexpected dissonances in the first arpeggio, and then the way the second one resolves them harmonically but ends on the dominant, not quite finishing the figure.

Clearly, it’s the Star Wars saga as a whole, for better or worse. If I had to pick just one, though, I would argue Empire as well. To me, that score ticks all the objective criteria for a magnum opus because it’s where he first found that full-bodied, colorful action voice for which he would become best known. A New Hope is full of those temp quotes and consciously classical idioms. It might be sacrilege, but to me it’s the least Star Warsian of all the Star Wars scores. Even looking beyond the obvious temp stuff like Dune Sea/Rite of Spring and Rebel Blockade Runner/Mars, you can tell Williams was drawing on the familiar everywhere in that score. When I hear Leia’s theme, I hear Tchaikovsky. When I hear the imperial theme, I hear Stravinsky. But when I hear The Asteroid Field, I hear John Williams. Pure, unadulterated Williams. Same with Han and the Princess, and Hyperspace, and the medical frigate Finale. By comparison, even ANH material like Here They Come or the Battle of Yavin—impactful though they may have been—feel like mere prototypes for the kind of multi-layered writing he would do in Empire.

Saw the film this weekend completely cold, having read nothing about the score beyond Jon Burlingame's Variety story earlier this year. I don't know if it was because I had low expectations for the film overall, but I was pleasantly very, very surprised by how good it was, and the role that JW's themes played in it. I'm not at all surprised to learn that he spotted the entire film before writing it—it fit it too well for it to be otherwise. Going into it, I did have the impression that JW's Han theme would be something more "abstract", something for Powell to draw on and reference, as if it had been part of the material from the original trilogy. I expected it to have some prominent appearances. But I hadn't quite expected it to be the core of the score in quite the way that it was, and for JW's stamp to be all over the film as much as it was. There were times when I must have had a stupid grin on my face in the theater because I realized that JW must have actually written the cue, or Powell was directly lifting from something he'd written (like 3:48 and 4:12 in Reminiscence Therapy or, as previously noted, 1:15 in Dice & Roll). And I have to say, the A theme is so catchy that it's the first time I've come out of the theater humming a new JW theme since War Horse. On its own, The Adventures of Han is a good, slightly convoluted concert piece (and I'm still really not a fan of the intro or the false ending). But as a thematic contribution to the fabric of a brand new Star Wars score, it feels like an incredible gift. I was skeptical enough of the entire enterprise of a Han origin story that I didn't expect JW and Powell to deliver as they did. Between this, TLJ, and TLJ's isolated score, what an incredible six month span of Star Wars music we've just had.

Han, no contest for me. RIR still makes no sense to me—I'm not a fan of either of the themes, I don't like how they're mashed up, and I find the ending to be very weak, almost cringeworthy. I find the ending (and opening) of Adventures of Han to be almost as weak (makes me cringe in a Mutt-like way), and it's not the sort of piece that perfectly encapsulates and develops the theme. But I really, genuinely enjoy the meat of the material. It feels like JW wrote the themes, had some killer ideas in mind for action cues, knew he'd never get the chance to see them on the screen, and slapped them all together as a demo reel/humblebrag for Powell.

Sure, that's totally legit. But all great art has internal connections that emerge beyond what the author consciously intended. These connections I'm not so much interested in as leitmotives—with some sort of intended narrative function or signal to the audience—than I am as recurring sequences in the genetic material generated in the compositional process. I'm not saying the appearance of a stripped-down version of the Jedi Steps in Holdo's Resolve is meant to be a leitmotivic connection—I'm just saying that a stripped-down version of the Jedi Steps melody appears in Holdo's Resolve. And that at Holdo's big moment when the Resistance escapes, Williams chooses to harmonize the desperation theme for the first time in the same way as the Jedi Steps. Whether it's a coincidence in terms of leitmotif and narrative, it's not coincidence in terms of the compositional mindset in which he's approached the ST. These intervals and chords were clearly on his mind, and that's part of how he writes music that we all recognize as Star Wars-ian. To me, it's not just the equivalent of writing dialogue like "Run!" or "lightsaber" repeatedly, it's more like the equivalent of adopting a narrative voice. If it were just gestures that could be copied and imitated, we wouldn't need Williams to write Star Wars scores. Williams said he didn't actually come up with the idea of counterpointing them until he actually wrote the TFA end credits suite. The line between intent and coincidence isn't always so clear…

Coincidence or not, the connection is there! Just because Williams didn't intend for it to happen doesn't stop it from deepening the links between the scores. I think of it like the connection between Rey's theme and the Force theme, which Williams seems to have realized only after he wrote it. Here's another one along the same vein: Whether intended or not, the desperation/Holdo theme is a variation of The Jedi Steps. You can hear a stripped-down version of the Jedi Steps melody as counterpoint in the low strings at 1:59 of Holdo's Resolve.

I was never a big fan of Ways of the Force either, but after TLJ, I appreciate it more and I'm even madder at JJ Abrams for tracking out the big Force statement when Luke's lightsaber flies to Rey instead of Kylo. The symmetry when that exact statement gets reprised in A New Alliance when Kylo sends the same saber flying to Rey (via Snoke's torso) is awesome—like when Clash of Lightsabers shows up in ROTS.

Has anyone else noticed that Luke's exile theme is based on the second motif from Into the Trap? I only just realized this and now I can't get over it. What a cool mirror image—to score Luke's decision to sit out the action and abandon the Resistance with a tragic, brooding version of the music when he was kept out of the action with the Rebellion by Palpatine's trap. It's as if it represents Palpatine's attempts to turn Luke against the Jedi, finally fulfilled in his self-imposed exile.

Hi George!

Off the top of my head? Holdo/desperation theme Rey's theme Anakin's Betrayal The Force theme Into the Trap Flag Parade The Asteroid Field The Jedi Steps Funeral Theme Jyn Erso's theme

Love that "Luke has a moment" cue and how it recapitulates some of the Acht-to material that I thought was a one-off. It also includes hints of the Holdo/desperation theme. Watching the film with the isolated score and really increases my appreciation for how densely woven into the score that theme is.

Are you thinking of 48 khz vs 44.1 khz? Then yes, it'd be several minutes. But for 24 vs 23.976, 0.1% of TLJ's 152 minute run time is 9.12 seconds. Okay, so several seconds.

Practically, it's better to change the frame rate of the video to match the audio. Although now that I'm thinking about it, it's possible that both MA and the Blu-ray are at 23.976. What I know for sure is that the first time I tried to sync them up in an MKV, they were off by a few seconds by the end of the film, and I had to do a manual override to set the Blu-ray rip to 23.976. Maybe my software tried to default to 24 (though why I'm not sure, since 23.976 should be the standard) and I needed to manually override it. That would actually make more sense. All I can say is you might have to play with the frame rates to get it right.

If your recording of the isolated score starts right at the STAR WARS title your timestamps will be off by about 18.5 seconds from the film, since that's the time it takes for the Lucasfilm and "A long time ago" logos. It was actually quite a pain to sync it up to the video—I think MA plays at 24 fps while a Blu-ray rip will be at 23.976.