Falstaft

Clearly synth to my ears, though very good samples. I'm pretty certain is not some undiscovered Williams music. The first follows TLJ 7m68A closely for the first 30 seconds or so, then is followed by well-done fantasia on Williams-esque action scoring ala "Chrome Dome." The stuff 1:16 to 2:00 in the secondtrack is not from any specific Williams cues, though it does seem to channel ANH 1m3 and ROTS 1m3. The rest is main title or the March of the Resistance, more or less verbatim save for some cuts and transitions in the latter.

What a great topic! ... And this, very best of all. Though I'm not sure I'd call it a countermelody until the 1:05 mark, but it's one of the greatest things he ever wrote so why not:

For whatever small amount it's worth, this passage was the subject of the Afterword of in my book Hollywood Harmony. I apparently called it a "manifest allusion to Wagner's Rhine music." Maybe not so manifest though, now that I think about it. Admittedly, it's a superficial resemblance and one someone doesn't need to know a lot of Wagner beyond a prelude or two to make. But not knowing how familiar Shore actually was with The Ring--or how punctillious he is in drawing his intertextual references--I hesitated to link it to anything more substantive, such as E major being the closing key of Die Walküre,or the figurations resembling something the Magic Fire leitmotivic complex. The most profound element to me is harmonic, namely the mixed plagal cadence with which it all concludes. This is certainly a prototypical Wagnerian touch, though again one Shore easily could have drawn without consciously thinking of Wagner, as it's become so engrained in post-Wagnerian harmonic rhetoric, to the extent that people just call iv-I and its variants a "Hollywood Cadence" nowadays. Anyhow, here's what I wrote.

A lot of you are setting your expectations very high with Tim's book. I think I can safely say those expectations will be not just met but exceeded. At the risk of making @Maestro blush, I think this is the best possible version of a biography of Williams you can imagine.

??

https://thelegacyofjohnwilliams.com/2024/07/30/anakins-theme-essay/

Hehe, I knew the score as soon as I saw the [name redacted] theme in the horns, and remembered the specific cue from that fff low E in the fourth measure. Here's one, not too hard but not too easy either I think.

Well done! This, and the few measure that succeed it, is one of my favorite transitions in all of Williams.

LOVE IT: Here's a new challenge: can you identify where this comes from, based purely on its chord progression -- no melody!

In case anyone is curious, an article I've written on Anakin's Theme, with a focus on the concert arrangement(s), is now up on The Legacy of John Williams page. Thanks to @TownerFan for the chance to share this work as part of his Prequel Scores at 25 Years Retrospective! Anakin’s Theme and the Musical Aftermath of The Phantom Menace: (https://thelegacyofjohnwilliams.com/2024/07/30/anakins-theme-essay/) I threw in some easter-eggs for old-school Williams fandom -- JWfan old-timers will hopefully appreciate the refernces to what the online community was up to back in 1999! Be sure to check out some of the hyperlinks. Archive.org is a miracle!

Just watched. Abels and the music team do a really wonderful job capturing the underscoring style of the Prequels. And while I hear very few outright melodic quotes from Star Wars, one motif that pops up in the second episode will bring to mind a certain formula from Williams's 2002 scores for suggesting mystery.

It's definitely a challenge, given how frustratingly incomplete and jumbled the score's presentation is. I'm not approaching any of the 9 as if they need any special defending. But in the case of TROS, I do feel I can offer a small corrective to what I see as a kind of mistreatment of Williams's swan song, both by the filmmakers and (more vexingly to me) the general public. I doubt there will be an audiobook -- it'd be unprecedented if there were for this particular book series (the Oxford Music/Media line). Though who knows... with AI emulation these days, maybe someone could enter all the text in and have it read back to you in the voice of Ian McDiarmid! There certainly will be an online companion though that has lots of short clips and such on it. I'm sure I'll cite Kalinak's chapter somewhere, though it's not especially central to what I'm doing. I don't know Evensen's SW/Wagner work, though, trust me, that angle is something I've got plenty to say about. Particularly since I think a lot of the existing scholarly treatment of the Williams/Wagner connection is at best superficial. But the man is a black hole: get too close and he completely dominates whatever subject you thought you were writing about before. So I'm trying to take care to keep the focus on JW rather than him.