Falstaft

Ooh, don't mind seeing this bumped -- especially since, in a few months time it'll have to be updated with another violin concerto! At the time I voted the Viola Concerto for favorite overall and the final movement of the Horn Concerto for movement, and I'm fairly certain I stick with that choice now. Williams better get cracking on that Concerto for Trombone, Concerto for English Horn, Concerto for Double Bass, and Concerto for Percussion to round out the rest of the traditional Romantic Orchestra! He's so close!

Hi Conor! I'm sure you know her work already, but in case not, check out Grace Edgar's dissertation on music & gender in action film scores. I agree that Williams approached Irina as a femme fatale, whether or not that suited her actual character or not. (It's not the first time Williams wrote a theme for female character in a slightly incongruent way.) Looking at the way he uses her theme in concert performances might be instructive. I know that for the past decade or so, he's played his (2008) arrangement of Marion's Theme to a montage of Hollywood heroines, in an amusing but also kind of wince-inducing way. I can't recall if he's done something similar with a montage against Irina's theme.

Temped, I think it's fair to assume, with this from Once Upon A Time in the West -- There's also "Susan Speaks" from The Patriot, which seems to me to highly derivative (yet somehow also superior to) Deborah's Theme from Once Upon A Time in America. At the end of the day, it's all drawing from Mahler 5/IV!

Heh, I remember running a "poll" on my old website on exactly this topic back in 1999 -- "What's Your Favorite TPM Fanfare." Lemme see if I can retrieve it. Update: amazing what the WaybackMachine has archived -- https://web.archive.org/web/20010602022120/http://apps6.vantagenet.com/zpolls/count.asp?id=9228153216 And the ol' John Williams Score Review if you're looking for a way to stroll down memory lane (or blackmail me?) is archived too: https://web.archive.org/web/20010713112742/http://home.netcom.com:80/~dlehman/JWscore.html)

Wonderful, isn't it? And the way it kind of flows out of the intervalic content of the main "hook" from earlier in the cue. (i.e. E-F-C# becomes C-Db-A) ↓↓↓ You know it occurs to me no one ever mentions Jar Jar Bink's thematic material in these sorts of threads, probably for good reason, but Williams wrote some really clever, colorful music for him. It's somehow even more enjoyable when you figure out Williams had Morton Gould's arrangement of "The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" in his ear, and Gould himself was stuffing that arrangement with nods to Stravinsky's Petrushka. Not the first time a Star Wars comic-relief theme drew from a 20th Century Russian composer...

Yeah, I've checked that, and as far as I can tell what's listed there amounts to the 4 albums I mentioned above, plus 3 EPs that are partial presentations of the songs on two of those albums. So I guess that technically adds to seven, but the sense I got from this quote from Dyer was that there were 7 distinct albums "It was several years, however, before Williams became a full-time film composer. First came a contract with Columbia Records, and, concurrently, television. For Columbia, Williams made two jazz band albums of his own (“They didn’t sell”) and arranged albums for such singers as Andy williams, Vic Damone, Jackie & Roy, and Doris Day (“Very strange; she had begun as a big band singer, but she was afraid of singing and of musicians – she wanted to bve in a booth where they couldn’t see her; a very inhibited lady”). And, of all things, Williams arranged seven albums for Mahalia Jackson. “I had to work with Mildred Falls, Mahalia’s three-hundred-pound pianist, who could drown out my whole sixty-piece orchestra. I took everything down from the the way Mildred played, because Mahalia believed the way she did it was the way the Lord meant it to be. It was a circus of a time: A tewelve-song LP would take a week to write and record and edit. Compare that to a rock album, where it takes three or four months to get thirty-five minutes worth of music. The business has changed so much in the last twenty years that it seems like a different world.” (Source: https://www.jwfan.com/?p=4494)

Hi everybody, this is a bit of a long shot, but can anyone help me determine all the albums Williams arranged for Mahalia Jackson back when he was getting his start? Dyer says in an 1980 interview that he did 7 albums with her, but I only have four of them, all with Columbia: I Believe (1960) Everytime I Feel The Spirit (1961) Great Songs of Love and Faith (1962) Silent Night: Songs for Christmas (1962) Are there three more I'm just missing? Or is it possible I/Dyer/Williams am just mistaken about the number? Thanks!

Hey, you never know -- maybe Haab was inspired by the motif at 1:06 (which is exactly the first 6 notes of Solo's Han Theme) when writing "Han's Kessel Run" for Battlefront II. And then Williams was inspired by Haab. And around it goes.

Check out the thread here

It's important to remember: the fact that Williams wrote singleton new variants of (Young) Anakin's Theme in Episodes 2 and 3 means neither he nor Lucas forgot the theme. Whether or not you think it was artistically the right call, it was a deliberate choice to let it fall to the wayside. Certainly, the music that does track Anakin's fall in ROTS is enormously effective on its own terms, particularly considering how much it needs to compensate for the character's otherwise bewilderingly underwritten hero-to-mass-murderer arc. Not sure if your shifting from Anakin to Alberich is intentional or not, but it's an interesting comparison! For one of the central villains of The Ring, Alberich's thematic material isn't especially well defined -- some loosely leitmotivic sneezes and squirms, IIRC. Though there's plenty of satellite "villain" music (Alberich's Curse, Alberich's Hatred, Tarnhelm, Fafner, the Hagen-related stuff), and it all has a neat way of infecting the "good guy" music at various stages, not unlike the Imperial March!

Seriously -- is there anyone on this board for whom this isn't a top 5, maybe even top 3 best statement of the Force Theme of all time? Nothing since, excepting maybe "Goodbye Old Friend," really comes close for me.

Yep, and a hell of a statement too: Hate to say it, but that's pretty much it for Anakin's Theme in this film, at least as far as I hear, after plenty of years of leitmotif hunting. The nearest he gets, besides that one, dissonant statement in 2M6 is this little shard in 6M1: But even that is not at all close enough to Anakin's Theme proper for me to consider it a variant. Really, it would need to have Anakin's opening intervallic pattern of G-C-D-A or C-D-E-F#-D for me to count it -- for whatever that's worth. (People are free to make their own musical associations, that's what Williams wants anyway!) That said, the moments you bring up are all great and some motivic in their own right in ROTS, and are definitely meant to be heard in relation to Battle of the Heroes, Imperial March, etc.

That would make a really nice side-project. I do know and adore SotE very well, despite -- maybe in part because -- of the density of classical allusions. But it coheres really well as an overall musical story, and holds up very well in view of 25 additional years of star wars music since. Maybe some day...

The Frank Martin reference is that little hymn theme that pops up here in there in SotE, based on a section of Martin's "In Terra Pax." I'm blanking on the specific Resphigi ref but I think it was from either the Pines of Rome or The Birds. There's also, IIRC, a handful of grabs from Poulenc and Vaughan Williams too, and probably others. Should have written this down when I noticed them!... I'll post if I remember!

25 years later and I am discovering new, extremely specific classical musical references in SotE, not just Walton and Prokofiev, but Ravel, Respighi, Frank Martin... Heck, just today, I was listening to John Corigliano's 1st Symphony and noticed that this section is where McNeely clearly derived this dissonant episode in Xizor's Theme. Honestly, a little crass on McNeely's part considering the subject matter of Corigliano's work. As to the topic at hand, I can't help but wonder what portions of the "original" MG Rogue One score were deemed too referential to Williams's music to require rewrites. Perhaps the beginning of the sequence on Mustafar, which has, IMHO, some of the most embarrassingly poor scoring in the entire franchise. And I'm glad JW gave the okay for the Edwardian Imperial March in the end -- it's delightful and quite skillfully done, and clearly affectionate towards both Williams and Elgar.

Pretty much! Also because, given the timeframe of Indy 5, I have hope for a Scherzo for Ford Pinto and Orchestra.

Impossible it is to pick just one so I'll just randomly venture one of the tons & tons of underappreciated little moments from AOTC in particular: this haunted statement of Shmi's theme in "Zam's Dirty Trick."

It's a marvelous set-piece and works gangbusters in the film. Even though, not surprisingly, the actual sequence is something of a Frankenstein's monster of what, 10 individual cues? Some magnificent sections of which we've never heard properly -- esp. 1M6, my goodness. From the standpoint of themes, we've got an all-time best statement of the March of the Resistance (end of 1M4), plus some fantastic iterations of the Rebel Fanfare, First Order, Poe, Main, Force, and (neatly concealed) Leia leitmotifs. Not to mention a little unused theme for Paige, and a [purely accidental] restatement of Finn's motif from TFA with that repurposed TFA-end-title combo of his and Poe's theme. And that all-pervasive Shostakovichian Tension/Resistance-in-Trouble motivic complex! Nor can we forget the Battle of the Heroes moment at the end. If anyone's curious about a deeper dive: this was done before we know what we do now about all the components of this opening sequence, but if you're open in some more music-theoretical treatment of the scene, here's a little article of mine from 2018: https://musicologynow.org/quick-take-motives-modulations-and-the-march-of-the-resistance-in-the-last-jedi/

Brilliant work, @BrotherSound. Heard in the right context, like this, you can really tell how much Williams knocked it out of the park in TROS when it came to emotionally satisfying, musically coherent long spans of densely thematic underscore.

Went with Princess Leia's theme, though it's a hard call. Ultimately, it's the concert arrangement for Leia that clinches it, that thing is without peer. I mean, not to minimize Pope's contribution, but it's still 90% Williams, right? The only part that would be "original" Conrad Pope is the lovely introduction, especially in the way it hints at Han Solo & the Princess in the horn part. After that, it follows the form of the original concert arrangement exactly, with (presumably Pope's) solo writing for ASM and some other slight reorchestrations here and there, all to good effect. My feeling too. Especially in ANH, Leia's Theme is really more a kind of "Archetypal Mythic Romance" theme, or even more specifically "Luke's Idea of Leia" than a real portrait of the character as portrayed by Carrie Fisher. Ditto for Marion. Very, very different approach than, say, Rey's Theme.

Fantastic connection, @crumbs! I hear some additional similarity in the string writing and harmonic sensibility to a closely related (and hugely underrated) track, "Watching the Eclipse," from Angela's Ashes, both w/ the beginning of "Healing Wounds" and its successor cue "Advice."

Here's my attempt to encapsulate the thematic make-up of these alternate end credits sequences. Not necessarily the easiest thing to read, but contains most of the pertinent thematic info, I think:

ESB, of course, and Close Encounters. The LOTR scores do come to mind, but FOTR has some serious longueurs, especially the Extended Edition. I would think ROTK makes for the more involving listen, start to finish, though the longer I listen, the more Shore's orchestrational tendencies might start to grate on me. Maybe I'm a minority, but I think start to finish, Goldsmith's Star Trek: The Motion Picture is about as satisfying, continually gripping a long-listen as you can ask for. Even as highly rated as ST:TPM tends to among film score fans, it's not rated highly enough.

Hmm, I've never made that connection with the Henry V score, though it is blindingly clear to me now. But I'd hardly say the JP cue is a downgrade on the Doyle, quite the opposite! The Grusin ripoff I'm with you on, as fun as the cue it is. Though for the Delerue/Face of Pan, that's a piece that completely transcends its temp track after about 15 seconds, no? And I love Delerue and the Agnes score in particular.

Wow! Never heard that before, what a striking resemblance. Pretty hard to fathom it was an intentional allusion -- esp. when more likely candidates exist -- some blend of Tchaikovksy's Swan Lake Finale, Elgar's 1st Symphony 2nd Movement, and the Tarnhelm motif from Rheingold and a few others models. But this is delicious music!