The Musical Themes of Star Wars

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When John Williams —already a greatly admired composer— was asked to write the music for Star Wars (subsequently called Star Wars Episode 1: A New Hope), and, by implication, for the sequels and the prequels, he approached the job seriously.

His great model for this undertaking was Richard Wagner, who had conceived and created a great cycle of 4 three-hour operas, a total of 12 hours of almost continuous music, and had thought long and hard about the compositional problem it presented.  The bottom line —for any extended piece of music, really— is that you just can't throw new tunes at the listener all the time.  Later in the musical work, you have to repeat musical material you've used earlier in the piece, if not as is, at least in a modified form.

In addition, a composer for a dramatic work (which Wagner was) had to use the music to underscore the plot.  One way, of course, was to have the Hero's Theme every time the hero rode in, such as one did in the Lone Ranger movies.  But a more subtle technique was possible: you could remind the audience of broken promises, or past events that foreshadowed what was going on on stage, or earlier events that caused what was transpiring on stage, or characters offstage whose existence was critical to the dynamics of what was happening.

So Wagner invented the idea of the Leitmotif, or leading motif, which was essentially a melodic fragment, terse and memorable, that the listener would quickly catch at its first introduction, and associate with something to do with that occasion.  Subsequently, when the leitmotif was reintroduced, the listener could not help but recall the earlier occasion when that very tunelet was heard.  You could slightly alter the melodic fragment, to represent distortions of ideas.  You could re-orchestrate it, to reflect the same idea being carried by a different character, for instance.

In the original album sleeve of the Star Wars movie (1977) soundtrack album, John Williams explained in detail what each track represented.  For various reasons (that might be obvious to other people, but not to me at this moment), each track really consisted of a continuous piece of music that used multiple motifs, but generally just a few.

In addition, it did not make sense to place individual motifs in a soundtrack album.  Each track had to be a complete piece of music, while a motif was a mere musical idea, a tune fragment.  The tunes John Williams used as themes were extended, memorable pieces of music, out of which he could extract a unique phrase which he could use as a motif.  Many of these tunes are well known to us.

First of all, of course, there is the Star Wars Theme itself, usually called the Main Title theme:

 


Note: after the main tune ends, there is some busy music that has to do with mood music and the Rebel ship that is conveying Princess Leia.  It is running the blockade of some planet, possibly Tatooine, and we hear the little fanfare that is really a second theme, the Rebel's Blockade Running Theme.

The Rebel's Blockade Running Theme is a jaunty tune which you invariably hear when the Rebel Alliance (or one of its ships) is trying to outrun the evil Empire ships, as happens repeatedly in Empire Strikes Back (Episode V, 1981).  It is a true motif, because it so short, not an extended piece of music.  (You can easily see how hard it was to make an extended track of this little tune.)  It comes in at around 0:09 in the clip below.  After its initial announcement, it is repeated with different instrumentation, interspersed with busy "Let's go!" type music.

One of the most important themes is The Force theme.  It starts out rather a nostalgic tune, recalling past things almost with regret, but it gathers itself after a few bars, and sounds determined and hopeful:

Every movie must have a love theme, of course.  A more unlikely pair of lovers was never seen than Han Solo and Leia Organa.  Their Han and Leia Love Theme, though is utterly romantic:

Those are the themes that approach the importance of motifs.  There are lots of other pieces used in the movie that perform important functions, such as the music in the Mos Eisley bar, for instance, and the closing scene, which has a great march, which John Williams admitted was inspired by Elgar's Pomp and Circumstances march (or perhaps Walton's Crown Imperial; I forget!)

There is a theme for Princess Leia:



(It is awfully difficult to keep a straight face listening to this theme!  It must have been written long before John Williams got to see Princess Leia, because the theme is soft and wistful, whereas a badder heroine that Leia was hard to imagine.  She was irascible, impatient and demanding, but of course we Star Wars fans see her through rose-tinted contacts, and we imagine her to be the very personification of femininity.  Well, a model of The New Woman, at the very least.)  But because of the wistful mood of the theme, you could not imagine it sounding in the background when Leia was out gunning down an adversary, or chasing someone on a "speeder", as they called the motor-bike - like personal vehicles that figured prominently in all the movies, most notably in The Return of the Jedi (Episode 6).  So this is not a very important theme in the development (John Williams did not use very sophisticated development most of the time.)

When Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back was released in ... wait a minute; let me look it up ... 1980, there were at least two really important new themes that hit the audiences: the first of these was the fabulous Darth Vader theme / Imperial March.  This is interesting; in Star Wars 4 (New Hope, 1977), Darth Vader was essentially the face of the Empire, a minor character.  In the next episode, we are given an inkling that he will emerge as an important protagonist, when he claims that Luke is his son.

The second of these is Yoda's Theme:

I must confess that I never associated this theme specifically with Yoda, but with Luke's successes in training, especially the jaunty high phrase in the winds, harmonized in sixths, with pizzicato strings and harp.  This kind of instrumentation is conventionally associated with fairy folk and magic, a sort of instrumental "Bippity boppity boo!"  Perhaps it was intended to remind us of the playful aspects of the force.

By the way, "OST" is evidently an abbreviation for 'original sound track.'  Young people who contribute videoclips to YouTube are far too busy to spell things out, and rely on acronyms for a quarter of all that they write.  TIA, ttyl.




[To be continued.]

Note:  See here for an article comparing Star Wars and Wagner's Ring cycle.