May the Fourth be with you – Journey across the Star Wars Universe!

John Williams (b. 1932)
Music from the Star Wars film franchise

Ludwig Göransson (b. 1984): The Mandolorian

ORCHESTRATION: 2 fl/picc; 2 ob/EH; 3 Cl/Eb/Bcl; 3 Bsn/CBsn – 4-4-3-1 Timpani; Perc; Harp;
Piano/Cel – Strs – Sop. Sax; 2 Alto Sax

The iconic John Williams is the most important, influential, and successful film composer in the nearly 100-year history of the form. He scored his first film, the B-movie Daddy-O, in 1959 (the official credit lists “Johnny Williams” as composer), about 30 years after the film industry began to effectively sync music with visual images on the screen. He is renowned for composing the iconic music for the Star Wars films, a score that has become synonymous with the franchise and is considered one of the most recognizable film scores of all time. On January 10, 1977, during the final days of the Ford Administration, Williams began writing music for “Star Wars,” a forthcoming sci-fi adventure film created by George Lucas. More than forty-two years later, on November 21, 2019, Williams presided over the final recording session for “The Rise of Skywalker,” the ninth and ostensibly last installment of the main “Star Wars” saga. Williams scored every film in the series, and there is no achievement quite like it in movie history, or, for that matter, in music history. Williams has received numerous accolades for his work on the Star Wars films, including 14 Grammy nominations and 6 wins, and the American Film Institute named the original Star Wars soundtrack as the most memorable score of all time for an American film. Film music scholar Martin Marks notes of Williams, “More than any of his contemporaries he has developed the ability to express the dramatic essence of a film in memorable musical ideas; likewise, he is able to shape each score to build climaxes that mirror a particular narrative structure.” Today’s program showcases nine of his most memorable scores.

Drawing inspiration from classical composers like Gustav Holst, Richard Strauss, Antonín Dvořák, and Golden Age Hollywood composers Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold., Williams employed the leitmotif technique to identify characters and situations, allowing the music to evolve and grow with the story. As a result, Williams created memorable themes for characters and situations, such as the "Star Wars" main theme, the "Force Theme," "Princess Leia's Theme," and "Darth Vader's Imperial March". The Star Wars score remains the best-selling score-only soundtrack of all time and won Williams an Academy Award for Best Original Score.

It’s one of history’s great ironies that movie music began in the silent era. In those days producers would send out scores for the accompanists—pianists, organists, or even full orchestras—whose primary job was to mask projection noises while also providing support for the onscreen action. Some ‘scores’ were just collections of generic figures and extracts from popular symphonies and operas. Others were fully-composed works employing leitmotifs, or ‘signature tunes’ that associated themselves with characters, situations, or places, and that evolved right along with the dramatic arc of the movie. The best of them could transform a silent film into a symphonic poem with images.

It was those silent film scores that evolved into what we now consider movie music. But that didn’t happen instantaneously. Musical scoring was rare in the early silent films, primarily due to technical limitations, but also due to a general discomfort with apparently disembodied music emerging from the theater’s speakers. A fair number of landmark moments of early sound film occur in eerie silence—our first look at Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster or Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula rising from his coffin provide excellent examples.

In 1933 the pioneering film composer Max Steiner created the score to King Kong, establishing film music for generations to come. King Kong does it all—leitmotifs, surging accompaniment to action sequences, and tender love scene music, all expressed in a late Romantic style redolent of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Wagner. For better or worse, the Steiner idiom became the Hollywood norm, employed by such masters as Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Franz Waxman. “Who’s going up those stairs to die, me or Max Steiner?” quipped Bette Davis while filming the conclusion of Dark Victory.

In the post-War years audiences heard less Richard Strauss and more naturalism. An innovator emerged: Bernard Herrmann, who cut his teeth on Citizen Kane, scored a host of science-fiction films, then entered a fertile partnership with Alfred Hitchcock. Herrmann chose his materials, including the instrumentation, to match the needs of the film. A Herrmann score might feature strings alone, organs, or even electronics, but not a symphonic orchestra unless it fit the movie, as in Hitchcock’s masterful Vertigo. Herrmann’s exploration of non-orchestral sounds impacted film composers throughout the 1950s and 1960s—consider the bluegrass of Bonnie and Clyde or the synthesized abstractions of Forbidden Planet.

By the early 1970s film scoring had become highly eclectic, but perhaps less effective. Too many scores were compilations of popular songs or styles, apparently aiming for the Best Song Oscar rather than a full theatrical experience. That’s when John Williams—formerly the ‘Johnny Williams’ who wrote TV music and arrangements for Henry Mancini—entered international consciousness as the leading film composer of the later 20th century. After several fine scores for Irwin Allen’s The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, and most notably the 1972 John Wayne film The Cowboys, Williams struck gold with Steven Spielberg’s masterful Jaws. While Williams’s ominous two-note shark leitmotif has become a musical semaphore for anything ominous or threatening, the entire score is remarkable for its support of the now-classic thriller’s charged drama.

If Jaws made Williams into a major film composer, Star Wars catapulted him into film immortality. Recognizing that George Lucas’s joyous space opera harkened back to the derring-do exuberance of pulp science fiction, Williams reached back into Hollywood’s past and resurrected the Max Steiner-style opulent film score, played by a massive symphony orchestra and written in the language of the late Romantic and early 20th century. By now the Hollywood studios had disbanded their crackerjack studio orchestras, so Williams made spectacular use of the London Symphony Orchestra for the soundtrack recording, establishing a trend of employing one of the world’s major orchestras for film. The original Star Wars score is so evocative that one can have a delightful time watching the film dialog-free, with just the musical score, just as one might with Korngold’s The Adventures of Robin Hood or Waxman’s The Bride of Frankenstein.

The Star Wars franchise has engendered a number of superb Williams scores: Revenge of the Sith, The Phantom Menace, and so on. With such an enviable record it’s not surprising that Williams became the sought-after composer for adventure and fantasy movies, such as Superman with its larger-than-life score that could almost stand alone as a symphonic poem à la Richard Strauss. Williams’s crowning achievement: music written for the original Star Wars film (1977, Oscar winner). The main title music is now part of the global musical lexicon. Williams has said of this music, “…it’s set in the most brilliant register of the trumpets, horns, and trombones so that we’d have a blazingly brilliant fanfare at the opening of the piece. You almost kind of want to stand up and salute when you hear it.”

John Williams defined an entire era and continues to influence film composers present and no doubt future. His achievements stand as movie music at its very best, sure to last as long as there are people who love movies and their music. We dedicate this performance to John Williams musical legacy, exploring the way his sound was shaped by the composers that came before him, as well as his mastery of the leitmotif exemplified in the films comprising the Star Wars franchise.