HOUSTON SYMPHONY CELEBRATES ‘STAR WARS’
It may be from a galaxy far, far away, but John Williams’ original “Star Wars” score was hardly created in a vacuum.
Since saddled with the somewhat cumbersome title “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope,” George Lucas’s 1977 swashbuckling sci-fi fantasy forever changed the way movies are made and marketed. But the phenomenon’s origins were rather humble.
According to an onstage interview Lucas gave during the 2017 Star Wars Celebration, he simply wanted to create “some sort of space-opera thing.” This vague idea he wound up selling to an executive at 20th Century Fox who had fallen in love with Lucas’s “American Graffiti.”
Much the same way Lucas’s story injects mythological overtones and allusions to the Bible to John Ford’s “The Searchers” and “The Wizard of Oz,” Williams — already a 20-year veteran Hollywood composer whom Lucas’s friend Steven Spielberg had recommended on the strength of his Oscar-winning “Jaws” music — seeded his score with recurring leitmotifs, a technique perfected in the operas of Richard Wagner.
In “Star Wars,” which the Houston Symphony will accompany live this weekend — including matinee/ evening doubleheaders both Saturday and Sunday — the bestknown leitmotif is probably “The Force Theme.” Sometimes known as “Binary Sunset,” this yearning, melancholy melody appears briefly as Princess Leia records her holographic message to Obi-Wan Kenobi in the film’s prologue and reappears center stage while Luke weighs leaving Tatooine. He’s pondering the desert planet’s twin suns; hence, the alternate title.
Speaking at an American Film Institute tribute to Lucas in 2005, Williams said, “I don’t think any composer … has been so lucky in the history of opera or theater, or certainly in film, to have been given the opportunity to compose music and create melodic identification for such a glossary of unforgettable characters and situations.”
Matinee music
By the mid-’70s, sci-fi soundtracks were increasingly dominated by eerie electronic music of the sort created by John Carpenter in “Dark Star” or Jerry Goldsmith in “Logan’s Run.” But Lucas wanted “Star Wars” to play like the highadventure spacefaring serials “Flash Gordon” and “Buck Rogers” he had loved growing up, and told Williams as much.
“John Williams was quoted saying he just thought it would be a Saturday-afternoon matinee thriller and you’d just let it go,” the Houston Symphony’s chief audio engineer, Brad Sayles reasons. “But I really think it was he and George Lucas’s decision to go full-blown orchestral for the first time in a long time that really gave (the film) its character.”
The composer who was synonymous with adventure at the height of such serials’ popularity was Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the Austrian native whose rousing music made a perfect match for Errol Flynn’s onscreen exploits in “The Sea Hawk” and “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”
But Korngold also scored his share of dramas, such as 1942’s “King’s Row,” a best-picture nominee now mostly remembered for co-starring future President Ronald Reagan. The blooming brass flourishes of Korngold’s main-title music echo clearly in Williams’ opening “Star Wars” theme.
“If you listen to it, you’ll be like, ‘Oh, I get the inspiration for the main theme now … that’s like at the beginning of ‘Star Wars,’ ’’ says Sayles, who also hosted the Houston Public Media program “Music From the Movies” from 2011 to 2015.
Indeed, watching “A New Hope” with a carefully trained ear can easily turn into a game of “spot the composer.” C-3PO and R2-D2’s trek across the desert as restless woodwinds erupt in the background and the strings create a miragelike effect feels twinned with Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”
Luke and his fellow pilots attack the Death Star accompanied by a barrage of staccato chords and percussion — a pattern that, Sayles
notes, bears a striking similarity to Gustav Holst’s “Mars, Bringer of War.”
“Everybody has their idea of which big, great orchestral composer they think (Williams’ score) sounds most like,” offers Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart, whose orchestra will perform Thursday at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion. “I wouldn’t say derivative, I would say those are the influences that he takes into his writing for the full orchestra.
“I think what’s most extraordinary about John,” he adds, “is that combined with a real compositional voice, he also has an amazing chameleonlike sort of way of inhabiting the (world) he’s trying to create.”
Benny Goodman in space?
A onetime member of Henry Mancini’s band who played piano on the famous “Peter Gunn” theme, Williams indulges his jazz background to the hilt when Luke and the droids meet Han Solo and Chewbacca in a shady Mos Eisley cantina. Lucas reportedly told Williams to imagine alien musicians discovering an old Benny Goodman record and going to town.
The score, and Williams’ main-title theme in particular, managed to align with 1977’s other pop-culture craze. Meco, a producer and erstwhile jazz musician who had co-produced Gloria Gaynor’s 1974 hit “Never Can Say Goodbye,” cashed in with an album called “Music Inspired by Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk.”
At this remove, it’s amusing to hear Williams’ themes blend with the prototypical rubber-band bass and four-on-the-floor drums of disco — plus blaster noises and stray creature grunts. Meco mashed Williams’ maintitle theme and “Cantina Band” into a single that quickly topped Billboard’s Hot 100. Once the movie started to catch fire, Polydor rushed Williams’ original theme into stores with “Cantina Band” as the B-side; it reached the Top 10.
The sinister music Williams created to accompany the scenes featuring Darth Vader and his Imperial minions, which he would further refine into Wagnerian “Empire Strikes Back” chestnuts including “Imperial March” and “Asteroid Field,” carries a strong whiff of the other 1977 movie he scored: “Black Sunday,” John Frankenheimer’s thriller about a terrorist group that attempts to attack the Super Bowl with a Goodyear blimp.
Reflecting on “Black Sunday” now, Sayles notes, “all (I) can hear in that film is the Stormtroopers running down the corridors of the Death Star.”