As Luke Skywalker stared into Tatooine’s twin suns and dreamed of joining the Rebellion, Lehman saw and heard his own future unfold. It was Williams’s plaintive, yearning “Binary Sunset” from Episode IV, heard during a childhood viewing of a VHS tape, that inspired Lehman to listen for a living. Lehman, the author of Hollywood Harmony and the editor of the upcoming Music Analysis in Film, is a scholar of film scores in general, but he’s devoted particular attention to Williams, whom he credits for helping him find his vocation. No one has chronicled Williams’s Star Wars work more comprehensively than Frank Lehman, a music theorist and associate professor of music at Tufts University. And while The Rise of Skywalker wasn’t the universally satisfying finale that fans might have hoped for, the 87-year-old Williams’s final Star Wars soundtrack didn’t disappoint, although some of the flaws of the film are inevitably mirrored in its music. As much as any of the iconography or the surname “Skywalker,” that aural link is the energy field that binds the Star Wars galaxy together. Although the films of the prequel and sequel trilogies often missed the mark set by the first few films in the series, they always sounded like Star Wars. No matter how hackneyed the dialogue, wooden the delivery, or gaping the plot hole, Williams was there to touch it up with a symphonic flourish. The Star Wars soundtrack never slumped, even as the quality of the storytelling fluctuated from film to film.
Over the 42 years that separated the releases of Episode IV and Episode IX, the directors, writers, special effects artists, and cast members who made Star Wars changed, but the composer was always the same. And for five decades, that sound was the work of one man, John Williams, who announced in 2018 that The Rise of Skywalker would be his last Star Wars soundtrack. The only true constant in the Skywalker saga is the sound of the score. All of those things are present at some point in each movie, but not from moment to moment.
It’s not even the indefatigable droid duo of R2-D2 and C-3PO. It’s not the lightsabers, blasters, or starfighters. It’s not the opening crawls or the scene wipes. The surest signal that one is watching one of the nine films in the Star Wars Skywalker saga isn’t something on the screen.
0 kommentar(er)
