operatic idiom, if you like, Wagner and this sort of thing.”12 Since Wagner’s influence pervaded the classical Hollywood style, Williams felt he could write a “swashbuckling score” that “put us in touch with remembered theatrical experiences, as well.”13 Besides being emotionally familiar, the late-romantic style is inherently thematic, which Lucas had planned to exploit even before Williams signed on to score the film. Lucas intended to use themes from these preexisting works “as leitmotivs for the film.”14 Williams convinced Lucas that such an approach would hurt the story. In his estimation, themes from repertoire music would take on a static, lifeless association with narrative elements: “for instance, if you took a theme from one of the selections of Holst’s The Planets and played it at the beginning of the film, it wouldn’t necessarily fit in the middle or at the end.”15 Williams made his newly composed themes “fit” throughout the entire film with timbre.
Theoretical Frame I argue that the effectiveness of Williams's Star Wars score has as much to do with timbre as it does pitch and rhythm. Far from simply evoking the sounds and scoring practices of classical Hollywood, Williams’s orchestration takes on a narrative function of its own. And, far from being a superficial color or a footnote to a leitmotiv, it elaborates and amplifies aspects of the film equally as well as melodic craft. By orchestration, I mean
12
Matessino, “A New Hope for Film Music,” 7.
13
Ibid.
14
Audissino, John Williams’s Film Music, 71.
15
Ibid.
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