music is gesturally designed to function as an elaborate, sophisticated sound effect. Directly before the sequence above in the Sandcrawler, Artoo is raised into the vehicle with a lifting mechanism. We see the mechanism descend to grab him, but it has no corresponding sonic behavior where we might expect one, like a grinding or whirring. Williams provides a musical sonic behavior — a simple downward scale that behaviorally fuses and adds gravity to the mechanism’s descent. He adds a more forceful upward crescendo gesture to the mechanism’s subsequent ascent, alerting us with “Color” xylophone timbre. The way Williams does this here is not subtle, keeping with his classical Hollywood style models. Gestural or behavioral correspondences like these tend to make music “fit” with a visual, however, and are likewise often requested by directors. “Have You Been in Many Battles?”: Difficulty of Music and Onscreen Action I addressed several of Williams’ use of more difficult passages for instruments in the discussion of Luke’s timbral evolution: e.g. the horns’ ascent in range from LT10 and the use of trombone and tuba in LT12 and LT14. Williams routinely pairs dangerous action sequences with relatively more difficult-to-perform music in all his scores, not just Star Wars. In an interview about his score for Raiders of the Lost Ark, he was asked “how do you write music for rolling boulders?” (referring to Indiana Jones’s iconic temple escape from the beginning). Williams’s first reply was simply “hard!”85 He elaborated further: “you have that rumble of the rock which will wipe out most of the music. My solution was to get up high in the orchestra and use trumpets—I probably had three of four of them in the London Symphony when we recorded that. And do high repeated notes over and over and over as
Dan Golding, “Raiders of the Lost Ark — Part II,” Art of the Score, accessed May 17, 2020, artofthescore.com.au, 24:00. 85
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