“Terra Cognita”: Historical Background of the Star Wars Soundworld

pacing) and in terms of how it contributes to the identity of the leitmotivs.7 The timbre of the

Star Wars musical galaxy, however, is less explored — despite it being, like “The Force,” the

“mysterious energy field” that binds it all together. Orchestration is usually relegated to a footnote or used simply as a leitmotiv’s instrumental identification badge.8

“Terra Cognita”: Historical Background of the Star Wars Soundworld

It was timbre — specifically, orchestral timbre — that helped the Star Wars score

make its indelible impression on the cinematic landscape of the 1970s. Orchestral scores

had fallen out of fashion for many reasons, not least of which were the dissolution of studio

orchestras and the sheer cost of hiring musicians; as a result, orchestras were used

primarily in large-budget films. Pecuniary concerns, in fact, abounded. Filmmakers and

composers began to experiment with pop and rock elements, and production companies

loved the hit records that resulted. Electronic instruments had become more affordable and

more adept at replacing studio musicians, especially for television scores. Aesthetically,

electronics could create futuristic sounds, so their use exploded in the sci-fi genre, which

already had a rich history of electronic experimentation. Lucas—whose American Graffiti

7 Williams himself says that success of film music “almost always comes down to rhythm.” From “The Mythology of ‘Star Wars’ with George Lucas,” BillMoyers.Com (blog), accessed July 6, 2021, https://billmoyers.com/content/mythology-of-star-wars-george-lucas/.

8 Two very recent outliers are Nicholas Kmet, “Orchestration Transformation: Examining Differences in the Instrumental and Thematic Colour Palettes of the Star Wars Trilogies” and Ian Sapiro, “Star Scores: Orchestration and the Sound of John Williams’s Film Music,” both in Audissino, John Williams : Music for Films, Television, and the Concert Stage. Kmet’s excellent article explores the evolution of Williams’ orchestrational practice from 1977 to 2017, over the span of seven Star Wars franchise films. Sapiro’s informative article interviews several of Williams’s orchestrator collaborators and deals with provides technical details of Williams’s orchestration, not just in Star Wars but throughout his entire output. My current chapter differs in that it deals primarily only with the 1977 Star Wars: A New Hope and analyzes its timbral and textural aspects more generally through an electroacoustic lens.

from 1973 had produced a hit 1960s rock revival record—rejected both pop and electronic

approaches for Star Wars, despite pressure from studio executives.9 He wanted a

symphonic sound, but he further rejected the experimental orchestral approaches

fashionable in sci-fi films from the time—often eclectic, modernist, atonal, and athematic

(Lalo Schifrin’s score for Lucas’ 1971 THX 1138 is an excellent example). Lucas wanted

Star Wars to be a retro homage to 1930s adventure films; he filled his temp track with clips

from romantic-style, Golden-Age Hollywood scores by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Miklós

Rózsa. He also used existing Romantic-era classical works, à la Kubrick’s approach for

2001: A Space Odyssey. And, like Kubrick, Lucas intended to make this temporary track

permanent — until he met John Williams in 1975.

Through this temp track, Lucas demonstrated to Williams that the timbral landscape

or “soundworld” for the score should be in “the late-romantic dialect, that of classical

Hollywood.”10 This was a dialect that Williams knew well — although he had composed

several fine eclectic, experimental scores himself in the 1970s, he started as a pianist in

late-classical Hollywood studios in the 50s and 60s, playing for Golden-Age luminaries like

Alfred Newman, Henry Mancini, Bernard Herrmann, and many others. Williams explained

that while Star Wars depicted “characters we hadn’t seen before and planets unimagined,”

it was decided that the music should be “very non-futuristic” and “emotionally familiar...it was not music that might describe terra incognita but the opposite of that.”11 For Williams,

as a musician, “emotionally familiar” translated into “the use of a nineteenth-century

9 Audissino, John Williams’s Film Music, 72.

10 Ibid., 71.

11 Michael Matessino, “A New Hope for Film Music,” CD booklet for Star Wars: A New Hope, BMG, 1997, 09026 68772 2, 7.