“Have You Been In Many Battles?”: Difficulty of Music and Onscreen Action

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

85 Dan Golding, “Raiders of the Lost Ark — Part II,” Art of the Score, accessed May 17, 2020, artofthescore.com.au, 24:00.

this rock would go, in a register of the orchestra and on the loudest instruments of the

orchestra, the trumpets, to penetrate the sound effects track as much as I could and to grab

the ear of the listener.”86 Conductor Nicholas Buc, who has performed the score live-to-

picture with several professional orchestras worldwide, calls this passage “frighteningly

difficult to play—it requires huge stamina [for a trumpeter]. It sounds difficult, it looks

difficult on paper, it looks difficult onscreen, and it all works beautifully together.”87

Williams is concerned with the practical matter of how his scores interact with the

sound effects track. As a practical musician and experienced conductor, he is also aware of

how difficult a passage like the following would be for the strings (Figure 3.13):

Figure 3.13: String flurry from end of opening cue88

This bowstring-breaking passage comes after the title crawl directly before we see Leia’s

small ship Tantive IV getting bombarded by a giant Star Destroyer. In his typical dueling-

textures approach to Star Wars it is followed by massive, hammered, full tutti chords (both

86 Golding, “Raiders of the Lost Ark — Part II,” 24:30.

87 Ibid, 25:05.

88 Star Wars : Suite for Orchestra (Milwaukee, WI: Leonard, 2007), 18.

textures are taken almost directly from Holst’s Mars.)89 With limited rehearsal time in a tight

film scoring session, even the forty-six LSO string players heard here (including a young

Irvine Arditti) had a difficult go — the recording heard in the score is a flurry of slightly

misaligned attacks. The celli’s strained upper register can be distinctly felt in the quivering

sound mass. This is perhaps by Williams’s design to anticipate the small ship’s unsuccessful

struggle against the Star Destroyer. But this feeling of the instrumentalists’ struggle comes

through; Smalley writes that “when we hear spectromorphologies, we [try to] detect the humanity behind them by deducing gestural activity.”90

Difficult rhythm can add unstable qualities to otherwise stable timbres. This is clearly

demonstrated in the “Here They Come!” cue that accompanies the first battle with Imperial

TIE fighters. The main “Here They Come” motive constantly shifts meter, adding its own

volatility to the scrambled visuals (Figure 14).

Figure 3.14: “Here they come!” meter changes (note: excerpt is in C)

89 See pp. 30-31 of the Dover edition of Holst’s The Planets, The planets : in full score (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1996).

90 Smalley, “Space-Form,” 47.