Musical score

The musical scores for all the Star Wars Episodes were composed by John Williams. The scores of the spin-offs have been written by various different composers. The music for the films are especially distinctive as it has been known to paint musical pictures of such accessibility and precision, and Williams's invaluable contribution to the Star Wars saga and story films stands as an unsurpassed feat in the history of film scoring in terms of breadth, thematic-development and cultural impact.

The scores utilize an eclectic variety of musical styles, many culled from the Late Romantic idiom of Richard Strauss and his contemporaries that itself was incorporated into the Golden Age Hollywood scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner.

The temporary soundtrack that George Lucas suggested to John Williams for the first Star Wars movie featured Dvořák and Richard Wagner. Williams tapped into a familiar Romantic idiom (melodic, tonal and acoustic) known to involve Lucas's desire to ground the otherwise strange and fantastic setting in well-known, audience-accessible music. Indeed, much of the trilogy's success relies not on advanced visual effects, but on the simple, direct emotional appeal of its plot, characters, and, importantly, music.

While several obvious nods to Holst, Walton, and Stravinsky exist in the score to A New Hope, Williams relied less and less on classical references in the latter five scores, incorporating more strains of modernist orchestral writing with each progressive score.

According to Joel McNeely, 19th-century European classical music is the foundation of the best film music since the 1950s. However, Star Wars is often credited as heralding the beginning of a revival of grand symphonic scores in the late 1970s; the popularity and impact of the scores was a major contribution. One technique in particular has had a particular influence: Williams's revival of a technique called "leitmotif", which is most famously associated with the operas of Wagner and, in film scores, with Steiner. A leitmotif is a phrase or melodic cell that signifies a character, place, plot element, mood, idea, relationship, or other specific part of the film. It is commonly used in modern film scoring, as a device to mentally anchor certain parts of a film to the soundtrack. Of chief importance for a leitmotif is that it must be strong enough for a listener to latch onto while being flexible enough to undergo variation and development.

Text and facts from the “Musical score” article on Wookieepedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Modified for this site.