Hi everyone!
This will be the first post in a new ongoing series I'm planning to discuss all of the music John Williams has written for Star Wars. At the very least, this project will cover his scores for the OT and the PT.
I may be interested in covering the ST eventually as well, but as of now that would be virtually impossible as most of the music recorded for those scores isn't available to listen to, and TROS doesn't even have sheet music available.
The plan for this series is simple. For each film, I will make one introduction post to cover information about the score overall, and then I will make one additional post per cue.
Throughout these posts I will discuss:
- what themes a particular cue features
- what scenes it was meant to score (and if it covered any cut footage)
- what scenes it ended up being used in
- when it was recorded
- who orchestrated it
- where it can be listened to
- if there is any publicly available recording sessions footage
I hope that this series will be informative and educational, I plan on discussing many facets of the music that are not often discussed or recognized among mainstream Star Wars fans.
Lastly, I want to wrap this Introduction post off by creating a quick glossary of film music terminology, since I'm going to be using a lot of these terms and you may not have heard them before:
Theme - Short musical melody that represents a character, place or idea. Examples of these include Luke's Theme, Leia's Theme and The Force Theme.
Cue - Musical piece written to picture for a specific scene in a film. Usually these will contain statements of themes. For example, the cue 3M2 New Lost R2 plays during the famous binary sunset scene in A New Hope and contains statements of Luke's theme and The Force Theme.
Revision - This is relatively self explanatory. It's just a new version of a cue that was written to replace an earlier version.
Insert - Somewhat less explanatory, this is a partial revision of a cue, it is usually recorded separately and then spliced into the original cue, replacing the revised portion. For example, the cue 6M5 Padme Falls from Attack of the Clones has an insert (called 6M5 Insert) that replaces a statement of the Love Theme with a statement of The Force Theme.
Concert Suite - Sometimes themes will get special performances recorded specifically for the eventual soundtrack release, these are called concert suites and usually don't appear within the film whose score they were written for.
Source music - Music heard by the characters within the film. Examples might include the Cantina Band, or the Dex's Diner music.
Score - The collection of cues and revisions and inserts and concert suites and source music written for a movie/series.
Slate number - Slate numbers are a relic of older movies which were stored on film reels. In XMY notation, the X represents the reel number, and the Y represents the part number. The part number is usually just a running total of the number of cues per reel. Sometimes slate numbers will include suffixes. Revisions will sometimes say "New" or "Rev."; inserts will sometimes outright say they are an insert and for what bars, sometimes they'll just put an "X" at the end of the slate number; source music will sometimes throw an "S" at the end of the slate number; cues that were originally multiple parts will sometimes have either an "A" or " pt. 2" appended to the cue number. Also, older scores would sometimes use a different notation, for example on the sheet music for a cue from the Original Trilogy, instead of saying "3M3" it might say "R3P3"; these are functionally equivalent. Almost all scores nowadays universally use the XMY notation, so that's what I'll use in these posts
Soundtrack - A soundtrack generally refers to a commercial release of a score, but can also include promos such as FYC albums.
OST - OST or Original Soundtrack refers to the first commercial release of a score, usually containing heavy edits and presenting the music out of order.
FYC - FYC or For Your Consideration refers to special albums released for consideration by Academy Awards members, usually for Best Original Score. These albums often contain different music than the OSTs do.
Expanded album - New releases of a soundtrack are sometimes referred to as an "expanded album". This just means that the release contains more music than previous releases did. It usually doesn't mean that new music was recorded for the album, just that the album contains music that was previously unreleased.
Unreleased - Unreleased cues are cues that are heard in a movie/series that aren't commercially available.
Unused - Unused cues are cues written for a movie/series that do not appear in the final product. They may or may not be unreleased.
Track - A track on a soundtrack album. These are usually heavily edited, and often contain multiple cues spliced together. They are also often retitled, with names that don't match the original cue titles.
Tracking - In verb form, "tracking" refers to the use of a cue in a scene other than the one it was written for. For example, in The Empire Strikes Back, most of 2M3 Luke's Rescue is replaced by tracked portions of 12M2 To Hyper-Space, which wasn't intended to appear until much later in the film.
That's everything I can think of for now. I hope you enjoyed this introduction, and I hope you look forward to my next post, where I will begin by analysis with Star Wars (1977)!
