Hello and welcome to this week's installment of Cue by Cue.
Today we're going to be listening to 4m4 Rev. A Home Destroyed. This is a revision of an earlier cue 4m4 A Home Destroyed, which went unrecorded.
Both versions were orchestrated by Herbert Spencer. The original is 74 bars long, and the revision is just 16 bars.
Here's the top of the conductor's score of both versions:
You may be wondering, "why is the revision so much shorter?" The answer is quite interesting:
You may know that the scene order of the Imperial scenes was shuffled around quite a bit in editing. In the originally scripted scene order:
Scene 42: Luke and Ben talk in Ben's House
Scene A42: Leia is tortured on the Death Star
Scene B42: Luke and Ben stumble on the wrecked Sandcrawler
Scene BB42: Luke speeds home
Scene C42: Luke finds dead aunt and uncle
Scene D42: Death Star sets course for Alderaan
The original 4m4 A Home Destroyed was written to play from the last minute of Scene 42, all the way until the end of Scene C42. Scene D42 would be left unscored.
At some point while the score was still being written (according to the handwritten date on the revised sheet it was done before February 23/25), the scene order was altered to the more familiar final cut order:
Scene 42: Luke and Ben talk in Ben's House
Scene 22: Death Star Conference Room scene
Scene B42: Luke and Ben stumble on the wrecked Sandcrawler
Scene BB42: Luke speeds home
Scene C42: Luke finds dead aunt and uncle
Scene A42: Leia is tortured on the Death Star
As a result of this change, 4m4 A Home Destroyed was split into two revised cues; 4m4 Rev. A Home Destroyed and 5m1 Rev. A Home Destroyed.
4m4 Rev. A Home Destroyed is 16 bars long, and is made of bars 1-14 of the original 4m4, with 2 additional bars (14A and 14B) for a new early ending. This cue covers just the end of scene 42, and it's the cue we'll be listening to today.
5m1 Rev. A Home Destroyed is 63 bars long, and is made of old bars 31-42, new bars 42A-D, old bars 43-71, new bar 72, old bars 15-30, and new bar 30A. This cue covers scenes B42-A42, but we'll talk about it in much more detail next week.
Okay, so with that out of the way, now we can finally listen to 4m4 Rev. A Home Destroyed:
At 0:00, some surprisingly sad string music plays for Luke complaining about being unable to help due to his uncle needing him.
Then at 0:22, Ben's theme kicks in again as he implores Luke to learn the Force and assist him on his mission.
This transitions into a statement of the Death Star motif at 0:42 as we see an establishing shot of a Star Destroyer arriving at the Death Star immediately before the conference room scene. Thus, the cue fades out...
This cue was recorded on March 9, 1977, the third day of the recording sessions. It was the first cue recorded that day. Three takes were recorded, numbered 56-58. According to the 1997 take log, the performance edit used just take 58.
This cue has been officially released on just one album:
3) In 1997 on RCA Victor's 2-CD Special Edition set
More specifically, 4m4 Rev. A Home Destroyed can be heard:
From 3:31-end of disc 1 track 8 "Tales of a Jedi Knight/Learn About the Force" on the 1997 album.
The 1997 set features a clean ending but no clean opening, and also is unfortunately brickwalled right around the Death Star motif. At least it does appear to match the film take exactly. The video above uses the 1997 set for everything, except for the clean opening which comes from the film itself.
That's all I have for today, thanks for reading! Feel free to leave any comments or questions.
Next week we'll be discussing 5m1 Rev. A Home Destroyed. See you then!