Hello and welcome to this week's installment of Cue by Cue. Today we're going to be listening to the final bit of music recorded for the film, the end credits insert 12m2x.
As I mentioned in the previous post, at some point after recording the opening to the original end credits cue 12m2a End Titles was rejected.
As a result, Williams went back to the drawing board and wrote a new opening to be recorded as an insert.
This insert is 10 bars long, intended to replace bars 52-60 of the original cue. Written on the sheet music is a note that when recording it should actually be recorded with bars 61-73 of the original cue. I suppose this was done to give the music editors more flexibility when splicing the recordings.
Unfortunately I'm unsure of who the orchestrator was, as I don't have scans of the conductor's score. I do however have scans of the per-instrument parts, this is the only cue from this score for which I have these. For example, here's the Oboe I part (the entire insert is 1 page):
In all, I have scans of 32 different parts given to different sections of the orchestra for this insert. The note at the bottom is pretty interesting because it doesn't seem that useful for the orchestra players.
I actually think that, especially given the giant blank space on the bottom of the page, it might've been intended as a note to the copyists to copy and paste those bars from the original cue into the bottom of the page. Then again though, if that were its purpose, you would expect it to be covered by the original bars...
With the overview out of the way, let's listen to the insert recording together:
At 0:00 the cue begins with a brass lead in to the start of Luke's theme at 0:02.
We only get one short statement, which the segues with some ascending brass into the Rebel Fanfare at 0:09 (right in time for the three main leads. This part is very similar to the original cue, however it isn't an exact match because the beat under the fanfare is different.
Once the Rolling Thunder kicks in at 0:16, the insert becomes the exact same as the original cue, the rest of the recording is the copy pasted bars 61-73.
Just like the original cue this is made up of a section of the Rebel Fanfare on repeat with backing Rolling Thunder, followed by a standalone Rolling Thunder intended to build into Luke's theme. The Luke's theme statement is cut off, the insert recording ends just before it would begin.
This cue was recorded on March 16, 1977, the eighth and final day of the recording sessions. It was the final cue recorded that day, making it the last piece of music recorded for the film. Five takes were recorded, numbered 215-219. According to the 1997 take log, the performance edit used just take 219.
This cue has been officially released on four different albums:
1) In 1977 on 20th Century Records' OST album
2) In 1993 on Arista Records' 4-CD Anthology box set
3) In 1997 on RCA Victor's 2-CD Special Edition set
4) In 2018 on Walt Disney Records' Remastered album (remastered OST rebuilt from scratch from the session masters)
More specifically, 12m2x can be heard:
From 1:45-2:15 of track 16 "The Throne Room and End Title" on the 1977/2018 albums
From 1:45-2:15 of disc 1 track 16 "The Throne Room/End Titles" on the 1993 album
From 1:45-2:15 of disc 2 track 11 "The Throne Room/End Title" on the 1997 album.
This cue is released on every album, edited into 12m2a End Titles as intended, and it is also used as intended in the film.
No set has a clean opening or ending, the 1977 set is a remix, the 1997 set is brickwalled and the 1993 set has wrong takes.
For my edit above, I used the 1981 Radio Drama for a clean opening (which is available in the end credits of every episode), and I faked a clean ending at the point the insert recording stops using a simple fadeout.
Even though I needed to fake a clean ending due to no sets featuring it, it is actually possible to prove the ending point of the insert with the recordings available. Beyond being the ending point outlined in the sheet music, we can prove that the insert recording splices into the original cue here because the Main Title track on the 2018 set doesn't use the insert. So if you line the waveforms of the 2018 Main Title and End Titles tracks together and phase invert them, the point at which they start canceling out is the splice from insert to original:
This shows that the splice point from the insert into the original cue is 0:39 into the end credits, although it isn't useful for a clean ending since it overlaps both before the inversion kicks in. You'll also notice that the phase inversion doesn't appear to be perfect as there is some residue, my guess is that they did some mastering to the final edited tracks that causes them to differ slightly so they don't invert perfectly.
The last thing to note about this insert is that it's also used in the published concert suite, so it has official sheet music available. "The Throne Room" suite from bars 96-116 is the same as bars 1-10 of this insert.
This suite is available from Hal Leonard as part of their Signature Edition line, and recordings can also be found on youtube. Here isthe Throne Room suite conducted by Gustavo Dudamel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vG_zkLFkIs
The part relevant to this cue from this Throne Room suite recording is 4:32-4:49.
That's all I have for today, thanks for reading! Feel free to leave any comments or questions.
That covers every cue recorded for this score! Next week will be a bonus entry covering The Princess Theme, which was also recorded at the film sessions though was not ever intended to be used in the movie. See you then!
