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There was really no call to reinvent the wheel here. That’s soundtrack scoring for you: put a new coat of paint on the classic hits. These are old characters, full of an old love, and there’s old music to fit it. You know what’s beautiful? “Han and Leia.” That’s because it’s an outgrowth of music we’ve heard before - melodies Williams has been teasing out since “Princess Leia’s Theme” from A New Hope. It’s all texture and eerie, seasick chordal motion, no melody is even hinted at. But perhaps that’s because it doesn’t hedge its bets. Supreme Leader Snoke gets some lower-than-hell bass fake Gregorian chant backdrops, and some ghostly string shivers - one of the better moments of the score. “Kylo Ren Arrives at the Battle” and “The Abduction” are just sneaky, sinister interpolations of “The “Force Theme” melody, punctuated by dramatic blasts and string double-times possible, arranged in seemingly no meaningful order all smoke, no fire. There isn’t snappy music for the evil people here, either. As you might imagine, “Scherzo for X-Wings” - despite a hilarious title - is much the same way: all the horn section playing one note as many times and as fast as they can, as if emulating blaster fire.Īnd don’t expect a triumphant sequel to the Imperial March.
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You can’t tell them apart too well, and there’s no triumphant whistle-along moment. This is not much different than much of the earlier Star Wars music, but really, it’s all ricocheting movement. “I Can Fly Anything” is unfettered angular, dissonant sound effect music, emulating the sound of Poe Dameron and Finn’s TIE fighter struggling to the other action sequence cues follow suit, sometimes infused with galloping, Spanish-sounding rhythms (see the hooks in “Follow Me” and “The Falcon”). This theory is borne out across the rest of the soundtrack.
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Raw mood and kinetic energy - not songcraft - is the message on this soundtrack. The fact that “The Scavenger”/“Rey’s Theme” - which consists of small, echoing snippets of jittery half-melody being passed back and forth across the orchestra - is the major new theme introduced in The Force Awakens signals that we are in a new era for music and Star Wars. In soundtracks today, a pretty melody is simply no longer the measure of a good character “theme” or credits sequence. But though he’s now an octogenarian, Williams is also not completely behind the times. Williams is no Glass: His sweeping dramatic gestures and rich chord progression are still based heavily in the work of late 19th-century, post-Romantic masters of the large orchestra like Mahler, Strauss, and Wagner. This music is all propulsive rhythms, bombast, and haunting, cyclical chord progressions, with little in the way of catchy tunes. But nowadays Philip Glass and post-minimalist-styled classical music - Hans Zimmer is perhaps the median Hollywood example at the moment - set the tone. Even “Anakin’s Theme,” introduced in Menace, has a pleasant, almost Randy Newman-ish lilt not found anywhere in Abrams’ film. “Scavenger” starts out as a kind of wispy exercise, based around an oboe futzing around like bush-league Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn, but as it gets into full gear with its twinkling vibes - vaguely redolent of The Nutcracker - and pulsating rhythm, you see that Williams is going for a different type of gold here.Īs immutable as Williams’ style and sense of melody is in the original soundtracks and those of the prequels, times have changed a lot since the ‘70s, ‘80s, and even the turn of the millennium. The most memorable new theme of the film comes very early on - when Rey first appears, foraging in the Jakka desert and then sliding down a huge dune to her hovering, puttering sand vespa. However, nothing new fails to leave much of a mark, for better and for worse.
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The movie may be full of fan service of various sorts, and it certainly does not overdo reprisal of the series’ classic themes - I could argue that there may even be too little repetition. Like any Star Wars flick, the music is invasive, intended to be a large part of the experience. Did you come out of the theater at The Force Awakens humming any brand new Star Wars melodies? Did you note any fantastic, unexpected music cues? Unlikely.