The breakup of the studio system, which triggered changes in the creation, distribution, and exhibition of feature films in Hollywood, affected every aspect of a film's production The successful attack by the United States government on the movie industry for monopolistic practices in distribution and exhibition forced a change in the operation of the major Hollywood studios. With their theater chains gone, studios lost a guaranteed market for their films. Television began to siphon off movie audiences. Production declined. Financial backing went to projects with proven marketability, and successful formulas produced scores of imitators.Endnotes
To look at the careers of Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, and David Raksin after about 1960 (Erich Wolfgang Korngold died in 1957), one might be tempted to think that the classical score virtually disappeared along with the studio system that engendered it. Steiner composed only nine film scores after 1959 in a career that encompassed over 360 films; after parting ways with Hitchcock in 1966, Herrmann found little work until the very end of his life; after a decade in demand, Raksin was relatively idle. It became commonplace among established composers to decry the demise of the film score. Complained Elmer Bernstein, "What ever happened to great movie music?"[1] A central premise of this book has been that the classical score, as a historical practice, is a flexible model which embraced numerous innovations as part of a continual process of renewal that insured its vitality. But in the late fifties and especially the sixties the classical score underwent a period of ex perimentation so intense that it often looked at the time as if it had simply vanished.
The first of many changes to the classical score was precipitated by jazz which, during the fifties, began to dominate the industry. As early as 1937 George Antheil included elements of jazz in his score for The Plainsman as did David Raksin in his 1948 score for Force of Evil. But it was the early fifties that saw the institutionalization of jazz through the success of such films as Panic in the Streets (1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and Touch of Evil (1958). One particularly influential score of the period was Elmer Bernstein's Man with the Golden Arm (1955) whose hit song, distilled from the main title, enjoyed widespread popularity.
As a proven commodity, the jazz-oriented score became highly marketable in the aftermath of the industry shake-up and was imposed upon many a film with which it had little connection. Yet in the best of these scores (and interestingly enough the most influential of them), jazz is narratively motivated and is exploited in much the same way that the classical score used atmospheric or mood music: to establish the authenticity of geographical and historical context. (Both Panic in the Streets and A Streetcar Named Desire, for instance, take place in New Orleans.) A comment by Elmer Bernstein is particularly telling in this regard: "my score [for Man with the Golden Arm] was not a jazz score, but a score in which jazz elements were incorporated toward the end of creating specific atmosphere for that particular film." [2]
Concurrent with the development of the jazz-oriented score was the proliferation of the monothematic or theme score. Engendered by the success of Raksin's Laura, the theme score gained momentum in the fifties, challenging (and sometimes combining with) the jazz score. Dimitri Tiomkin's score for High Noon proved pivotal in this regard. No longer was the hit song culled from thematic material; Tiomkin composed a country-western song (with lyricist Ned Washington) specifically for the film: "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin'," sung by Tex Ritter on the soundtrack. Films such as Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) accrued additional revenue from record sales of songs composed specifically for them. Like jazz-oriented scores, theme scores became so institutionalized that composing a hit song as part of a film score became virtually compulsory, a phenomenon composer Irwin Bazelon described as "title-song mania" and Jerry Goldsmith as "a real pain."[3] Yet Bazelon's description draws attention to an important link between the theme score and its classical progenitor. The theme score operates on the principle of the leitmotif and, like the classical score, presents the musical ideas which unify the score in the main title. In the theme score, of course, the "leitmotif" is arranged as an integral piece of music that is extractable from the score. But in the context of the film the theme is treated as a leitmotif: varied and repeated in response to the dramatic and emotional needs of the film.
With the advent of the sixties, the most serious challenge to the classical film score emerged: the "guitar-washed"[4] youth-oriented version based in various kinds of rock and roll. These pop scores, as they came to be known in the industry, represented a loose adaption of the theme scores of the fifties, substituting a succession of self-contained musical numbers, usually nondiegetic songs, for the repeated occurrences of a score's theme. Pop scores were particularly attractive to the industry in an era when changing demographics revealed an increasingly younger audience. Since many composers of pop scores were already established in the record industry, scores such as those for The Graduate (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and Good-bye Columbus (1969) were also easily marketed as records, and frequently outgrossed the films they were composed for. In the seventies producers capitalized on the pop score's ability to create an audience for a film and began the practice of premarketing a film's songs. The pop score has, not unexpectedly, produced heated response from established composers who pronounced it the death of the film score. David Raksin, for instance, claims that "this business of having rock and pop in everything is just absolutely absurd,''[5] and it is hard to disagree with Elmer Bernstein's observation that the music in some films "seems to drone on quite unrelated to the events in the picture."[6]
In fact, the pop score represents the most serious challenge to the classical score among the various attempts to update it in the fifties and sixties. Specifically, the pop score's insistence on the integrity and marketability of the nondiegetic song frequently brought it into conflict with some of the basic principles of the classical model. Unlike earlier innovations which added new idiomatic possibilities, like jazz, or demonstrated the adaptability of the leitmotif, like the theme score, the pop score often ignored structural principles at the center of the classical score: musical illustration of narrative content, especially the direct synchronization between music and narrative action; music as a form of structural unity, and music as an inaudible component of the drama. Yet for all that, few would claim that the pop score furfilled the dire prophecy initially attached to it. Like the jazz-oriented score and the theme score before it, the pop score initially challenged the classical model as a radical alternative, only to find its most iconoclastic characteristics excised in the process of fitting itself into Hollywood. The pop score that emerged from the seventies was much closer to the classical paradigm than the one that was born in the sixties. Nondiegetic songs, which had previously filled the soundtrack, were now reduced to one or two distinctive numbers, or relegated to the main and end titles.
A film such as Flashdance (1983) exemplifies the direction the pop score took in the seventies. Though its musical idiom is contemporary, Giorgio Moroder's score for Flashdance continues to function structurally within the classical framework. The industry, in fact, has begun to use the label contemporary to differentiate these scores from the earlier pop variety. Music, for instance, sustains structural unity at those moments when narrative continuity is most tenuous. Another important change from the pop score is the return to music's narrative functions: to underscore action (watch for the Mickey Mousing in the opening factory montage); to resonate emotion between the spectator and the screen; and to represent a character's subjectivity. Though the score for Flashdance features nondiegetic songs, it embeds them in spectacle, relying on conventions of the classical score to authorize their audibility. Both the nondiegetic "Lady, Lady, Lady" and the diegetic "Flashdance: What a Feeling" work in this way.
The major change to confront the classical score in the seventies and eighties has been the development of synthesized sound as an alternative to, or sometimes replacement for, acoustic instruments. As part of the process to keep on the contemporary edge, Hollywood has begun to turn to synthesized or synth scores as a way to update its product. "The synthesizer is an extension in musical history the way automobiles were an extension in transportation history," claims Giorgio Morodor, whose synth score for Midnight Express (1978) was the first electronic score to win an Academy Award.[7] Dubbed "the mockingbird of instruments," the synthesizer has an almost limitless ability to create sound, unique and otherwise, including the ability to duplicate acoustic instruments.[8] In this capacity synthesizers can be used to fill out an orchestral texture by doubling traditional orchestral instruments, expanding a string section, for instance, or adding a complement of horns. In some cases, synthesizers have been used to substitute for live musicians in order to reduce expenses. Synthesizers are most commonly used, however, for the unique sounds they can produce. Thus, they are often exploited in sci-fi and futuristic genres to create an otherworldly effect. Giorgio Moroder's reconstruction and rescoring of the 1927 Metropolis is such an example, as is Vangelis' score for Bladerunner (1982). In more conventional genres, synthesizers can give a film that much-sought-after contemporary edge. Maurice Jarre's score for Witness (1985) is a striking example of the influence and prevalence of synthesized sound in Hollywood. Its main title and several opening cues are obviously synthesized, but even the barn-building sequence, which sounds so quintessentially American (it's based on the modal harmonies of American folk song), is scored exclusively for synthesizer. To many listeners, its sound is indistinguishable from that of an orchestra.
Contemporary literature on film music has credited John Williams, virtually single-handedly, with returning the classical film score to its position of preeminence. As the preceding discussion reveals, however, the classical score is hardly in need of resuscitation. It continues to function in Hollywood as a primary determinant on the construction of the film score. Williams was, however, the major force in returning the clasical score to its late-romantic roots and adapting the symphony orchestra of Steiner and Korngold for the modern recording studio. Through Williams' example, the epic sound established in the thirties once again became a viable choice for composers in contemporary Hollywood. In fact, the score for The Empire Strikes Back is a master example of the continued strength of the structural model which underlies the classical score and the force of the late-romantic idiom which drives it.
Like so many other film composers in both the classical and the contemporary eras, John Williams "stumbled into films" from a career or anticipated career in art music.[9] Trained as a pianist and composer, primarily at UCLA and Juilliard, Williams found his way in the fifties to Columbia and later Twentieth Century-Fox where he played in their orchestras. Unlike Steiner or Korngold who entered the studio ranks with a fair amount of prestige and its attendant power, Williams entered as a contract musician working with "the then giants of the film industry": Alfred Newman, Franz Waxman, and Dimitri Tiomkin.'[10] Eventually Williams began to orchestrate, a process he describes as "a natural progression," including work for Adolph Deutsch on The Apartment ( 1960) and Tiomkin on The Guns of Navarone ( 1961).[11]
Concurrent with the work in films, however, was another apprenticeship--in television. The film industry had begun to consider television a proving ground, as Williams' straddling of the division between the large screen and the small screen at an early stage in his career demonstrates. The growing ease with which composers could move not only from television to film but from film to television blurred distinctions between the two mediums, at least in terms of dramatic scoring, and not surprisingly Williams' television work, such as Wagon Train (1957-65), M Squad (1957-59), Kraft Suspense Theatre (1963-65), and Lost in Space (1965-67), reflects many of the principles that underlie the classical model.
Television scoring resembles film scoring in more ways than one. Like the scores for "B" movies churned out by studios, television scores were often the product of more than one creative agent, and all of Williams' credits cited in the previous paragraph are collaborative in this sense. Williams may have composed an opening theme or more likely a few internal cues, "real factory-line work," as he calls it.[12] In fact, his experience rather closely resembles the apprenticeship of David Raksin at Twentieth Century-Fox, where a composer specialized in scoring particular types of generic situations but was expected to fill in if the occasion warranted as orchestrator, arranger, or composer. Such musical typecasting characterized Williams' transition to the big screen where he became known for his work in hip sixties comedies such as John Goldfarb, Please Come Home (1964), How to Steal a Million ( 1966), Not with My Wife, You Don't! ( 1966), and A Guide for the Married Man (1967).
It wasn't until the seventies that Williams turned to the action-adventure projects with which he has become indelibly associated. A series of disaster films, among them The Poseidon Adventure ( 1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), and Earthquake (1974), led him to Steven Spielberg and Jaws (1975). During this period Williams retooled his style from the sixties-inflected musical idiom which fills his comedies to the late-romantic idiom which has come to characterize his work. Williams' exploitation of the resources of the symphony orchestra is aptly demonstrated in Jaws, nowhere more tellingly than in the leitmotif Williams composed for the shark itself, a deceptively simple yet unnerving alternation of two notes, scored for eight basses and five trombones. The phenomenal success of Jaws, as both a film and a score, led to the establishment of Williams as the premiere composer of Hollywood big-budget films, action and otherwise, where, as he says himself, he likes to paint "with a big brush."[13]
As an established film composer Williams epitomizes a practice which closely resembles that of Steiner and Korngold in the heyday of the studio system. Like most of the major film composers of that era, Williams works in an extremely constricted time frame (for The Empire Strikes Back, Williams had less than eight weeks, from the initial spotting session in early November to the recording sessions in late December and early January); he depends upon an orchestrator or, more likely, orchestrators to produce a finished version; his major musical resource is the symphony orchestra (on the Star Wars trilogy, none other than the London Symphony); and he conducts his scores himself.
There are also important structural characteristics which bind Williams to the classical model: the use of music to sustain unity; a high degree of correspondence between narrative content and musical accompaniment; the use of music in the creation of mood, emotion, and character; the privileging of music in moments of spectacle; a dependence on expressive melody and the use of leitmotifs; and the careful placement of music in relation to the dialogue. There are even striking similarities between Williams and Hollywood's classical composers on a personal level. Like Steiner who never reads scripts ("I run a mile everytime I see one"), Williams avoids them also, preferring to "react to the people and places and events . . . of the film itself."[14] And like Korngold, Williams has tried to sustain a career in art music while working in Hollywood.
The practice of orchestration in Williams' work provides insight into the ways in which the contemporary film score has both adopted and adapted the classical model. Like his predecessors, Williams depends on others to orchestrate his material. Given his background as a pianist, it is not surprising that Williams often composes at the piano, but before he gives these sketches to the orchestrator, he transfers them from the two staves of a piano sketch to eight to ten staves: "I try to be very careful about my sketches so that I get just what I want."[15] Like Korngold who developed a long-term relationship with his orchestrator, Hugo Friedhofer, Williams has developed an association with Herbert Spencer who is credited with the orchestration of most of Williams' scores. Such detailed sketches and long-term collaboration leave little room for deviation and insure a consistency in terms of the Williams sound.
As Williams' approach to orchestration demonstrates, the classical model's division of labor which separates composition from orchestration continues to influence contemporary scoring practices. If anything, such parceling out of activity has proliferated. On Star Wars ( 1977), for instance, though Herbert Spencer retains screen credit for orchestration (by Williams' own tally, Spencer orchestrated about five hundred of the score's eight hundred pages), four other orchestrators, including Williams, contributed to the final version.[16] Williams still prides himself on his orchestration, and on occasion, for a "small" film, he orchestrates the entire score. But more typical is the situation of The Empire Strikes Back in which a veritable army of orchestrators worked on the ice battle alone.
At least one characteristic of the contemporary scoring scene, however, does not have its roots in its classical progenitor, that is, temp tracking. This is the practice of accompanying the film during the early stages of editing (before the score is composed) with recorded music of various kinds (pop, classical, or even other movie music) to substitute for a score that has yet to be composed. Temp tracks are used for a variety of purposes, from simply giving a film the effect of music before the score is ready, to providing a specific sound for composers to imitate. While the temp track can be useful as a point of communication between a composer and the production team, it can also function as a straitjacket, locking the composer into certain musical ideas, gestures, styles, and even melodies. The most infamous example of the tyranny of the temp track concerns Alex North's original score for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which was dumped in favor of the temp track chosen by director Stanley Kubrick: Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra, Johann Strauss waltzes, and works by Khachaturian and Ligeti.
Even a composer with John Williams' stature must deal with the temp track. On The Empire Strikes Back, director Irvin Kershner rummaged through the classical record collection of producer Gary Kurtz to create a temp track before Williams spotted the film. Asked whether this would in any way tie Williams' hands or influence him in a certain direction, Kershner answered, "No, it won't make the slightest difference. John has a strong feel for what he wants."[17]
The score for The Empire Strikes Back is by anyone's reckoning a massive piece of music. While it was common in the classical era for roughly three-quarters of a fiim to contain music, changes in the fifties and sixties gradually altered this proportion, and by the seventies it was more likely that one-quarter of a film was scored. Empire runs 127 minutes, and Williams initially marked 117 minutes of it for musical accompaniment. He was able to recycle three of the important leitmotifs from the original Star Wars: the Star Wars theme, which functions as a sort of all-purpose leitmotif for the Rebel Alliance and especially Luke Skywalker; the Force theme which doubles as a leitmotif for Ben (ObiWan) Kenobi; and the opening phrase of Princess Leia's leitmotif, which serves as a love theme for Leia and Han. Williams also reprised the main title from Star Wars, but the vast majority of music in The Empire Strikes Back was scored specifically for the film. I have chosen three musical cues to analyze in detail here: the main title, Darth Vader's leitmotif, and the ice battle on the planet Hoth, each of which exemplifies Williams' use and adaptation of the classical model. Together they represent a cross-section of the way music functions in the film.
The Empire Strikes Back begins with a reprise of the main title of Star Wars, a martial overture which contains many familiar classical conventions: the opening gesture for epic genres, a cymbal crash and brass fanfare; a modified sonata allegro form; and continuous scoring through to the first cue of the film. The opening chord is particularly effective here following a sustained pause after the Twentieth Century-Fox musical logo and synchronized to the appearance of the title Star Wars. (The actual appearance of the title The Empire Strikes Back is a bit of an understatement after this. It's buried on the screen after "Episode V" and is part of a lengthy printed text.) Like the titles, the familiar Star Wars theme, with its dramatic upward fifths, tonal harmony, brass instrumentation, and rhythmic underpinning, connects this film to its successful predecessor. The distinctive martial and heroic sound is achieved through an exploitation of brass and percussion (trumpets for the melody, joined later by woodwinds, tubas, trombones, horns, snare drums, and timpani in accompaniment), a driving counter-rhythm (on the off-beat) in the accompaniment, and a heroic form--a march marked "Maestoso" (majestically).
One motif that is not reprised from Star Wars is the musical tag for Darth Vader, the rebels' archenemy. In his flowing black robes and Nazi stormtrooper headgear, Vader is the embodiment of evil. With his amplified heavy breathing and distorted speech, Vader unsettles aurally as well as visually. Not surprisingly, his motif in Star Wars plays off musical conventions for suspense: it's a short passage in chordal harmony accompanied by various combinations of timpani, celli, trombones, bassoons, and basses playing low in their register. There is a hint of dissonance in the accompaniment which is a kind of ostinato, a single repeated note in a rhythmic pattern driven by triplets with a distinctive descending major third at the end of some phrases.
In The Empire Strikes Back Vader has a much larger role, and Williams composed a new theme for him, an extended and richly orchestrated march which activates not only musical conventions for suspense but those for evil as well. The basis of the melodic line is deceptively simple--an inverted spelling of a major triad. But the accompaniment, especially the strings, is predominantly minor, which confuses perception of the tonality. Even the way Williams chooses to spell out the triad confounds a clear major or minor tonality. Instead of spelling, or breaking down the triad into the conventional and familiar pattern of bottom note, middle note, and top note in the chord, Williams shuffles the pattern to middle note, bottom note, top note, with a return to the middle note once again. Thus instead of the expected intervals of an ascending major third, an ascending minor third (and an ascending fifth between the first and last notes of the chord), we hear a descending major third, an ascending fifth, and a descending minor third. The important part to remember here is that this arrangement works to make the melody sound minor even though it is actually major. (The interval of descending major third is the conventional way to begin the spelling of a descending minor chord.) Thus we're set up, in a sense, to expect minor, which colors our perception of the rest of the melody. It is interesting to speculate that Williams capitalized on that crucial descending major third from the original Vader motif in Star Wars, developing the new theme around it. (Descending major thirds also turn up in the woodwind and timpani parts in the new theme.) At any rate, it is surely a great irony that one of the most sinister and "minor"-sounding melodies in classical scoring is actually based on a major triad.
Vader's leitmotif in The Empire Strikes Back, like the Star Wars theme, has an ABA structure: the main melodic motif, followed by a contrasting section, and a return to the original. This contrasting B section is even murkier in its definition of major/minor tonality than the preceding A section. It is basically a descending chromatic line which develops out of the notes of the triad and flirts with both major and minor before coming to rest in the major for the reprise to section A. In fact, one might even describe Vader's leitmotif as bitonal, playing a predominantly major melodic line against predominantly minor accompanying parts.
The major/minor tonality is only one of the ways in which Williams taps cultural associations to create Darth Vader's evil persona. To return to the A section for a moment, after the motif based on the triad is completed, the melody leaps to the seventh tone of the scale, privileging one of the most potentially disturbing intervals in the pitch system. This is followed by a tri-tone, associated with evil since medieval times, which introduces the return to the triad, momentarily in the minor before resolving back into the major. The instrumentation also carries connotations of darkness as well as militarism, especially in the choice of trumpets, horns, trombones, and basses for the melody and low percussion instruments such as a bass drum and timpani in the accompaniment (denoted "marcato"). A marking in the score also indicates a "deep military drum." Finally, Williams has retained the triplet figure from the original Vader theme to drive the rhythm in the new version's accompaniment and recast its ostinato-like repeated notes, which build suspense, as a prelude to the new one.
That prelude is first heard in the film as the imperial spaceship bearing Darth Vader enters the frame. Several elements, both visual and aural, build suspense even before Vader appears. Though the screen is filled with various craft careening through space, Vader's command ship enters from the offscreen space behind the camera, startling us and creating tension by drawing our attention to a portion of offacreen space we are often unaware of when watching a film. The prelude to Vader's theme is heard here: a series of ascending intervals consisting of two minor sixths and two major sevenths. Each of these intervals creates tension through its instability in the tonal system, especially the seventh which beckons the tonic note which begins Vader's leitmotif. Even Vader's appearance is unnerving. Our first glimpse of him is a tight close-up with his back to the camera, any clues to his feelings or personality hidden under the black helmet that obscures his head.
The placement of Vader's leitmotif and its relation to narrative content both explicit and implicit reveal the power of the classical model in Williams' work. In this scene, as in a typical classical score, music begins before the actual sequence does, covering over the rather arty wipe which ends the preceding scene with a musical cue that continues uninterrupted until the end of Vader's sequence (and beyond). Such continuousness on the part of the music necessitates certain adjustments so as not to challenge the primacy of narrative exposition. Volume, for instance, is controlled by narrative priority: dialogue which requires the subjugation of the music, and spectacle which allows the privileging of it. (Listen, for example, to the marked increase in volume which accompanies the wipe to the vast expanses of space.) Similarly the texture of the music is dependent on narrative exposition: during dialogue the musical texture is sparse so as not to compete with or distract from the spoken word; such constraints are not necessary, however, during the spectacle which precedes Vader's appearance where Williams is freer to exploit intricate rhythmic patterns and unusual combinations of instruments. Even instrumentation itself is tied to the recording of the human voice. Vader's deep bass voice (dubbed by an uncredited James Earl Jones), in conversation with his staff, is accompanied in this sequence not by the distinctive trumpets, horns, and trombones, but by the woodwinds, which provide more of a contrast and allow Jones's voice to be heard more easily.
Vader's leitmotif appears throughout The Empire Strikes Back as one might expect when his presence literally or figuratively looms over the narrative. Williams uses the leitmotif again in Return of the Jedi ( 1983) where it is heard so often that it actually competes with the Star Wars leitmotif for dominance of the soundtrack. One of the most evocative occurrences of the leitmotif, in fact, is heard in Return of the Jedi at Vader's death, when his helmet is removed and he is revealed as Anakin Skywalker, Luke's father. Instrumentation here activates celestial associations which encourage the audience to forgive Vader, as Luke does. This quasi-religious mood is set up in the preceding duel between Vader and Luke which is accompanied by hymnlike chanting. Three particularly arresting repetitions of the Vader motif reinforce these associations: one for extremely high violins accompanied by harps; one for a flute solo again accompanied by harps; and finally, one for a solo harp. This monumental change in instrumentation from the brasses which have performed Vader's theme throughout two films to a solo harp extremely high in its register makes this one of the most powerful moments in the trilogy.
As the preceding analysis of the Star Wars and Vader leitmotifs suggests, Williams' score for The Empire Strikes Back is steeped in late romanticism: in its expressive use of melody; its exploitation of the effects of instrumentation; its dependence on tonal harmony and especially triadic harmony; and its use of the large-scale resources of the symphony orchestra. George Lucas had originally wanted to use classical music as accompaniment for the first Star Wars film, but Williams convinced him to try original music which can be used "in a major key, minor key, fast, slow, up, down, inverted, attenuated and crushed, and all the permutations that you can put a scene and a musical conception through, that you wouldn't be able to tastefully do if you had taken a Beethoven symphony and scored . . . with that."[18] For Williams using a late-romantic sound was "a conscious decision . . . . music should have a familiar emotional ring so that as you looked at these strange robots and other unearthly creatures, at sights hitherto unseen, the music would be rooted in familiar traditions."[19] Williams' apologia hardly seems necessary given the tremendous success of the score, but not all critics were equally enthusiastic about Williams' "return" to the nineteenth-century sound. The Village Voice labeled his music "corny Romanticism," and Greg Oatis, in the epigraph to this chapter, bemoans Williams' rote models (Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and Korngold), wishing instead for "'avant-garde' composers like Varese or Cage."[2]0 Oatis' comment is odd but revealing: why not ask George Lucas for a less classical filmmaking style, or Lucas, Leigh Brackett, and Lawrence Kasdan for a less conventional story, or John Mollo for a more futuristic couture?
Williams' dependence on a late-romantic idiom and medium is nowhere more apparent than in the extraordinary battle on the ice planet Hoth. Although the sequence is filled with the synthesized sounds of an ion cannon, blasters, speeders, imperial walkers, and other assorted space hardware, its music is recorded in its entirety by the London Symphony augmented with an additional five piccolos and oboes, a battery of extra percussion, and two pianos and harps. (In fact, the only musical cue I could detect in the entire score that employs a synthesizer is entitled "The Magic Tree"; it can be heard during Luke's confrontation with the apparition of Darth Vader on Dagobah.)
The ice battle cue depends upon a number of familiar classical conventions which both lend to the tension of the sequence and help to clarify its key narrative moments. The sequence opens with a familiar musical gesture for the creation of tension_tremolo strings and pedal point--here accompanying a vaguely pentatonic xylophone part. It accompanies a shot of the rebels on the frozen landscape of Hoth preparing for an attack from the Empire. Reverse shots reveal an empty snowscape. Although nothing appears on the horizon, suspense about the impending invaders is sustained through a combination of narrative expectation ("General, there's a fleet of star destroyers coming out of hyperspace in sector four"), narrative construction (parallel editing between the ice plain, rebel headquarters, and Vader's spaceship), and the music.
Continuous scoring accompanies the cutaway from the ice plain to the rebel headquarters, helping to facilitate the spatial and temporal transition. Discovered now by the Empire, the rebels must evacuate immediately and run the Empire's blockade to do so. The diegetic sound is quite dense here with numerous distracting sound effects; the quick tempo of the music contributes to the overall sense of chaos and tension. Two important leitmotifs, however, can be clearly differentiated: Vader's, played at an increased tempo, and the rebels', the Star Wars theme itself. The way in which these two musical identifications interact complements the image track: first, the distinctive opening phrase from Vader's leitmotif as the Empire somewhat overconfidently readies to destroy the first rebel transport, then a motif from the Star Wars theme (though not the identifying opening phrase) as the outcome of the confrontation is in doubt, and finally the recognizable opening phrase as the rebels foil the Empire and the transport escapes unharmed. Thus a dense and busy musical score performs a dual function here: it contributes to the creation of confusion crucial to sustaining the tension of the sequence, and it draws attention through the use of leitmotifs to key narrative developments to guide the spectator through it.
This same strategy of simultaneously creating mood and anchoring narrative development can be heard throughout the ice battle. Williams employs a number of tactics here to produce effects of tension: competing musical lines, unusual and intricate rhythmic patterns, and odd instrumentation. Xylophones, for instance, are featured prominently, contributing to a sense of foreboding at the beginning of the sequence and coming to be associated with the imperial walkers by the end of it. Simultaneous with these techniques are strategies for drawing attention to key moments in the dense narrative texture. These can be as straightforward as attaching dissonance to the approach of imperial forces and marking the demise of an imperial walker with a descending octave or as complicated as casting the opening motif from the Star Wars theme into the minor when Luke's ship crashes. In fact, a number of leitmotifs are used here: Vader's theme as imperial forces close in on the power generator and later when Vader makes an imposing entrance in rebel headquarters; the Force theme, when the rebel retreat is called; the Star Wars theme during the collapse of the rebels' command center; and the opening fanfare to the Star Wars theme as Luke destroys an imperial walker. Leitmotifs here even foreshadow later narrative developments: the sequence ends with a short quotation from what will become Leia and Han's love theme as the Millennium Falcon, bearing both of them, narrowly escapes capture.
Williams' score for The Empire Strikes Back represents one version of the classical film score, a contemporary adaptation of the original model which adopts its idiom and medium as well as its structural imperatives. Due to the phenomenal success of the music from the Star Wars trilogy and other Williams work of the era such as Jaws and E.T. (1982), scores which depended on a late-romantic style and utilized the resources of a symphony orchestra became reestablished as a viable option. The romantic film score took its place once again among the various stylistic practices available to Hollywood composers. This is not to say that the romantic film score replaced other options. There continue to exist other possibilities. Pop music, synthesized sound, and the use of non-diegetic songs all have left their mark on the classical model. Yet, like The Empire Strikes Back, all of these practices share a commitment to narrative exposition and to the classical techniques which insure it.
1. Elmer Bernstein, "What Ever Happened to Great Movie Music?" High Fidelity, July 1972, 55.
2. Ibid. 58.
3. Irwin Bazelon, Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975), 170; Jerry Goldsmith, quoted in Bazelon 190.
4. Goldsmith, quoted in ibid. 190.
5. David Raksin, quoted in ibid. 241.
6. Bernstein quoted in Joseph Curley, "Elmer Bernstein: How Rock Has Rolled over Film Scoring," Millimeter, August 1980, 134.
7. Giorgio Moroder, quoted in Terry Atkinson, "Scoring with Syntilesizers," American Film 17, 10 (September 1982): 71.
8. Glenn Morley, "The Synthesizer: The Mockingbird of Instruments," Cinema Canada nos. 60-61 (December 1979/January 1980), 46.
9. John Williams, quoted in Bazelon, Knowing the Score 193.
10. John Williams, quoted in Derek Wiley, "[An Interview with] John Williams," Part 11, Films and Filming 24, 11 (August 1978): 31.
11. Ibid 32.
12. Ibid.
13. John Williams, quoted in Thomas Maremaa, "The Sound of Movie Music," New York Times Magazine, 28 March 1976, 45.
14. Max Steiner, "The Music Director," in The Real Tinsel, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and Harry Silverstein (London: Macmillan, 1970), 392; Wiley, ["An Interview with] John Williams," Part 1, Films and Filming 24, 10 (July 1978): 23.
15. Ibid. 24.
16. Ibid. The other three orchestrators are Arthur Morton, Angela Morley, and Al Woodbury.
17. Irvin Kershner, quoted in Alan Arnold, Once upon a Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of The Empire Strikes Back (New York: Ballantine Books, Del Rey Books, 1980), 249.
18. Williams, quoted in Tony Thomas, "A Conversation with John Williams," Cue Sheet: The Journal of the Society for the Preservation of Film Music 8,1 (March 1991): 12.
19. Williams, quoted in Arnold, Once upon a Galaxy 265.
20. Greg Oatis, "John Williams Strikes Back, Unfortunately," Cinemafantastique 10, 2 (Fall 1980): 8.
