Star Wars

• Williams has scored every Star Wars movie since the release of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope in 1977 (which was originally entitled simply “Star Wars”).¹
  • 1977’s Star Wars was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between Williams and George Lucas (as producer). In addition to nine Star Wars films and Star Wars anthology films, they also collaborated on the Indiana Jones series. 
• Williams’ score for Star Wars is notable in its use of leitmotifs. Musicologist Frank Lehman has created a “Complete Catalog of Motivic Materials in Star Wars,” which is available for free download if you’d care to dive in. (If you do, though, be warned you may never emerge. It’s a trap.) 
• Steven Spielberg recommended John Williams to George Lucas for Star Wars shortly after Williamsms had scored Jaws.   

“I had known Spielberg for a long time up to that point and, you know, we were talking about the film…and I said, ‘I want a classical score, I want the Korngold kind of feel about this thing, it’s an old fashion kinda movie and I want that kind of grand soundtrack they used to have on movies.’ And he said, ‘The guy you gotta talk to is John Williams. He made Jaws, I love him, he is the greatest composer who ever lived. You gotta talk to him!”

George Lucas ²

“I looked at the movie and I liked it – I had no idea at the time that it was going to be a trilogy – and I thought the film would give me the opportunity to write an old-fashioned swashbuckling symphonic score, so that’s what I did.”

John Williams³

“The music for the film is very non-futuristic. The films themselves showed us characters we hadn’t seen before and planets unimagined and so on, but the music was – this is actually George Lucas’s conception and a very good one – emotionally familiar. It was not the music that might describe terra incognita but the opposite of that, music that would put us in touch with very familiar and remembered emotions, which for me as a musician translated into the use of a nineteenth-century operatic idiom, if you like, Wagner and this sort of thing.”

John Williams⁴

1. Palmer, Christopher, and Martin Marks. “Williams, John.” Grove Music Online (January 31, 2020), accessed May 27, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-3000000229.
2. Quoted in Emilio Audissino, John Williams’s Film Music: Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Return of Classical Hollywood Style (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 71.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 72.