Star Wars: A New Score - Week 13

          I wrote a new version of the opening crawl, and it’s by far my favorite of all my demos for this scene. It is completely different from John Williams’s original music, but it is just as effective (in my opinion). I decided that this is also the music I will use for the beginning of the credits, and for the Throne Room finale. I went with a “battle preparation” sound, with horns and a snare beat, because I thought this fit the mood of the opening, especially considering this is Star Wars. I used Luke’s theme, Luke’s secondary theme, and the Force theme all in the opening crawl, although this is really just a way to introduce these sounds to the listener before they form the associations.

 The last full scene I needed to finish was “Imperial Attack,” which directly follows the opening crawl. This, much like the final battle, was a difficult scene to score because of all the timing issues. I had fourteen tempo changes in only six minutes, which is difficult to score without abrupt, unclean transitions. This scene was also important because it introduces Vader, the droids, and Leia, all of which have significant leitmotifs. I tried to give the droids’ theme fairly obvious in their portions of this scene, but I only hinted at Leia’s theme and Vader’s theme, since they have much more important roles to play later in the film. This scene was only a means of introducing their “sound,” much as Wagner slowly introduced his leitmotifs to the listener.

          I contacted a music producer who specializes online in recreating movie soundtracks with his computerized sound libraries. He said he is willing to run my music through his computer, and now I am waiting to hear back from him with a price estimate.

          At our meeting, Dr. Moser and I decided that the film is best when shown with sound. Though I will have to mute certain sections in which the original music is prevalent, many scenes in the original film contain little to no music, which we can easily remove. The film will be shown on December 8, 2016 at 9:00 p.m. in Stewart Hall, Tucker Student Center. The entire film will be shown with subtitles, and roughly half of it will have to be muted. I have finished my writing! I certainly have quite a bit of tweaking left to do over the next several months, but for all intents and purposes, I have successfully completed my Summer Research Scholar project.