Star Wars: A New Score - Week 7

          This week doesn’t offer much for me to journal about, simply because I focused on scoring scenes, and didn’t use any specific romantic influences. I spent a large portion of my time at the beginning of the week working on the cue “In the Garage.” This was an important scene for me; it really introduces the viewer to Luke, but also spotlights Leia, the droids, and briefly mentions Obi-Wan. That gives me a lot to introduce musically. A scene this full of important character background could easily give the listener thematic overload, so I struggled to maintain a consistent flow. I decided this scene needed a more tonal approach than some of my other scenes, but this isn’t a bad decision in my mind. Luke is introduced as a homebody, someone that’s lived on the farm his entire life. It makes sense that he would be surrounded by “tonal” music during this portion of the movie, and as he begins to experience life outside the farm, the music becomes less and less tonal.

          I then moved on to the scene “Death Star Destination.” It was only 1 minute long, but I wanted to have that scene finished (I have been trying to complete all of the random short scenes on the Death Star). I implemented the Imperial motive, Vader’s theme, and Tarkin’s motive into a short span of time, and used a slight variation of Tarkin’s motive in the cello to transition back to Tatooine. From that point, I used a mixture of the droids’ theme and free tonality music as the droids hide from the stormtroopers.

            I began work on “Your Father’s Lightsaber,” but I eventually decided to take a break from this cue roughly 90 seconds into scoring. I had just finished a fairly long speaking cue (“In the Garage”), and the similarities between the two had me feeling burnt out. I definitely have some good concepts down on paper, but I need to step back from this one and score some different scenes.
​
            For the “Arrival on Yavin IV,” I originally wrote a grand buildup with flourishes in the high strings and woodwinds (when ship is in space), building into a large rendition of Leia’s theme (as they approach the planet). I watched the scene a few times with my music in place, and just didn’t feel like it worked well at all. I went back and started from scratch, and decided to use the high piano version of a “war” motive I wrote, accompanied by high strings and woodwinds. This is a much more ambiguous way to start the cue, and shows the uncertainty of space (in my opinion). I still wanted to use Leia’s theme, because I view her as the first rebel, and therefore I think her theme can represent the spirit of the rebellion. I moved the beginning of this theme statement back a few bars (now beginning once the ship lands), softened the cue (strings have the melody), and added a snare drum rhythm (to make the thematic statement seem more militaristic).